Arthur Evans
Sir Arthur John Evans was a British archaeologist and pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age.
The first excavations at the Minoan palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete began in 1877. They were led by Cretan Greek Minos Kalokairinos, a native of Heraklion. Three weeks later Ottoman authorities forced him to stop. Almost three decades later, Evans heard of Kalokairinos' discovery. With private funding, he bought the surrounding rural area including the palace land. Evans began his own excavations in 1900.
Based on the structures and artefacts found there and throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Evans found that he needed to distinguish the Minoan civilisation from Mycenaean Greece. Evans was also the first to define the Cretan scripts Linear A and Linear B, as well as an earlier pictographic writing.
Biographical background
Family
Arthur Evans was born in Nash Mills, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England, the first child of John Evans and Harriet Ann Dickinson, the daughter of John's employer and maternal uncle, John Dickinson, the founder of Messrs John Dickinson, a paper mill business. Arthur Evans' grandfather, Arthur Benoni Evans, had been headmaster of Dixie Grammar School at Market Bosworth, Leicestershire. John knew Latin and could quote the classical authors.In 1840 John Evans started work in the mill owned by his maternal uncle, John Dickinson. He married his first cousin, Harriet, in 1850, and in 1851 became a junior partner in the family business. Profits from the mill would help fund Arthur Evans's excavations, restorations at Knossos, and resulting publications. For the time being they were an unpretentious and affectionate family. They moved into a brick terraced house built for the purpose near the mill, which came to be called the "red house" because it lacked the sooty patina of the other houses. Harriet called her husband "Jack." Grandmother Evans called Arthur Evans "darling Trot," asserting in a note that, compared to his father, he was "a bit of a dunce." In 1856, with Harriet's declining health and Jack's growing reputation and prosperity, they moved into Harriet's childhood home, a mansion with a garden, where the children ran free.
John Evans maintained his status as an officer in the company, which eventually became John Dickinson Stationery, but also became distinguished for his pursuits in numismatics, geology, and archaeology. His interest in geology came from an assignment by the company to study the diminishing water resources in the area with a view toward protecting the company from lawsuits. The mill consumed large amounts of water, which was also needed for the canals. He became an expert and a legal consultant.
John became a distinguished antiquary, publishing numerous books and articles. In 1859, he conducted a geological survey of the Somme Valley with Joseph Prestwich.
Arthur Evans's mother, Harriet, died after childbirth in 1858 when he was seven. He had two brothers, Lewis and Philip Norman, and two sisters, Harriet and Alice. He would remain on excellent terms with all of them all of his life. He was raised by a stepmother, Fanny, née Phelps, with whom he also got along very well. She had no children of her own and also predeceased her husband. John's third wife was a classical scholar, Maria Millington Lathbury. When he was 70, they had a daughter, Joan, who became an art historian. John Evans died in 1908 at 85, when Arthur Evans was 57.
Education
Harrow
After a preparatory school, Evans entered Harrow School in 1865 at the age of 14. He was co-editor of The Harrovian in his final year, 1869/70. At Harrow he was friends with Francis Maitland Balfour. They competed for the Natural History Prize; the outcome was a draw. They were both highly athletic, including riding and swimming, and also mountain climbing, during which activity Balfour was killed later in life. Evans's field of vision was blurry beyond a close distance. He compensated by carrying a cane, which he called Prodger, to explore the environment. His wit was very sharp, too sharp for the administration, which stopped a periodical he had started, The Pen-Viper, after the first issue.Oxford
Arthur matriculated on 9 June 1870 and attended Brasenose College, Oxford. His housemaster at Harrow, F. Rendall, had eased the way to his acceptance with the recommendation that he was "a boy of powerful original mind." At Brasenose College, he read Modern History.His summertime activities with his brothers and friends were perhaps more important to his subsequent career. Having been given an ample allowance by his father, he went looking for adventure on the continent, seeking out circumstances that might be considered dangerous by some. In June 1871, he and Lewis visited Hallstatt, where his father had excavated in 1866, adding some of the artefacts to his collection. Arthur Evans had made himself familiar with these. Subsequently, they went on to Paris and then to Amiens. The Franco-Prussian War had just concluded the month before. Arthur Evans had been told at the French border to remove the dark cape he was wearing so that he would not be shot for a spy. Amiens was occupied by the Prussian army. Arthur found them prosaic and preoccupied with souvenir-hunting. He and Lewis hunted for stone-age artefacts in the gravel quarries, Arthur Evans remarking that he was glad the Prussians were not interested in flint artefacts.
In 1872, he and Norman adventured into Ottoman territory in the Carpathians, already in a state of political tension. They crossed borders illegally at high altitudes, "revolvers at the ready." This was Arthur Evans's first encounter with Turkish people and customs. He bought a set of clothes of a wealthy Turkish man, complete with red fez, baggy trousers, and an embroidered short-sleeved tunic. His detailed, enthusiastic account was published in Fraser's Magazine in May 1873.
In 1873, he and Balfour tramped over Lapland, Finland, and Sweden. Everywhere he went he took copious anthropological notes and made numerous drawings of the people, places and artefacts. During the Christmas holidays of 1873, Evans catalogued a coin collection being bequeathed to Harrow by John Gardner Wilkinson, the father of British Egyptology, who was too ill to work on it himself. The headmaster had suggested "my old pupil, Arthur John Evans – a remarkably able young man."
