National Geographic: Treasure Seekers - Glories of the Ancient Aegean (1999) Movie Script
In the dim past of Europe,
by the shores of the Aegean Sea,
the ancient bards told stories
of a golden age long ago,
a time when men were heroes
larger than life,
when the daring Theseus
battled the Minotaur,
and soldiers clashed over the face
of the beautiful Helen
who brought down the walls of Troy.
For hundreds of generations
these tales will pass down as myths.
Then in the 19th century,
two remarkable men
dared to believe that
the myths were clues to the treasures
of a forgotten past.
Their extraordinary adventures
uncovered the roots
of Western civilization.
In the 19th century,
archeology was in its infancy.
Ancient Greece was considered
the beginning of Western civilization,
its architecture the most beautiful;
its ideas the foundation
for everything to come.
Yet its roots before the 8th century
B.C. were shrouded in mystery.
Did this extraordinary civilization
spring out of nowhere?
Or did another, almost as advanced,
come before it?
The only accounts of
an earlier age were legends
that nearly everyone dismissed
as myths.
The first grade works of
Western literature,
the Iliad and the Odyssey, were
considered fiction, nothing more.
Who could have guessed that
Homer's beloved stories
could lead the way to a real past?
In Athens today a classical temple
marks the grave of Heinrich Schliemann,
to some, the father of archeology.
To others, an impetuous fool.
To Schliemann, Homer's stories
of the Trojan War were true,
and he set out to prove it.
His incredible discoveries pushed back
European history a thousand years.
Schliemann's story
has been romanticized
in films, books, even grand opera.
But none more fantastical
than his own stories about himself.
I think he thought that
he was the center of the world.
And I think he had a kind of
medieval map of the world
in which he was at the center
and everything else
was in concentric circles around him.
I think he was
the most frightful big head.
Schliemann throughout his life was
pretty cavalier with the truth.
He, I don't think, distinguished
so clearly as most of us do
between what is true
and what is false.
He tended to tell the story
that suited the moment.
Schliemann's personal myths stretched
all the way back to his childhood.
He was born in 1822
in northeastern Germany.
At the age of 7, he tells how
his father gave him a history book
with a picture of the ancient city
of Troy in flames.
Electrified by the site,
the young Heinrich asked
what had become of the great city.
His father explained that Troy had
burned to the ground leaving no trace.
Unconvinced, Heinrich disagreed:
"Father," retorted I,
"if such worlds once existed,
they cannot have been
completely destroyed.
Vast ruins of them must still remain
hidden away beneath the dust of ages."
In the end we both agreed that
I should one day excavate Troy.
It's a wonderful story, but there's
really no reason why we need to believe it.
He tells us not a day went by
where he thought about this goal
of earning enough money
to go out and excavate Troy.
But we have thousands of letters and
many diaries when he was a young man.
There's no mention of going out
and excavating Troy.
Schliemann may have been trying to
mask the truth of a painful childhood.
His mother died young,
but not before his minister father
lost his job
by committing adultery
with the housemaid.
Schliemann had to drop out of school
to help support his brothers and sisters.
All this, I think, etched itself
deeply onto Schliemann's mind.
He was left with a bitter,
bitter resentment about it in later life.
On the other hand,
the drive for all that he achieved
came out of this unhappy childhood.
Schliemann's story continues
like a fairy tale.
He ran away to sea,
was shipwrecked,
and then became a clerk
for a trading house in Amsterdam.
Toiling endlessly,
he taught himself languages
by copying passages
and then learning them by heart.
He mastered at least
ten languages this way.
As Schliemann himself said:
Talent means energy and persistence,
and nothing more.
Schliemann's talent was making money.
With energy and persistence,
the obsessive German became
an international merchant,
trading in commodities like indigo.
In 1849, prospectors struck gold
in California.
Ever the opportunist, Schliemann
joined the Gold Rush.
In Sacramento, he opened a bank,
buying gold dust from the miners
and lending them money at 12 percent
interest per month.
After two years,
he left California a very rich man.
My biggest fault-
being a braggart and a bluffer-
yielded countless advantages.
And there were even more to come.
Russia was on the brink of war,
so Schliemann cornered the market on
saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder.
The Crimean War made his fortune.
It seemed that everything
he touched turned to gold,
except his social standing.
His unhappy marriage to the daughter of
a St. Petersburg lawyer didn't help.
The uneducated merchant was shunned
as nouveau riche.
Now in his mid-40s,
Schliemann realized he wanted more
out of life than making money.
He wanted respect.
The situation in 1868
was that he was adrift.
He'd divorced his first wife,
a Russian woman.
He had sewed up his business
in St. Petersburg,
and he didn't know what to do.
He was going through a kind of
mid-life crisis.
And he took a journey to the
Mediterranean, to Italy and to Greece.
It was during the course of
that journey,
he was looking for something to do with
the rest of his life and he found it.
In June of 1868, Schliemann
arrived at the ruins of Pompeii.
Buried under layers of volcanic ash
for almost 1800 years,
this lost city was in the midst of
a spectacular rediscovery.
Excavations had uncovered
magnificent public spaces.
And rescued intimate frescos
from the buried houses.
Schliemann was captivated
by this journey into a lost world.
For the first time he met a real
archeologist, Giuseppe Fiorelli.
It was the Italian's innovation to
inject plaster into the ancient ash,
revealing the forms of the Pompeiians
caught in the last moments of life.
At this point, archeology was more
romance than science,
with few precedents
and even fewer rules.
Needless to say,
it was right up Schliemann's alley.
As he continued his travels,
His diaries began to
reflect a new direction.
He would set off on
a grand archeological adventure
and uncover the biggest
challenge of all:
the legendary city of Troy.
But first he had to find it.
When Heinrich Schliemann set out
on his quest for Troy,
most people believed the city
was a myth.
For one thing, it wasn't on the map.
Legend had placed Troy on the Dardanelles,
near the coast of present-day Turkey
But no ruins identified
the great city.
It was as if the site
of the Trojan War-
the greatest war story ever told-
had never existed.
But for thousands of years people
had repeated Homer's tale.
How Helen, the face that launched
a thousand ships,
had been taken away to Troy.
How the Greeks had battled for
ten long years to get her back,
led by the great king Agamemnon.
How the war was finally won with
a wooden horse full of soldiers.
In Homer's tale,
the Greeks destroyed the great city
of Troy; burning it to the ground.
Schliemann was just captured
by the Iliad,
the descriptions of what goes on,
everything about the human condition
is found in the Iliad
in a very poetic
and magnificent manner.
And the idea of finding the site
where all of these great tensions
between love and strife,
between divine and human interaction
were worked out
was something that just
swallowed him up.
With his copy of Homer as a guide,
Schliemann examined the mound thought
to be the likeliest location of Troy.
In the Iliad, two springs marked
the foot of the great city's hill.
To his dismay, Schliemann found
many more here.
And trial excavations turned up
nothing but dirt.
But just as he was about to leave
the area, the German got lucky-
He met an Englishman named
Frank Calvert who owned another mound,
the site of many prior civilizations.
