Arthur Evans unearths the Throne Room at Knossos

An archaeological field is rarely founded by a single excavation-week in the second month of a single season. Arthur Evans had pursued the late-nineteenth-century Aegean-Bronze-Age scholarly question (the question of whether the Mycenaean Greek-Bronze-Age culture that Heinrich Schliemann had excavated at Mycenae in 1876 had a deeper Aegean pre-history beyond the Greek-mainland sites) across the previous decade through the careful systematic field-survey of the Greek islands, the Aegean coastal sites, and the Ottoman Cretan archaeological landscape. The Kephala excavation of March-and-April 1900 was the central single test-case of his scholarly hypothesis.

THE HEMEL HEMPSTEAD ANTIQUARY

Arthur John Evans was born at Nash Mills outside Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire on the eighth of July 1851, eldest son of Sir John Evans, the senior English numismatist and prehistorian who was the President of the Society of Antiquaries of London from 1885 to 1892, and Harriet Ann Dickinson. He was raised in the substantial Nash Mills paper-manufacturing-family-and-antiquarian household (the John Dickinson and Co paper-mill at Nash Mills was the family commercial concern across the nineteenth century, and provided the substantial private income on which Sir John Evans's antiquarian-and-numismatic career rested), was schooled at Harrow School from his thirteenth year, took the place at Brasenose College, Oxford, in October 1870 in his nineteenth year, and took the first-class Modern History honours degree in 1874.

He travelled across the Balkans through the late 1870s on the senior-archaeological-and-political fact-finding tours (his position as the Manchester Guardian Balkan correspondent across 1877-78 became the foundation of his subsequent Balkan-and-Aegean scholarly career), settled at the Casa San Lazzaro outside Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) on the Dalmatian coast across 1877-1882 on the strength of his marriage to Margaret Freeman (the eldest daughter of the senior Oxford historian Edward Augustus Freeman), and across the 1880s built the Balkan-and-Aegean antiquarian-publication career on which his subsequent Oxford appointment rested. He took the Keepership of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in 1884 in his thirty-third year on the strength of the English-archaeological-establishment recognition of his Balkan-and-Aegean fieldwork, and held the Ashmolean Keepership across the next twenty-four years to 1908.

THE CRETAN HYPOTHESIS

He took the Aegean-Bronze-Age scholarly hypothesis (the hypothesis that the Mycenaean Greek-Bronze-Age culture that Schliemann had excavated at Mycenae in 1876 had a deeper pre-Mycenaean Aegean pre-history that should be locatable at one or more of the larger Aegean islands) from the 1885-to-1895 period of his Ashmolean Keepership on the strength of the small carved-seal-stone collection he had acquired across the Athens-and-Smyrna antiquities market through the early 1890s. The seal-stones were small carved-gem objects in the Aegean-Bronze-Age style, were not directly attributable to any known Mycenaean-mainland site, and were traceable through the Athens dealers to the small Greek-Cretan provincial-dealer network of the Ottoman Crete. Evans concluded by 1894 that the Aegean-pre-Mycenaean culture should be locatable at the Greek-legendary site of Knossos in central Crete, the legend-and-mythology centre of the Bronze-Age King Minos and the Minotaur-and-Labyrinth Greek narrative.

He travelled to Crete on the 1894 antiquarian-survey-tour, identified the small Kephala hill four miles south of Heraklion as the likely Knossos site (the Kephala hill had been partially investigated by the small Greek-Cretan archaeological-society excavation of Minos Kalokairinos in 1878 to 1879, which had uncovered the corner of one substantial Bronze-Age structure, but the Ottoman authorities had stopped the Kalokairinos excavation on the 1879 land-purchase-disagreement), and negotiated across 1894-to-1899 the Ottoman-Cretan land-acquisition arrangement for the Kephala hill through his Cretan-Greek intermediary Iosif Hatzidakis. He completed the land-purchase on the twenty-first of February 1900 on the 235-Turkish-lira purchase-price (approximately 235 British pounds at the 1900 exchange-rate, paid out of his Nash-Mills family inheritance), and arrived at Heraklion with his excavation team on the eighteenth of March 1900 to begin the excavation of the Kephala hill on the twenty-third of March.

