The Riddle of the Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF

on March 17:
    In the evening some excitement. Knowing the straight road, I walked back at 9.45 in clear moonlight from the chief café to the inn. Hardly in my room, than three Christians burst in to the inn to say that two Turks had followed me to assassinate me, and would have stabbed me if they had not come after them. . . . People seem excited about it, but what is certain is that I was not.
    In the following days, as he roamed the island’s rocky country by foot and mule, Evans came upon seal-stones and engraved gems like those he had bought in Athens, carved with the same curious symbols. Many were owned by Cretan peasant women, who prized them as amulets. Known locally as galopetras (“milk stones”), they were worn by nursing mothers, who believed they ensured a plentiful supply of breast milk. Evans bought as many of the stones as he could; if a young mother refused to sell her charm, he could often persuade her to let him make a rubbing of it.
    The engravings on the stones, Evans quickly came to believe, were no mere decorations. They were too stylized for that, and too systematic. The carved symbols often occurred in clearly defined groups, and the same symbols might recur again and again on different stones. The carvings clearly signified something very particular to the Bronze Age people who had made them. “It is impossible to believe that the signs on these stones were simply idle figures carved at random,” he wrote in 1894. “Had there not been an object in grouping several signs together it would have been far simpler for the designer to have chosen single figures or continuous ornament to fill the space at his disposal.”
    Evans knew that he had come upon a system of written communication, used long before the Phoenicians invented the alphabet in the eleventh century B.C. and longer still before the alphabet made its way to Greece at the end of the ninth. It was a written record of the sort Schliemann had expected to find at Mycenae. And now Evans had found it elsewhere in the Aegean, dating to Mycenaean times. The Cretan stones, he later wrote, offered clear evidence “that the great days of the island lay beyond history.”
    By the end of 1893, before he had even set foot on Crete, Evans had felt sure enough of the markings on his Athenian seal-stones to announce his discovery in public, declaring to a London audience that he possessed “a clue to the existence of a system of picture-writing in the Greek lands.” In 1894, after he returned from the island, he published his first significant article about the engraved Cretan stones. In it, he argued that “an elaborate system of writing did exist within the limits of the Mycenaean world.”
    Evans identified two types of Cretan writing. On some stones, the carvings were clearly hieroglyphic, teeming with pictograms of people, plants, and animals. On others, the symbols were “linear and quasi-alphabetic,” as if the hieroglyphs had been reduced to their clean, bare outlines in “a kind of linear shorthand.” “Of this linear system too,” he wrote prophetically in 1894, “we have as yet probably little more than a fragment before us.” What was needed, Evans knew, was a full-scale excavation on Cretan soil. Over the next few years, he paid repeated visits to the island, eventually choosing Knossos as the place to dig.
    It was no random selection. Tradition held that Knossos had been the chief city of Cretan antiquity, the fabled seat of Minos’s empire. “Broad Knossos,” Homer had called it in the Iliad . In the Odyssey , he sang:
    One of the great islands of the world
in midsea, in the winedark sea, is Krete:
spacious and rich and populous, with ninety
cities and a mingling of tongues. . . .
And one among their ninety towns is Knossos.
Here lived King Minos whom great Zeus received
every ninth year in private council .
    By Evans’s day,