Calvert believed his mound held
the real Troy far beneath the surface.
Frank Calvert explained to Schliemann
that he had done some excavations there
which took him below the Greek
and Roman levels,
into deep deposits where were earlier.
So he said there was a very good chance
that in these deep burial deposits
you will find the Troy
of the Trojan War.
And that convinced Schliemann;
it gave him something to do.
But Schliemann didn't have a clue
how to begin.
Dear Mr. Calvert, have I to take a tent
and iron baluster and pillar with me?
What sort of hat is best
against the scorching sun?
Please give me an exact statement of
all of the implements of whatever kind
and of all the necessaries
you would advise me to take with me.
With Calvert's encouragement Schliemann
began digging in earnest in October 1871.
On the first day, he hired 8 men.
By day three there were 80.
Caution was not his style.
Assuming Homer's Troy lay
at the bottom of the mound,
Schliemann had his men dig a great
gash right through the center of it.
One must plunge immediately
into the depths.
Only then will one find things.
On their way down the men uncovered
not one city, but many of them.
But Schliemann didn't let these other
Troys get in his way.
You can see when he began that
his methods were very, very crude.
He was going in with winches
and crowbars and battering rams.
The horrifying tales are spelled out
in some of his writings.
Nowadays, one just blenches
at the thought of it.
Numbers of immense blocks of stone
which we continually come upon
cause great trouble and have to be
got out and removed.
All of my workmen hurry to see
the enormous weight roll down
and settle itself at some distance
in the plain.
Schliemann was discarding
priceless relics
from thousands of years
of civilization on the site.
Thankfully, rains closed
the season early.
But the next year he was back,
this time attacking the mound
with 150 men under the command
of a railroad engineer.
Often by Schliemann's side
was his new Greek wife, Sophia,
who won his heart
by reciting from the Iliad.
Forging ahead,
Schliemann continued to aim straight
for the bottom of the mound,
haphazardly uncovering
ancient stone walls
and collecting pottery and other
artifacts along the way.
What Schliemann did was to go down
deep into this complex, complex site.
And he did try to understand
how the layers had built up
one on top of the other.
He wasn't bad at either;
he was quite observant.
Of course now we would do it
in much finer detail than he did,
but he was the one to reveal
that this sort of thing could be done
in a site of this sort.
In the third season of digging
the hard work finally paid off.
Near the bottom of the mound
workman uncovered the charred ruins
of a citadel.
It didn't look like much,
but Schliemann declared it must be
the place of King Priam
burned in the Trojan War.
As he himself told the story,
he dismissed his workman and began
to attack the palace walls himself.
I cut out the treasure
with a large knife,
which was impossible to do without
the most fearful risk of my life.
But I never thought of any danger.
It would, however, been impossible for
me to have removed the treasure
without the help of my dear wife who
stood by me ready to pack the things
that I cut out in her shawl
and carry them away.
It was a fabulous find.
Ancient silver and copper vessels.
Bronze weapons.
And most extraordinary of all,
elaborate gold jewelry.
With Schliemann's usual panache,
he announced that he had
uncovered the treasure of Priam
and the jewels of Helen of Troy.
A photograph of Sophia Schliemann
modeling Helen's jewels
became one of the most celebrated
images of the 19th century.
Yet, Schliemann's account
of the discovery
was controversial from the start.
The story is certainly fiction in
at least one major element,
and that is that Sophie was not there.
Sophie had left about three weeks
earlier, gone back to Athens.
So she was certainly not there
packing the stuff
in her shawl and carrying them off.
The question is how much else is true?
I think that although Sophie
wasn't there-
and we know that Schliemann
was telling a lie about that-
that doesn't necessarily mean that
the treasure itself is a hoax.
I think, in fact, there are very good
signs that it was genuine.
There are discrepancies with regard
to where the treasure was found,
the day on which it was found,
and exactly what was found.
He makes wrong connections.
For example, he misremembers exactly
where things were found.
He associates them with
the wrong features and so forth.
But I think you also have to consider
what he has left us with
at the end of the day,
and what he has left us with is
an enormous volume of material
because he was so energetic,
and spent so much money
and spent so much time at Troy.
A master of 19th century media,
Schliemann informed
the world of his success.
But first he carefully smuggled
his treasures out of Turkey,
ignoring his permit stipulation that
all finds belonged to the Turks.
The crafty German was triumphant.
Convinced that he'd
uncovered Homer's Troy,
buried in myth for more than
Being Schliemann, however,
even fame and recognition
couldn't occupy him for long.
Homer pointed him in a new direction,
to a city rich in gold.
He turned his sights to Mycenae, home
of Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks.
According to Homer, the conqueror of
the Trojans had met a violent fate.
Agamemnon returned home to Mycenae,
only to find that his wife
had taken up with another man.
Late one night,
the two murdered the great hero.
It was another compelling tale-
sufficient motivation for Schliemann.
And with Mycenae, the fledgling
archeologist had an easier assignment.
Unlike Troy, the city
had never been lost.
It's picturesque ruins
still dominated a hill in Greece,
not far from the Aegean Sea.
Hungry for gold, Schliemann began
to dig in August 1876.
Within a few weeks, he discovered
evidence of a sacred site.
The man's luck seemed unbelievable.
Pressing on, he unearthed
a series of royal graves
filled with treasures
and skeletons adorned with gold.
Leaping to conclusions yet again,
Schliemann declared he had discovered
the golden mask of Agamemnon.
As it turned out, later archeologists
decided it wasn't the mythical king.
But it didn't really matter.
Schliemann had uncovered evidence of
a rich and sophisticated civilization
which had flourished 1,000 years
before the days of classical Greece.
The objects he'd unearthed
were elegant and skillfully crafted.
He'd even found a helmet made of boar's
teeth that matched Homer's description.
Schliemann fabulous discovery at
Mycenae brought him international fame,
even the respect of
many of his critics.
Throughout the next decade,
he dug at other Greek citadels,
accumulating evidence of the wealth
and splendor of this previously
unknown civilization.
But Schliemann wasn't satisfied.
In his heart, he knew
his new discoveries cast doubt
on the primitive treasures
he'd found at Troy.
How could he be sure that the walls
he uncovered deep beneath that mound
were the same ones that
kept Agamemnon's forces at bay?
That down those broken street
Helen once walked?
It was time to return to Troy
and make sense of that perplexing
mound once and for all.
This time, Schliemann proceeded
slowly and cautiously,
digging on the edge of the mound.
And bit by bit, the old treasure hunter
uncovered a layer in the middle
that he'd missed in his earlier days.
Here, finally, was what he had been
searching for all along:
the ruins of broad streets,
massive walls, and a much bigger citadel.
Schliemann should have been thrilled.
But instead, his heart sank.
It meant there was a lot of
rethinking to do.
In a sense,
he saw before his eyes 20 years
of work just going down the drain.
For four days Schliemann retreated to
his tent, searching for answers.
From the beginning,
he'd assumed that Homer's Troy lay
at the bottom of the mound.
Now his new discovery changed
everything.
