The Riddle of the Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF Page A

would not be able to turn his full attention to the quest till the end of the century.
    In Oxford, meanwhile, Evans was occupied with transforming the Ashmolean from a haphazard cabinet of curiosities into a world-class museum of art, archaeology, and antiquities. The keepership allowed for frequent travel, and he spent much time abroad, scouring Europe for artifacts to add to the collection. He was also busy orchestrating a suitable home for himself and Margaret. Evans had bought sixty acres on a hill outside Oxford, with commanding views of the countryside; it was a place he had loved in his student days. There he would build his house, which he named Youlbury, “from the ancient name of the heath below,” as Horwitz wrote.
    For Evans, there was a sense of urgency about the project: In 1890, Margaret had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and he hoped Youlbury’s clean Oxfordshire air would restore her to health. But she did not live to see it finished. In March 1893, Margaret Evans died after fifteen years of marriage, leaving Arthur a widower at forty-one. “For the rest of his life he wrote on black-edged paper,” Horwitz wrote. “Even his scribbled notes were bordered in black.” Youlbury, a sprawling Victorian behemoth, was completed the next year, and Evans moved into it alone.
    Even before Margaret’s death, Evans had begun to explore the idea that writing was used in the Mycenaean world. In February 1893, just weeks before she died, he returned to Athens, where he picked over small, dusty treasures in antiquities shops. What he found there would eventually lead him to Knossos: small, prism-shaped stones of three and four sides, often of semiprecious material like red or green jasper, carnelian, or amethyst, pierced for wearing. Each face of the stone was engraved, Evans wrote, with “a series of remarkable symbols.” These symbols—ornate hieroglyphic pictures of people, animals, and objects—were, as he observed, “not a mere copy of Egyptian forms.”
    Cretan stones with hieroglyphic engravings, acquired by Arthur Evans
    Arthur J. Evans , Scripta Minoa
    The stones he had come upon are called seal-stones. Designed to make an impression in soft clay or wax, they were a means of marking ownership in prehistoric times. They reminded Evans of something Schliemann had shown him: the small, beadlike gems unearthed at Mycenae, also pierced and engraved with tiny stylized symbols. (Schliemann’s bead gems, however, were strictly ornamental.)
    In Athens, Evans bought as many seal-stones and engraved gems as he could find. With each purchase, he asked the dealer where the stones were from. The answer was nearly always the same: They had come from Crete. “To Crete,” Evans wrote, “I accordingly turned.”
    TO MODERN OBSERVERS, Crete seems merely a seaborne extension of Greece; in fact, it did not become part of the Greek state until 1913. The largest of the Greek islands, it lies almost equidistant between Europe, Asia, and North Africa, for centuries a handy stopping point for Mediterranean seafarers. As archaeologists of Evans’s time were already aware, Crete’s earliest known inhabitants were unrelated to the Greeks who would later people the mainland. “It was clearly recognized by the Greeks themselves,” Evans wrote, “that the original inhabitants of Crete were ‘barbarian’ or un-Greek.”
    In the centuries to come, Crete was repeatedly settled, invaded, colonized, traded with, resettled, reinvaded, and recolonized. By 1900, when Evans began digging there, the island was a web of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural influences stretching back thousands of years.
    Evans paid his first visit to Crete in March 1894. The island was then part of the Ottoman Empire, and within days of his arrival, he was plunged unwittingly into the hostilities between Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims there. As he wrote in his journal