THE THIRTEENTH OF APRIL

The Evans excavation team across March-and-April 1900 was the small-team turn-of-the-century European-archaeological-excavation configuration: Evans himself as the excavation director; Duncan Mackenzie of the British School at Athens as the junior-excavator-and-recorder; Federico Halbherr of the Italian Archaeological School at Athens as the senior-excavator-collaborator; the 80-to-120 Cretan-local-workmen day-labour-force on the 1-Turkish-lira-per-day-labour-rate. The excavation pattern followed the 1900 European-archaeological-excavation-protocol: the systematic stratigraphic-removal of the overburden-soil-and-rubble across the 2-metre-by-2-metre excavation-grid-squares; the recording-and-cataloguing of the finds-by-stratigraphic-context; the photographic-and-drawing-record of the exposed-architectural-features.

The excavation across the first three weeks of March-and-April 1900 cleared the overburden-soil from the small western section of the Kephala hill and exposed the limestone-block-and-gypsum-veneer west-facade-and-foundation-courses of the substantial Late-Bronze-Age palatial complex Evans had hypothesised. By the morning of Friday the thirteenth of April 1900 the excavation had cleared the overburden from the small inner-chamber-section in the south-west quadrant of the exposed palatial-complex, and Mackenzie's junior-excavator-team began the systematic clearance of the limestone-rubble fill from the small inner-chamber. The clearance across the morning of the thirteenth of April exposed the limestone block-and-gypsum-veneer throne (a single-piece limestone-bench with the carved-gypsum-veneer-back, set against the north-wall of the inner-chamber), the fresco-decorated antechamber-walls (the painted-griffin-figures-flanking-the-throne on the fresco-plaster), and the stone-lined-lustral-basin-ritual-bath at the south-end of the inner-chamber. The Throne-Room was the central single architectural feature of the Knossos-palace-complex and the foundational moment of the modern field of Aegean Bronze Age archaeology.

THE MINOAN CIVILISATION

Evans coined the name Minoan civilisation for the pre-Mycenaean-Aegean-Bronze-Age culture at Knossos in the same week of the Throne Room discovery, on the strength of the Greek-legendary association of the Kephala hill with the Bronze-Age King Minos of Crete and the Minotaur-and-Labyrinth Greek-mythological narrative. The Minoan-civilisation designation has been universally accepted by the Aegean-Bronze-Age scholarly community across the subsequent hundred and twenty-five years and has been the chronological-and-cultural reference for the eastern-Mediterranean Late-Bronze-Age sequence (the Minoan-Mycenaean-and-Helladic chronology, the Late-Minoan-IA-IB-II-IIIA-IIIB-IIIC chronological sequence, the Minoan-Linear-A-and-B script-decipherment work of Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in 1952-53).

Evans continued the Knossos excavation across the next thirty-one years (1900 to 1931), exposed across the thirty-one-year excavation-period the substantial Late-Bronze-Age palatial complex of approximately twenty thousand square metres (the largest-single Bronze-Age-palatial complex of the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age), supervised the controversial reconstruction-and-conservation of the Knossos-palace-fabric across 1922-1930 (the Knossos-reconstruction-controversy that continues in the Aegean-Bronze-Age-scholarly-debate to the present), and published the four-volume Palace-of-Minos at Knossos between 1921 and 1936. He was knighted in 1911 in his sixtieth year on the strength of the Knossos excavation-recognition, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1901, served as President of the Society of Antiquaries of London 1914 to 1919, and died at his Boars Hill country-house outside Oxford on the eleventh of July 1941 in his ninety-first year. The Palace-of-Knossos at the Kephala hill outside Heraklion has been the central single tourist-archaeological destination of modern Crete since the post-war re-opening of 1950, with the annual-visitor-volume of approximately a million tourists per year. The Evans name in modern Aegean Bronze Age archaeology carries the weight of the morning at the Throne Room on the thirteenth of April 1900.