If he'd finally found the Troy of
the Trojan War in this middle layer,
then 20 years ago he'd made
a tragic mistake.
For in his haste to dig to the bottom,
he destroyed much of
what he'd been looking for.
He'd never know
what treasures had been lost.
Exhausted, Schliemann vowed to continue
the following season.
But it was not to be.
Suffering from a terrible pain
in his ear,
he traveled to Germany for surgery,
then headed home to Greece.
He never got there.
Buried in Athens with a state funeral,
Schliemann was mourned
even by his critics.
For 20 years he'd lit up
the world of early archeology
with his drive and enthusiasm.
Pursuing his childhood dreams of
ancient Greek heroes to the end,
he pushed back the frontiers
of European history.
In the process, he put the
young science of archeology on the map.
Among the many he inspired was a
brilliant young man named Arthur Evans
who visited Schliemann
several years before his death.
Reaching beyond Schliemann's
discoveries,
the intrepid Englishman would also
track down a legend
into the far corners
or Europe's hidden past.
He would reawaken an even older
civilization buried in myth and oblivion
for more than 3,000 years.
Unlike Schliemann, Arthur Evans seemed
destined to become an archeologist.
His father,
a wealthy paper manufacturer,
was a pioneer in studying the past.
Born in 1851,
Arthur spent his childhood
in the English countryside
digging for Roman coins.
But as the boy grew older,
his nickname grew increasingly annoying-
"Little Evans,"
son of John Evans the great.
He's kind of, in his early years,
like a rebel without a cause.
He's looking for something
to get hold of to be different
than his father and to prove
his own worth.
And so as an expression of
this sort of rebelliousness,
he did the most romantic thing
he could think of,
which was to travel to the Balkans.
From his first sight of
the Balkans in 1871,
Evans rejected any notion of
returning to his father's business.
Instantly at home,
he haunted the bazaars,
delighting in the colorful mixture
of East and West.
To Evans the fact that the land
was at war only added to its appeal.
The Slavs were rebelling against the
Ottoman Turks after years of domination.
Evans became a roving reporter
for the Manchester Guardian.
Affected with bad eyesight,
he disdained glasses.
Instead, he used is walking stick
which he named 'prodger'
as a kind of antenna.
The mad Englishman with the walking
stick became a familiar sight,
and a thorn in the sight of
authorities.
He was quite a romantic.
Much more volatile than his father.
He did things like wearing a red cloak
and riding on a black horse
at the Turkish Burgess,
really quite dangerous
difficult territory.
He did it with a sense of drama.
He wanted to be a spy,
and he did some very rash things.
Evans sympathies were with the Slavs
and their struggle for independence.
As the years went on
and the conflict intensified,
his articles became
more and more impassioned.
His recklessness began
to worry his wife Margaret,
whom Evans had married
after several years in the Balkans.
The young couple had settled
into Brovnia, Croatia,
Arthur's version of paradise.
But in 1882, Evans articles
caught up with him.
Thrown into jail as a spy,
he languished there for seven weeks.
Characteristically,
the young adventurer found a novel way
to communicate with his wife.
Breaking a tooth off his pocket comb,
he drew blood from his arm.
"Dear Margaret"
He wrote in his blood,
"I'm fine, but it would be wise
to get a lawyer."
His family did succeed in
getting him released.
But Evans was expelled
from the Balkans.
For him, paradise was lost.
Once home in England the landscape
looked grey and leaden.
Arthur missed the Mediterranean
and found that he couldn't sit still.
So he and Margaret took off
on a grand tour,
a holiday that would have
a lasting impact on his future.
In Greece, the young couple
visited the customary sights
revered by educated Europeans
as the essence of beauty.
Evans was unimpressed.
He was more interested in truly
ancient ruins,
like the ones at Mycenae.
Ever since the first newspaper
accounts more than a decade before,
Evans had been fascinated by
the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann.
He visited the German archeologist
at his home in Athens.
With great pride,
Schliemann showed the younger man
the objects he'd unearthed at Mycenae.
Evans was captivated.
His nearsighted eyes would often
notice details others missed.
And what excited him here were
the tiny sealstones used to press
a design into wax or clay.
Their intricate symbols reminded him
of picture writing
like the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Could it be that
this early European civilization
had also mastered the art of writing?
And if it was so advanced,
thought Evans,
then surely another civilization
must have preceded it.
He seemed to feel almost instinctively
that there had to be something earlier.
I think that as one of the
great contributions, really,
that Evans made was the sense
that Mycenaean art wasn't the
beginning of something;
it was the end of something.
So he had this sense that there
must be something earlier to find.
And that, of course, was one of
the things that pointed him
in the direction of Crete.
In 1893, Evans' wife Margaret
died of tuberculosis.
The couple had been living
in Oxford for ten years
where Evans served as director
of the Ashmolean Museum.
Without his companion,
Evans was bereft.
For the rest of his life he would only
write on black bordered note paper.
Clearly, he needed a new adventure.
His mind returned to
his meeting with Schliemann
and the enigma of the sealstone.
He'd heard that the island of Crete
was full of these little treasures.
It was time to see for himself.
In 1894, Arthur Evans went to Crete,
a sleepy island in the Aegean Sea.
In ancient times it had been fabled
as a rich and populous land.
Now under the control of
the Ottoman Turks,
it was timeless and unspoiled.
Exactly the sort of place
Arthur Evans liked.
He traveled all over the island looking
for sealstones unearthed by the plow.
Here women called them 'milkstones'
and wore them around their necks
to ensure enough milk for their babies.
Finally, he came to a great mound,
still identified by the locals
as the site of Knossos,
in Greek mythology,
the palace of King Minos.
Arthur Evans couldn't resist
the power of the myth,
that beneath this hill once lay the
labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur.
As the story goes,
every year the City of Athens
was required to send tribute
to King Minos.
Seven youths and seven maidens were
sent into the labyrinth
to face the Minotaur,
the terrifying monster half man
and half bull.
No one came out alive.
Then a youth named Theseus
devised a scheme
to mark his trail with
a ball of thread.
The hero met the Minotaur
in a great battle.
Triumphant,
he followed the thread to freedom.
When Arthur Evans arrived
at the great mound,
it looked like any other hill
with no evidence of a palace,
let alone a labyrinth.
But Evans met a man who had found some
huge storage jars close to the surface.
He claimed there was much more
waiting beneath the earth.
Evans began to negotiate with
the land's Turkish owners.
It took him five years
and the patience
to wait until Crete gained
its independence from the Turks.
Evans had learned as a collector
that the only way really to control
an artifact was to own it.
So Evans decided to own
his greatest artifact,
and to buy Knossos
because he knew that as landowner
he would have a right to do
whatever he wanted on it.
On the 23rd of March 1900,
Arthur Evans broke ground at Knossos.
In an effort to heal scars
from the recent war for independence,
he hired both Muslims and Christians,
men and women, to work the dig.
Evans himself was almost overcome
with excitement.
There is a bit of schizophrenia
almost in Evans
where he is trained by his father
as the scientific archeologist.