Arthur John Evans graduated from Oxford at the age of 24 in 1874, but his career had come near to foundering during the final examinations on modern history. Despite his extensive knowledge of ancient history, classics, archaeology, and what would be termed today cultural anthropology, he apparently had not read enough in his nominal subject to pass the required examination. He could answer no questions on topics later than the 12th century. He had convinced one of his examiners, Edward Augustus Freeman, of his talent. They were both published authors, they were both Gladstone liberals, and they were both interested in the Herzegovina uprising and on the side of Old Herzegovina insurgents. Freeman convinced Evans's tutors, George Kitchen and John Richard Green, and they convinced the Regius professor, William Stubbs, that, in view of his special other knowledge and interests, and his father's "high standing in learned society", Evans should not only be passed, but receive a first-class degree. It was the topic of much jesting; Green wrote to Freeman on 11 November 1875:
In the spring of 1875 he applied for the Archaeological Travelling Studentship offered by Oxford but, as he says in a letter to Freeman later in life, he was turned down thanks to the efforts of Benjamin Jowett and Charles Thomas Newton, two Oxford dons having a low opinion of his work there.
Göttingen
In April–July 1875 he attended a summer term at the University of Göttingen at the suggestion of Henry Montagu Butler, then headmaster at Harrow. Evans was to study with Reinhold Pauli, who had spent some years in Britain, and was a friend of Green. The study would be preparatory to doing research in modern history at Göttingen. The arrangement may have been meant as a remedial plan. On the way to Göttingen, Evans was sidetracked, unpropitiously for the modern history plan, by some illegal excavations at Trier. He had noticed that the tombs were being plundered surreptitiously. For the sake of preserving some artefacts, he hired a crew, performed such hasty excavations as he could, crated the material and sent it home to John.Göttingen was not to Evans's liking. His quarters were stuffy, and the topics were of little interest to him, as he had already demonstrated. His letters speak mainly of the discrepancy between the poor peasants of the countryside and the institution of the wealthy in the town. His thinking was of a revolutionary bent. Deciding not to stay, he left there to meet Lewis for another trip to Old Herzegovina. That decision marked the end of his formal education. Herzegovina was then in a state of insurrection. The Ottomans were using bashi-bazouks to try to quell it. Despite subsequent events, there is no evidence that the young Evans might have had ulterior motives at this time, despite the fact that Butler had helped to educate half the government of the United Kingdom. He was simply an adventurous young man bored with poring through books in a career into which he had been pushed against his real interests. The real adventure, in his mind, was the revolution in the Balkans.
Career
Agent in the Balkans
After resolving to leave Göttingen, Evans and Lewis planned to spy against the Principality of Montenegro in the rebellious mountain village of Bobovo, Pljevlja at the time of their journey the strongest point of resistance in triple mountain ranges of Ljubišnja and Tara gorges. During the struggle in Bobovo on 15 August 1875 during the Herzegovina uprising they were expelled from Province of Pljevlja by the Ottoman authorities and went to board a ship in the city of Dubrovnik via Pljevlja, a city with a large settlement from the Roman period, which Evans named as the Municipium S.They knew that the region, a part of the Ottoman Empire, was under martial law and that the Christians were in a state of insurrection against the Muslim beys placed over them. Some Ottoman troops were in the country in support of the beys, but mainly the beys were using irregular forces, the bashi-bazouks, loosely attached to the Ottoman military. Their notorious cruelty, which they practised against the natives, helped to turn the British Empire under W. E. Gladstone against the Ottoman Empire, as well as to attract Russian intervention at Serbian request. At the time of Evans' and Lewis' initial adventure, the Ottomans were still trying to lessen the threat of intervention by placating their neighbours. Evans sought and obtained permission to travel in Bosnia from its Ottoman military governor.
The two brothers experienced little difficulty with either the Serbs or the Ottomans but they did provoke the neighbouring Austro-Hungarian Empire and spent a night in "a wretched cell". After deciding to lodge in a good hotel in Slavonski Brod on the border, having judged it safer than Bosanski Brod across the Sava River, they were observed by an officer who saw their sketches and concluded they might be Russian spies. Politely invited by two other officers to join the police chief and produce passports, Evans replied, "Tell him that we are Englishmen and are not accustomed to being treated in this way". The officers insisted and, interrupting the chief at dinner, Evans suggested he should have come to the hotel in person to request the passports. The chief, in a somewhat less than civil manner, won the argument about whether he had the right to check the passports of Englishmen by inviting them to spend the night in a cell.
On the way to the holding cell the two young men were followed by a large crowd, whom Evans lost no opportunity to harangue, even though they understood only German. He threatened the authorities in the name of the British fleet, which, he asserted, would sail up the Sava river. He demanded the mayor, offered the jailer a bribe for food and water, but went into the cell unfed and without water. Meanwhile, the incident came to attention of Dr Makanetz, leader of the National Party of the Croatian Assembly, who happened to be in Brod. The next day he complained to the mayor. Evans and his brother were released with profuse apologies.
They crossed the Sava into Bosnia, which Evans found so different that he regarded the Sava as the border between Europe and Asia. After a number of interviews with Ottoman officials who attempted to dissuade them from travel on foot, the passport from the pasha prevailed. They were given an escort – one man, enough to establish authority – as far as Derventa. From there they travelled directly south to Sarajevo and from there to Dubrovnik on the coast, in Dalmatia. In Sarajevo they learned that the region through which they had just passed was now "plunged in civil war".