The Riddle of the Labyrinth Read Online Free PDF Page B

archaeologists had already unearthed significant finds on the island. At the time, the part of Crete where Knossos was thought to have stood was known locally as Kephala. (The name was a shortened form of the half-Greek, half-Turkish phrase tou Tseleve he Kephala , “squire’s Knoll.”) In 1878, a Greek linguist with the historically evocative name of Minos Kalokairinos brought twenty workmen to Kephala and started digging. He found the remains of a vast building made of gypsum blocks, whose rooms were filled with huge ceramic jars.
    Three weeks into the dig, the Cretan Assembly ordered Kalokairinos to stop work. As MacGillivray wrote, “The reasoning, which Kalokairinos accepted, was that he might begin to reveal the sort of enviable artifacts that would almost certainly be removed from Crete to Constantinople.” Word of the discovery did get around in archaeological circles, and modern historians often credit Kalokairinos as the first true discoverer of the Palace of Minos. In the early 1880s, William James Stillman, a former American consul on Crete, examined a wall that Kalokairinos had exposed before the dig was halted and noticed the curious “masons’ marks” carved into the stone.
    Schliemann, too, had his eye on Kephala. Starting in 1883, he determined to excavate the Palace of Minos himself: It would be the final triumph, he hoped, of his storied career. Kephala was owned by an extended Turkish family, and though Schliemann tried to secure permission to dig there, he was unable to do so before he died in 1890. Schliemann’s death left the way open for Evans. “Nor can I pretend to be sorry that he did not dig at Knossos,” Evans would write years later.
    Besides the seal-stones and engraved gems he had already secured on Crete, Evans had encountered something even more exciting. In 1895, a local man showed him something he had found on the ground at Kephala: a “slip” of burned clay, about the size and shape of a slip of paper, incised with linear signs that “seemed to belong to an advanced system of writing,” as Evans said. He added, decisively: “On the hill of Kephala . . . I resolved to dig”
    Needing digging rights, Evans did what any self-assured Victorian of means would do: He simply bought the property. But the process turned out not to be so simple, even for a man of his wealth and determination. Schliemann had made two fortunes, first by starting a bank in Sacramento amid the California Gold Rush and later by cornering the European indigo market, yet even he had had no luck on Crete.
    In 1894, after much negotiation with Kephala’s owners, “native Mahometans, to whose almost inexhaustible powers of obstruction I can pay the highest tribute,” Evans managed to buy a quarter-share of the property for 235 British pounds. This gave him the right to force the sale of the remaining three-quarters. But over the next few years, a bloody insurrection on the island, in which the Greek Cretans tried to rout their Turkish oppressors, made further negotiation impossible. As he had done in the Balkans, Evans threw his support behind the local people in their fight to break free of the Ottoman Empire.
    Though he could not yet begin to dig, Evans was certain of the deep importance of what he had already found on Crete. The seal-stones and engraved gems he had obtained from the island’s peasant women were, he wrote in 1897, “striking corroboration” that “long before our first records of the Phoenician alphabet, the art of writing was known to the Cretans.”
    The insurrection raged on for several years before the Greeks prevailed; the last of the Turkish forces left the island in late 1899. The next year, “after encountering every kind of obstacle and intrigue,” Evans bought the rest of Kephala for 675 pounds. After extensive preparations in England—he equipped himself with a gross of nail brushes,