At the same time,
the romantic explorer is desperate
to get at the treasure.
It didn't take long.
Exactly one week
after he began digging,
Arthur Evans found clay tablets
inscribed with two different systems
of writing never seen before.
Evans called them
'Linear A' and 'Linear B.'
He would spend the rest of his
long life trying to decipher them.
Even more extraordinary lay in wait.
Arthur Evans found in the very
first week of his excavation
a wonderful gypsum throne,
a stone throne still it in a place,
in a room beautifully decorated with
frescos, it was flanked by griffins.
And he was instantly able
to announce to the world
this is the oldest throne in Europe,
this is the beginning of
European civilization.
The civilization Evans was uncovering
seemed amazingly advanced.
While the rest of Europe
was still living in huts,
these ancient people had resided
in comfort and splendor.
Essentially it really was like
a grand European palace
where you had running water actually
running through the building itself.
This sort of thing, most of Evans'
readers in the London Times didn't have.
You know, flushing toilets in their
own houses and fresh water
running through the houses.
Elated by the extraordinary treasures
of Knossos,
Evans boldly announced to the world
that he had found a completely unknown,
unimagined civilization.
Older than Schliemann's Mycenae,
and more than 15,000 years
older than classical Greece.
He decided these remarkable
ancient Europeans needed a name.
'Minoan' he called them
after the legend of King Minos.
This time Arthur Evans
had found a cause
equal to his boundless imagination.
As the years went on,
the challenges set in.
Winter storms damaged
the vulnerable ruins.
Evans realized he had to
devise a way to protect them.
It was only the beginning of
his conservation problems.
Soon his workmen found evidence that
the palace had actually had
several stories.
Evans sent two experienced silver
miners tunneling into the earth.
They dug for weeks,
eventually revealing the remains of
four magnificent flights of stone steps.
Evans found the only way
to preserve the staircase
was to restore it to its former glory.
All it would take was
a bit of imagination.
Really what started off as a first-
aid to keep the building in tact
grew out of hand a little bit
because he began to really enjoy
what he was doing.
Little by little, Evans began
to restore Knossos.
Using his own fortune,
he transformed the ruins into rooms,
based on his personal vision
of Minoan architecture.
The project was controversial
from the start.
Evans used modern materials
like steel and reinforced concrete,
melding the ancient with the latest
in 20th century architecture.
Evans was trying to recreate
a total experience in the same way
that we try to set up
virtual reality mazes
where people can experience
architecture.
Evans was trying to do the same thing
at Knossos.
He was criticized for building
a movie set,
and in a sense that is
what he was doing.
He wanted people to be able to walk
through and experience the building.
But really one is experiencing
Evans' vision
more than anything else
when you visit Knossos.
Even Evans critics today admit that
the palace would be a confusing maze
without his unifying vision.
As more and more ruins continued
to be unearthed,
Evans hired architects to help him
make sense of the twisting
corridors and rooms.
He began to think that
the palace itself had inspired
the myth of the labyrinth,
for he found 1400 rooms
stretched over 6 acres.
The palace was reasonably
well preserved,
but nothing like as well
preserved as it now feels.
It is really quite important to walk
into a place and have a sense of walls
and ceilings as well as
just foundations
the come up to about knee level.
So with things like
the grand staircase,
of which he was hugely proud,
I think a lot of people have cause
to be grateful to Evans
for allowing them the chance
to walk down a Minoan staircase
and to be surrounded by Minoan columns
and even restored frescos on the wall.
It has been a wonderful experience.
Evans was inspired by the frescos.
The fragments suggested a world
surprisingly modern,
a handsome people who lived
in harmony with nature.
But the images were
indistinct and broken.
So Evans took another leap.
He hired a team of artists
to help him fill in the blanks.
What emerged from Evans palette was
a world of grace of sensuality,
unlike any other in ancient times.
There were no images of war.
Women were on an equal footing
with men.
Priestesses led the worship
of a mother goddess.
How much of this inviting world
was truly Minoan,
and how much the creation of
Arthur Evans?
He idealized the Minoans.
He had no real concept that
there could be
an darker side to their nature,
any war-likeness.
They were, for him, sort of
latter-day hippies, really.
They were people who lived
in an almost perfect world,
a world which I think Evans saw
in contrast to the real world.
They were always a bit of
an escape for him.
During Evans years at Knossos,
the outside world was shattered
by the violence of World War I.
Evans was horrified
by the brutal technology
and raw power of the 20th century.
Just as he had escaped
from industrial England in his youth,
he found solace in the refined world
of the Minoans.
They became almost real to him,
a perfect people who lived
in an ideal world.
In his writings only once
did Evans admit
that his Minoans might have had
a violent side.
He couldn't help noticing that
everywhere he looked in the palace
he saw menacing images of bulls.
They reminded him of
the innocent youths and maidens
sacrificed to the Minotaur.
One fresco haunted him,
a charging bull with a young acrobat
in the midst of a suicidal leap.
What could be the meaning
of this cruel sport,
so like the bloody rituals
of the Roman amphitheater?
"The sports of the Roman
amphitheater may thus in Crete
may be trace back to prehistoric times.
Perhaps the legends of Athenian
prisoners devoured by the Minotaur
preserve a real tradition of such
cruel sports."...Arthur Evans
But most of the time Evans Minoans
seemed to have lived with all the grace
and polish of their eminent
discoverer.
He was Sir Arthur now,
widely honored and renowned.
He entertained frequently,
but remained a private person,
more at home in the world he created.
He spent much of his later years
writing a history of the Minoans called,
"The Palace of Minos."
In defiance of modern technology,
he wrote all four volumes in longhand
with a white goose-feather quill pen.
Many of his friends
said his handwriting
was even beginning
to look like Linear A.
Throughout his writings Evans insisted
on the superiority of his Minoans.
He believed they had
dominated the Aegean,
lording over the more warlike tribes
of mainland Greece.
Even in the face of
conflicting evidence,
he insisted that only an earthquake
precipitated their fall.
Other archeologists disagreed.
They pointed to evidence which showed
that the Minoans had been conquered
by the Mycenaeans sweeping in
from Greece about 1450 B.C.
Evans could never accept the image
of his Minoans as a captive people.
To the end of his life Evans remained
true to his dream of the Minoans.
All over Crete other excavators
were digging,
revealing the outlines of
other palaces
that had flourished at the same time
as his Knossos.
Their methods were not the same as his-
science had taken over archeology.
No longer would a single vision
recreate a civilization.
The days of the treasure seekers
were over.
There are instances
where we can see him
as being wrongheaded,
pigheaded, just plain wrong.
But what really strikes you
very forcibly is that
if you're starting any piece
of Minoan research,
if you're asking any questions,
you can almost always go back to
Arthur Evans' writings
and find a starting point.
You may not agree with
what he says about it,
but he almost always been there
first and thought of the question.
Regardless of whether it was true
or not, Evans image of Minoan culture-
its elegance and grace-
captivated the Western imagination.
It continues to inspire more than a
million visitors to Knossos every year.
The treasure he'd unearthed
was more than gold.
It was the vision of a civilized world
deep in the dark recesses of
the European past.
by the shores of the Aegean Sea,
the ancient bards told stories
of a golden age long ago,
a time when men were heroes
larger than life,
when the daring Theseus
battled the Minotaur,
and soldiers clashed over the face
of the beautiful Helen
who brought down the walls of Troy.
For hundreds of generations
these tales will pass down as myths.
Then in the 19th century,
two remarkable men
dared to believe that
the myths were clues to the treasures
of a forgotten past.
Their extraordinary adventures
uncovered the roots
of Western civilization.
In the 19th century,
archeology was in its infancy.
Ancient Greece was considered
the beginning of Western civilization,
its architecture the most beautiful;
its ideas the foundation
for everything to come.
Yet its roots before the 8th century
B.C. were shrouded in mystery.
Did this extraordinary civilization
spring out of nowhere?
Or did another, almost as advanced,
come before it?
The only accounts of
an earlier age were legends
that nearly everyone dismissed
as myths.
The first grade works of
Western literature,
the Iliad and the Odyssey, were
considered fiction, nothing more.
Who could have guessed that
Homer's beloved stories
could lead the way to a real past?
In Athens today a classical temple
marks the grave of Heinrich Schliemann,
to some, the father of archeology.
To others, an impetuous fool.
To Schliemann, Homer's stories
of the Trojan War were true,
and he set out to prove it.
His incredible discoveries pushed back
European history a thousand years.
Schliemann's story
has been romanticized
in films, books, even grand opera.
But none more fantastical
than his own stories about himself.
I think he thought that
he was the center of the world.
And I think he had a kind of
medieval map of the world
in which he was at the center
and everything else
was in concentric circles around him.
I think he was
the most frightful big head.
Schliemann throughout his life was
pretty cavalier with the truth.
He, I don't think, distinguished
so clearly as most of us do
between what is true
and what is false.
He tended to tell the story
that suited the moment.
Schliemann's personal myths stretched
all the way back to his childhood.
He was born in 1822
in northeastern Germany.
At the age of 7, he tells how
his father gave him a history book
with a picture of the ancient city
of Troy in flames.
Electrified by the site,
the young Heinrich asked
what had become of the great city.
His father explained that Troy had
burned to the ground leaving no trace.
Unconvinced, Heinrich disagreed:
"Father," retorted I,
"if such worlds once existed,
they cannot have been
completely destroyed.
Vast ruins of them must still remain
hidden away beneath the dust of ages."
In the end we both agreed that
I should one day excavate Troy.
It's a wonderful story, but there's
really no reason why we need to believe it.
He tells us not a day went by
where he thought about this goal
of earning enough money
to go out and excavate Troy.
But we have thousands of letters and
many diaries when he was a young man.
There's no mention of going out
and excavating Troy.
Schliemann may have been trying to
mask the truth of a painful childhood.
His mother died young,
but not before his minister father
lost his job
by committing adultery
with the housemaid.
Schliemann had to drop out of school
to help support his brothers and sisters.
All this, I think, etched itself
deeply onto Schliemann's mind.
He was left with a bitter,
bitter resentment about it in later life.
On the other hand,
the drive for all that he achieved
came out of this unhappy childhood.
Schliemann's story continues
like a fairy tale.
He ran away to sea,
was shipwrecked,
and then became a clerk
for a trading house in Amsterdam.
Toiling endlessly,
he taught himself languages
by copying passages
and then learning them by heart.
He mastered at least
ten languages this way.
As Schliemann himself said:
Talent means energy and persistence,
and nothing more.
Schliemann's talent was making money.
With energy and persistence,
the obsessive German became
an international merchant,
trading in commodities like indigo.
In 1849, prospectors struck gold
in California.
Ever the opportunist, Schliemann
joined the Gold Rush.
In Sacramento, he opened a bank,
buying gold dust from the miners
and lending them money at 12 percent
interest per month.
After two years,
he left California a very rich man.
My biggest fault-
being a braggart and a bluffer-
yielded countless advantages.
And there were even more to come.
Russia was on the brink of war,
so Schliemann cornered the market on
saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder.
The Crimean War made his fortune.
It seemed that everything
he touched turned to gold,
except his social standing.
His unhappy marriage to the daughter of
a St. Petersburg lawyer didn't help.
The uneducated merchant was shunned
as nouveau riche.
Now in his mid-40s,
Schliemann realized he wanted more
out of life than making money.
He wanted respect.
The situation in 1868
was that he was adrift.
He'd divorced his first wife,
a Russian woman.
He had sewed up his business
in St. Petersburg,
and he didn't know what to do.
He was going through a kind of
mid-life crisis.
And he took a journey to the
Mediterranean, to Italy and to Greece.
It was during the course of
that journey,
he was looking for something to do with
the rest of his life and he found it.
In June of 1868, Schliemann
arrived at the ruins of Pompeii.
Buried under layers of volcanic ash
for almost 1800 years,
this lost city was in the midst of
a spectacular rediscovery.
Excavations had uncovered
magnificent public spaces.
And rescued intimate frescos
from the buried houses.
Schliemann was captivated
by this journey into a lost world.
For the first time he met a real
archeologist, Giuseppe Fiorelli.
It was the Italian's innovation to
inject plaster into the ancient ash,
revealing the forms of the Pompeiians
caught in the last moments of life.
At this point, archeology was more
romance than science,
with few precedents
and even fewer rules.
Needless to say,
it was right up Schliemann's alley.
As he continued his travels,
His diaries began to
reflect a new direction.
He would set off on
a grand archeological adventure
and uncover the biggest
challenge of all:
the legendary city of Troy.
But first he had to find it.
When Heinrich Schliemann set out
on his quest for Troy,
most people believed the city
was a myth.
For one thing, it wasn't on the map.
Legend had placed Troy on the Dardanelles,
near the coast of present-day Turkey
But no ruins identified
the great city.
It was as if the site
of the Trojan War-
the greatest war story ever told-
had never existed.
But for thousands of years people
had repeated Homer's tale.
How Helen, the face that launched
a thousand ships,
had been taken away to Troy.
How the Greeks had battled for
ten long years to get her back,
led by the great king Agamemnon.
How the war was finally won with
a wooden horse full of soldiers.
In Homer's tale,
the Greeks destroyed the great city
of Troy; burning it to the ground.
Schliemann was just captured
by the Iliad,
the descriptions of what goes on,
everything about the human condition
is found in the Iliad
in a very poetic
and magnificent manner.
And the idea of finding the site
where all of these great tensions
between love and strife,
between divine and human interaction
were worked out
was something that just
swallowed him up.
With his copy of Homer as a guide,
Schliemann examined the mound thought
to be the likeliest location of Troy.
In the Iliad, two springs marked
the foot of the great city's hill.
To his dismay, Schliemann found
many more here.
And trial excavations turned up
nothing but dirt.
But just as he was about to leave
the area, the German got lucky-
He met an Englishman named
Frank Calvert who owned another mound,
the site of many prior civilizations.
Calvert believed his mound held
the real Troy far beneath the surface.
Frank Calvert explained to Schliemann
that he had done some excavations there
which took him below the Greek
and Roman levels,
into deep deposits where were earlier.
So he said there was a very good chance
that in these deep burial deposits
you will find the Troy
of the Trojan War.
And that convinced Schliemann;
it gave him something to do.
But Schliemann didn't have a clue
how to begin.
Dear Mr. Calvert, have I to take a tent
and iron baluster and pillar with me?
What sort of hat is best
against the scorching sun?
Please give me an exact statement of
all of the implements of whatever kind
and of all the necessaries
you would advise me to take with me.
With Calvert's encouragement Schliemann
began digging in earnest in October 1871.
On the first day, he hired 8 men.
By day three there were 80.
Caution was not his style.
Assuming Homer's Troy lay
at the bottom of the mound,
Schliemann had his men dig a great
gash right through the center of it.
One must plunge immediately
into the depths.
Only then will one find things.
On their way down the men uncovered
not one city, but many of them.
But Schliemann didn't let these other
Troys get in his way.
You can see when he began that
his methods were very, very crude.
He was going in with winches
and crowbars and battering rams.
The horrifying tales are spelled out
in some of his writings.
Nowadays, one just blenches
at the thought of it.
Numbers of immense blocks of stone
which we continually come upon
cause great trouble and have to be
got out and removed.
All of my workmen hurry to see
the enormous weight roll down
and settle itself at some distance
in the plain.
Schliemann was discarding
priceless relics
from thousands of years
of civilization on the site.
Thankfully, rains closed
the season early.
But the next year he was back,
this time attacking the mound
with 150 men under the command
of a railroad engineer.
Often by Schliemann's side
was his new Greek wife, Sophia,
who won his heart
by reciting from the Iliad.
Forging ahead,
Schliemann continued to aim straight
for the bottom of the mound,
haphazardly uncovering
ancient stone walls
and collecting pottery and other
artifacts along the way.
What Schliemann did was to go down
deep into this complex, complex site.
And he did try to understand
how the layers had built up
one on top of the other.
He wasn't bad at either;
he was quite observant.
Of course now we would do it
in much finer detail than he did,
but he was the one to reveal
that this sort of thing could be done
in a site of this sort.
In the third season of digging
the hard work finally paid off.
Near the bottom of the mound
workman uncovered the charred ruins
of a citadel.
It didn't look like much,
but Schliemann declared it must be
the place of King Priam
burned in the Trojan War.
As he himself told the story,
he dismissed his workman and began
to attack the palace walls himself.
I cut out the treasure
with a large knife,
which was impossible to do without
the most fearful risk of my life.
But I never thought of any danger.
It would, however, been impossible for
me to have removed the treasure
without the help of my dear wife who
stood by me ready to pack the things
that I cut out in her shawl
and carry them away.
It was a fabulous find.
Ancient silver and copper vessels.
Bronze weapons.
And most extraordinary of all,
elaborate gold jewelry.
With Schliemann's usual panache,
he announced that he had
uncovered the treasure of Priam
and the jewels of Helen of Troy.
A photograph of Sophia Schliemann
modeling Helen's jewels
became one of the most celebrated
images of the 19th century.
Yet, Schliemann's account
of the discovery
was controversial from the start.
The story is certainly fiction in
at least one major element,
and that is that Sophie was not there.
Sophie had left about three weeks
earlier, gone back to Athens.
So she was certainly not there
packing the stuff
in her shawl and carrying them off.
The question is how much else is true?
I think that although Sophie
wasn't there-
and we know that Schliemann
was telling a lie about that-
that doesn't necessarily mean that
the treasure itself is a hoax.
I think, in fact, there are very good
signs that it was genuine.
There are discrepancies with regard
to where the treasure was found,
the day on which it was found,
and exactly what was found.
He makes wrong connections.
For example, he misremembers exactly
where things were found.
He associates them with
the wrong features and so forth.
But I think you also have to consider
what he has left us with
at the end of the day,
and what he has left us with is
an enormous volume of material
because he was so energetic,
and spent so much money
and spent so much time at Troy.
A master of 19th century media,
Schliemann informed
the world of his success.
But first he carefully smuggled
his treasures out of Turkey,
ignoring his permit stipulation that
all finds belonged to the Turks.
The crafty German was triumphant.
Convinced that he'd
uncovered Homer's Troy,
buried in myth for more than
Being Schliemann, however,
even fame and recognition
couldn't occupy him for long.
Homer pointed him in a new direction,
to a city rich in gold.
He turned his sights to Mycenae, home
of Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks.
According to Homer, the conqueror of
the Trojans had met a violent fate.
Agamemnon returned home to Mycenae,
only to find that his wife
had taken up with another man.
Late one night,
the two murdered the great hero.
It was another compelling tale-
sufficient motivation for Schliemann.
And with Mycenae, the fledgling
archeologist had an easier assignment.
Unlike Troy, the city
had never been lost.
It's picturesque ruins
still dominated a hill in Greece,
not far from the Aegean Sea.
Hungry for gold, Schliemann began
to dig in August 1876.
Within a few weeks, he discovered
evidence of a sacred site.
The man's luck seemed unbelievable.
Pressing on, he unearthed
a series of royal graves
filled with treasures
and skeletons adorned with gold.
Leaping to conclusions yet again,
Schliemann declared he had discovered
the golden mask of Agamemnon.
As it turned out, later archeologists
decided it wasn't the mythical king.
But it didn't really matter.
Schliemann had uncovered evidence of
a rich and sophisticated civilization
which had flourished 1,000 years
before the days of classical Greece.
The objects he'd unearthed
were elegant and skillfully crafted.
He'd even found a helmet made of boar's
teeth that matched Homer's description.
Schliemann fabulous discovery at
Mycenae brought him international fame,
even the respect of
many of his critics.
Throughout the next decade,
he dug at other Greek citadels,
accumulating evidence of the wealth
and splendor of this previously
unknown civilization.
But Schliemann wasn't satisfied.
In his heart, he knew
his new discoveries cast doubt
on the primitive treasures
he'd found at Troy.
How could he be sure that the walls
he uncovered deep beneath that mound
were the same ones that
kept Agamemnon's forces at bay?
That down those broken street
Helen once walked?
It was time to return to Troy
and make sense of that perplexing
mound once and for all.
This time, Schliemann proceeded
slowly and cautiously,
digging on the edge of the mound.
And bit by bit, the old treasure hunter
uncovered a layer in the middle
that he'd missed in his earlier days.
Here, finally, was what he had been
searching for all along:
the ruins of broad streets,
massive walls, and a much bigger citadel.
Schliemann should have been thrilled.
But instead, his heart sank.
It meant there was a lot of
rethinking to do.
In a sense,
he saw before his eyes 20 years
of work just going down the drain.
For four days Schliemann retreated to
his tent, searching for answers.
From the beginning,
he'd assumed that Homer's Troy lay
at the bottom of the mound.
Now his new discovery changed
everything.
If he'd finally found the Troy of
the Trojan War in this middle layer,
then 20 years ago he'd made
a tragic mistake.
For in his haste to dig to the bottom,
he destroyed much of
what he'd been looking for.
He'd never know
what treasures had been lost.
Exhausted, Schliemann vowed to continue
the following season.
But it was not to be.
Suffering from a terrible pain
in his ear,
he traveled to Germany for surgery,
then headed home to Greece.
He never got there.
Buried in Athens with a state funeral,
Schliemann was mourned
even by his critics.
For 20 years he'd lit up
the world of early archeology
with his drive and enthusiasm.
Pursuing his childhood dreams of
ancient Greek heroes to the end,
he pushed back the frontiers
of European history.
In the process, he put the
young science of archeology on the map.
Among the many he inspired was a
brilliant young man named Arthur Evans
who visited Schliemann
several years before his death.
Reaching beyond Schliemann's
discoveries,
the intrepid Englishman would also
track down a legend
into the far corners
or Europe's hidden past.
He would reawaken an even older
civilization buried in myth and oblivion
for more than 3,000 years.
Unlike Schliemann, Arthur Evans seemed
destined to become an archeologist.
His father,
a wealthy paper manufacturer,
was a pioneer in studying the past.
Born in 1851,
Arthur spent his childhood
in the English countryside
digging for Roman coins.
But as the boy grew older,
his nickname grew increasingly annoying-
"Little Evans,"
son of John Evans the great.
He's kind of, in his early years,
like a rebel without a cause.
He's looking for something
to get hold of to be different
than his father and to prove
his own worth.
And so as an expression of
this sort of rebelliousness,
he did the most romantic thing
he could think of,
which was to travel to the Balkans.
From his first sight of
the Balkans in 1871,
Evans rejected any notion of
returning to his father's business.
Instantly at home,
he haunted the bazaars,
delighting in the colorful mixture
of East and West.
To Evans the fact that the land
was at war only added to its appeal.
The Slavs were rebelling against the
Ottoman Turks after years of domination.
Evans became a roving reporter
for the Manchester Guardian.
Affected with bad eyesight,
he disdained glasses.
Instead, he used is walking stick
which he named 'prodger'
as a kind of antenna.
The mad Englishman with the walking
stick became a familiar sight,
and a thorn in the sight of
authorities.
He was quite a romantic.
Much more volatile than his father.
He did things like wearing a red cloak
and riding on a black horse
at the Turkish Burgess,
really quite dangerous
difficult territory.
He did it with a sense of drama.
He wanted to be a spy,
and he did some very rash things.
Evans sympathies were with the Slavs
and their struggle for independence.
As the years went on
and the conflict intensified,
his articles became
more and more impassioned.
His recklessness began
to worry his wife Margaret,
whom Evans had married
after several years in the Balkans.
The young couple had settled
into Brovnia, Croatia,
Arthur's version of paradise.
But in 1882, Evans articles
caught up with him.
Thrown into jail as a spy,
he languished there for seven weeks.
Characteristically,
the young adventurer found a novel way
to communicate with his wife.
Breaking a tooth off his pocket comb,
he drew blood from his arm.
"Dear Margaret"
He wrote in his blood,
"I'm fine, but it would be wise
to get a lawyer."
His family did succeed in
getting him released.
But Evans was expelled
from the Balkans.
For him, paradise was lost.
Once home in England the landscape
looked grey and leaden.
Arthur missed the Mediterranean
and found that he couldn't sit still.
So he and Margaret took off
on a grand tour,
a holiday that would have
a lasting impact on his future.
In Greece, the young couple
visited the customary sights
revered by educated Europeans
as the essence of beauty.
Evans was unimpressed.
He was more interested in truly
ancient ruins,
like the ones at Mycenae.
Ever since the first newspaper
accounts more than a decade before,
Evans had been fascinated by
the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann.
He visited the German archeologist
at his home in Athens.
With great pride,
Schliemann showed the younger man
the objects he'd unearthed at Mycenae.
Evans was captivated.
His nearsighted eyes would often
notice details others missed.
And what excited him here were
the tiny sealstones used to press
a design into wax or clay.
Their intricate symbols reminded him
of picture writing
like the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Could it be that
this early European civilization
had also mastered the art of writing?
And if it was so advanced,
thought Evans,
then surely another civilization
must have preceded it.
He seemed to feel almost instinctively
that there had to be something earlier.
I think that as one of the
great contributions, really,
that Evans made was the sense
that Mycenaean art wasn't the
beginning of something;
it was the end of something.
So he had this sense that there
must be something earlier to find.
And that, of course, was one of
the things that pointed him
in the direction of Crete.
In 1893, Evans' wife Margaret
died of tuberculosis.
The couple had been living
in Oxford for ten years
where Evans served as director
of the Ashmolean Museum.
Without his companion,
Evans was bereft.
For the rest of his life he would only
write on black bordered note paper.
Clearly, he needed a new adventure.
His mind returned to
his meeting with Schliemann
and the enigma of the sealstone.
He'd heard that the island of Crete
was full of these little treasures.
It was time to see for himself.
In 1894, Arthur Evans went to Crete,
a sleepy island in the Aegean Sea.
In ancient times it had been fabled
as a rich and populous land.
Now under the control of
the Ottoman Turks,
it was timeless and unspoiled.
Exactly the sort of place
Arthur Evans liked.
He traveled all over the island looking
for sealstones unearthed by the plow.
Here women called them 'milkstones'
and wore them around their necks
to ensure enough milk for their babies.
Finally, he came to a great mound,
still identified by the locals
as the site of Knossos,
in Greek mythology,
the palace of King Minos.
Arthur Evans couldn't resist
the power of the myth,
that beneath this hill once lay the
labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur.
As the story goes,
every year the City of Athens
was required to send tribute
to King Minos.
Seven youths and seven maidens were
sent into the labyrinth
to face the Minotaur,
the terrifying monster half man
and half bull.
No one came out alive.
Then a youth named Theseus
devised a scheme
to mark his trail with
a ball of thread.
The hero met the Minotaur
in a great battle.
Triumphant,
he followed the thread to freedom.
When Arthur Evans arrived
at the great mound,
it looked like any other hill
with no evidence of a palace,
let alone a labyrinth.
But Evans met a man who had found some
huge storage jars close to the surface.
He claimed there was much more
waiting beneath the earth.
Evans began to negotiate with
the land's Turkish owners.
It took him five years
and the patience
to wait until Crete gained
its independence from the Turks.
Evans had learned as a collector
that the only way really to control
an artifact was to own it.
So Evans decided to own
his greatest artifact,
and to buy Knossos
because he knew that as landowner
he would have a right to do
whatever he wanted on it.
On the 23rd of March 1900,
Arthur Evans broke ground at Knossos.
In an effort to heal scars
from the recent war for independence,
he hired both Muslims and Christians,
men and women, to work the dig.
Evans himself was almost overcome
with excitement.
There is a bit of schizophrenia
almost in Evans
where he is trained by his father
as the scientific archeologist.
At the same time,
the romantic explorer is desperate
to get at the treasure.
It didn't take long.
Exactly one week
after he began digging,
Arthur Evans found clay tablets
inscribed with two different systems
of writing never seen before.
Evans called them
'Linear A' and 'Linear B.'
He would spend the rest of his
long life trying to decipher them.
Even more extraordinary lay in wait.
Arthur Evans found in the very
first week of his excavation
a wonderful gypsum throne,
a stone throne still it in a place,
in a room beautifully decorated with
frescos, it was flanked by griffins.
And he was instantly able
to announce to the world
this is the oldest throne in Europe,
this is the beginning of
European civilization.
The civilization Evans was uncovering
seemed amazingly advanced.
While the rest of Europe
was still living in huts,
these ancient people had resided
in comfort and splendor.
Essentially it really was like
a grand European palace
where you had running water actually
running through the building itself.
This sort of thing, most of Evans'
readers in the London Times didn't have.
You know, flushing toilets in their
own houses and fresh water
running through the houses.
Elated by the extraordinary treasures
of Knossos,
Evans boldly announced to the world
that he had found a completely unknown,
unimagined civilization.
Older than Schliemann's Mycenae,
and more than 15,000 years
older than classical Greece.
He decided these remarkable
ancient Europeans needed a name.
'Minoan' he called them
after the legend of King Minos.
This time Arthur Evans
had found a cause
equal to his boundless imagination.
As the years went on,
the challenges set in.
Winter storms damaged
the vulnerable ruins.
Evans realized he had to
devise a way to protect them.
It was only the beginning of
his conservation problems.
Soon his workmen found evidence that
the palace had actually had
several stories.
Evans sent two experienced silver
miners tunneling into the earth.
They dug for weeks,
eventually revealing the remains of
four magnificent flights of stone steps.
Evans found the only way
to preserve the staircase
was to restore it to its former glory.
All it would take was
a bit of imagination.
Really what started off as a first-
aid to keep the building in tact
grew out of hand a little bit
because he began to really enjoy
what he was doing.
Little by little, Evans began
to restore Knossos.
Using his own fortune,
he transformed the ruins into rooms,
based on his personal vision
of Minoan architecture.
The project was controversial
from the start.
Evans used modern materials
like steel and reinforced concrete,
melding the ancient with the latest
in 20th century architecture.
Evans was trying to recreate
a total experience in the same way
that we try to set up
virtual reality mazes
where people can experience
architecture.
Evans was trying to do the same thing
at Knossos.
He was criticized for building
a movie set,
and in a sense that is
what he was doing.
He wanted people to be able to walk
through and experience the building.
But really one is experiencing
Evans' vision
more than anything else
when you visit Knossos.
Even Evans critics today admit that
the palace would be a confusing maze
without his unifying vision.
As more and more ruins continued
to be unearthed,
Evans hired architects to help him
make sense of the twisting
corridors and rooms.
He began to think that
the palace itself had inspired
the myth of the labyrinth,
for he found 1400 rooms
stretched over 6 acres.
The palace was reasonably
well preserved,
but nothing like as well
preserved as it now feels.
It is really quite important to walk
into a place and have a sense of walls
and ceilings as well as
just foundations
the come up to about knee level.
So with things like
the grand staircase,
of which he was hugely proud,
I think a lot of people have cause
to be grateful to Evans
for allowing them the chance
to walk down a Minoan staircase
and to be surrounded by Minoan columns
and even restored frescos on the wall.
It has been a wonderful experience.
Evans was inspired by the frescos.
The fragments suggested a world
surprisingly modern,
a handsome people who lived
in harmony with nature.
But the images were
indistinct and broken.
So Evans took another leap.
He hired a team of artists
to help him fill in the blanks.
What emerged from Evans palette was
a world of grace of sensuality,
unlike any other in ancient times.
There were no images of war.
Women were on an equal footing
with men.
Priestesses led the worship
of a mother goddess.
How much of this inviting world
was truly Minoan,
and how much the creation of
Arthur Evans?
He idealized the Minoans.
He had no real concept that
there could be
an darker side to their nature,
any war-likeness.
They were, for him, sort of
latter-day hippies, really.
They were people who lived
in an almost perfect world,
a world which I think Evans saw
in contrast to the real world.
They were always a bit of
an escape for him.
During Evans years at Knossos,
the outside world was shattered
by the violence of World War I.
Evans was horrified
by the brutal technology
and raw power of the 20th century.
Just as he had escaped
from industrial England in his youth,
he found solace in the refined world
of the Minoans.
They became almost real to him,
a perfect people who lived
in an ideal world.
In his writings only once
did Evans admit
that his Minoans might have had
a violent side.
He couldn't help noticing that
everywhere he looked in the palace
he saw menacing images of bulls.
They reminded him of
the innocent youths and maidens
sacrificed to the Minotaur.
One fresco haunted him,
a charging bull with a young acrobat
in the midst of a suicidal leap.
What could be the meaning
of this cruel sport,
so like the bloody rituals
of the Roman amphitheater?
"The sports of the Roman
amphitheater may thus in Crete
may be trace back to prehistoric times.
Perhaps the legends of Athenian
prisoners devoured by the Minotaur
preserve a real tradition of such
cruel sports."...Arthur Evans
But most of the time Evans Minoans
seemed to have lived with all the grace
and polish of their eminent
discoverer.
He was Sir Arthur now,
widely honored and renowned.
He entertained frequently,
but remained a private person,
more at home in the world he created.
He spent much of his later years
writing a history of the Minoans called,
"The Palace of Minos."
In defiance of modern technology,
he wrote all four volumes in longhand
with a white goose-feather quill pen.
Many of his friends
said his handwriting
was even beginning
to look like Linear A.
Throughout his writings Evans insisted
on the superiority of his Minoans.
He believed they had
dominated the Aegean,
lording over the more warlike tribes
of mainland Greece.
Even in the face of
conflicting evidence,
he insisted that only an earthquake
precipitated their fall.
Other archeologists disagreed.
They pointed to evidence which showed
that the Minoans had been conquered
by the Mycenaeans sweeping in
from Greece about 1450 B.C.
Evans could never accept the image
of his Minoans as a captive people.
To the end of his life Evans remained
true to his dream of the Minoans.
All over Crete other excavators
were digging,
revealing the outlines of
other palaces
that had flourished at the same time
as his Knossos.
Their methods were not the same as his-
science had taken over archeology.
No longer would a single vision
recreate a civilization.
The days of the treasure seekers
were over.
There are instances
where we can see him
as being wrongheaded,
pigheaded, just plain wrong.
But what really strikes you
very forcibly is that
if you're starting any piece
of Minoan research,
if you're asking any questions,
you can almost always go back to
Arthur Evans' writings
and find a starting point.
You may not agree with
what he says about it,
but he almost always been there
first and thought of the question.
Regardless of whether it was true
or not, Evans image of Minoan culture-
its elegance and grace-
captivated the Western imagination.
It continues to inspire more than a
million visitors to Knossos every year.
The treasure he'd unearthed
was more than gold.
It was the vision of a civilized world
deep in the dark recesses of
the European past.