The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  All figures are shown in profile. They are painted as if in one movement, without superfluous details or extravagant gestures. The color scale—blue, gold, brown. The prevailing vertical accents underline the monumental gravity and serenity of the scene.

  Now the procession changes direction all of a sudden. Against a blue background, male figures (marked by the brown color of their faces, as distinct from the light complexions of the women). Two of them carry goats, and the third, closest to the edge of the scene, a model of a ship—a motif often found in Egyptian tomb paintings as well. The heavenly background breaks off and we now touch on the very heart of the scene, the mystery of mysteries, the mystical cause.

  The outline of a building on three levels, behind it a tree that is read as a cypress. From the earth the hero of the drama emerges. He has the shape of a statue, a herm, wrapped tightly in a light-colored robe as in a cocoon, enigmatic as a specter, concrete as a stone. He has come back to earth one more time, lured by sacrifices, music, incantations—indifferent and sublime. It is to him that the sepulchral libations, the seduction of flutes and blood are dedicated.

  The narrow sides of the sarcophagus show a chariot harnessed to two horses, led by two figures with battered diadems on their heads. On the other side, the same two figures (the dead accompanied by a deity, interpreters speculate), but the draft team is strange, two winged lions with the heads of birds—griffins. A bird has landed on their enormous, golden-blue wings, the sign of a deity’s presence.

  The sarcophagus is not only a masterpiece, it is also the only surviving Minoan Book of the Dead—an exact portrayal of a funeral ritual; so it has the value of a document, a visual record of an ancient tradition. None of the figures portrayed has a decorative character, all play a certain role in the ceremony represented. We easily find here all the great religious symbols of the Minoans: the double-sided axe, the labrys, from which we got our “labyrinth,” the stylized bull’s horns called votive horns, trees and birds, whose symbolic meaning is beyond any doubt, and also musical instruments—string instruments, accompanying the bloodless libations, and wind instruments, associated with animal sacrifices. The whole composition seems to follow the strict rules of a formalized liturgy.

  The scholars have given us an array of more or less convincing interpretations of the paintings on the sarcophagus. Some see in it a ceremony connected to an agrarian cult—celebrating the return of spring; others think they see the mystical wedding of Zeus and Hera. Most persuasive are the readings that take the cult of the dead as their point of departure. The mourning ritual, sacrifices, and sacral gestures have a practical aim: to watch over the life of the deceased—since death and resurrection were a natural right like the laws of nature, the succession of the seasons, the falling of leaves, and the sprouting of grain.

  The artist passed on to us something greater than the record of a cult. An untiring faith in immortality emanates from the sarcophagus paintings, the conviction that life is indestructible. It is a powerful and almost joyful song of resurrection, such as we read on the Petelia tablet many centuries later.

  Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a spring,

  and by the side thereof standing a white cypress.

  To this spring approach not near.

  But thou shalt find another, from the Lake of Memory.

  Cold water flowing forth, and there are guardians before it.

  Say, “I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven,

  but my race is of Heaven alone. This ye know yourselves.

  But I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly

  the cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.”

  III

  In judging discoveries2 such as Tutankhamon’s tomb, the palace of Knossos on Crete or the royal tombs at Ur, it is difficult at first to find the right perspective. These finds, which are truly extraordinary, constitute one of the elements of an ordered image of the past, and are at the same time a revelation of the historical background against which all of us, consciously or unconsciously, play our parts.

  LEONARD WOOLLEY

  THE DISCOVERY OF MINOAN civilization is the work of one man—Arthur Evans. He was not the first whose attention was drawn to the mysterious island in the wine-dark sea. For decades many amateur archaeologists had been going there to ferret around. One Spanish consul had announced that there was a buried palace near Knossos 180 feet long and 140 feet wide. Toward the end of the 1870s, Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy—he who put his unbounded faith in Homer and was not disappointed—entered into complicated negotiations whose object was precisely the purchase of those grounds where, under a layer of earth covered with olive trees, the palace of Minos had lain hidden for thousands of years. This transaction was never realized, because the Cretan owner of the land turned out to be a fraud and a crook, which the solid Schliemann could not tolerate.

  Before Evans, the Italian archaeologist Federico Halbherr and his French colleague Joubin were active on the island, as was the American journalist and lover of archaeology, Stillmann. It seemed that a great scientific sensation was in the air.

  But before we tell that story, let us look a little more closely at Arthur Evans. This will be useful, for it will allow us to understand why the honor of discovery falls to him, and explain why he gave us Knossos in the form he did.

  He was short, even small, not too attractive physically, and his explosive temperament made him more enemies than friends, but these natural deficits and character flaws were compensated for by an unbreakable will, a solid education and enormous reserves of energy. Fortune granted him a long life and personal wealth which permitted him to carry out forty years of excavation and to conduct his fanciful reconstructions.

  He was born in 1851 in the small town of Hemel-Hampstead, into a family of wealthy industrialists and scientists. His grandfathers on both the sword and distaff side were members of the Royal Society, his father a prominent geologist, anthropologist, expert on prehistoric archaeology and collector of antiquities.

  A proud household, filled with souvenirs, Victorian virtues, and fossils. From his early youth Arthur was passionate about coins, which was not unconnected with his hopeless myopia, which we mention in order to understand better the later mistakes of this great archaeologist.

  Joan Evans in her book Time and Chance writes of her half-brother as follows: “Evans was extremely3 shortsighted and always wore spectacles. Without them he could see only small objects held a few centimeters from his eye, but then in the most minute detail, while everything around him was a vague blur. For this reason details, which he saw in microscopic precision, as if cut off from the outside world, possessed a greater importance for him than they did for other people.”

  But Evans’s whole character and personality were the contrary of what is usually called a “bookworm.” Already at Harrow, his famous school, the future discover of Knossos became known as an exceptionally able and quite unruly boy (he edited the satirical student paper “The Serpent,” halted by the teaching staff after the first issue, as well as a fine swimmer and equestrian, which was of vital significance for his future career as an explorer. For archaeology in its heroic period demanded of its adepts great physical stamina, and also personal courage. Sunbaked deserts, swarms of insects carrying diseases, long nights in stuffy barracks under a mosquito net, the peril of malaria, the revolts of illiterate workers, solitude—these were the common scenario and the price stoically paid for a salvaged stone, inscription, sculpture.

  The young Evans goes to Oxford, spending his free time and holidays traveling, and that to places that are far from banal, to Rome, say, or Paris. He is drawn to lands lying on the edge of civilized Europe—Lapland, Finland, the Crimea, Bulgaria, Romania, and of course, Greece.

  Evans had a particular sympathy for the Slavic countries of southeastern Europe. He was fascinated by the Dalmatian coast with its mosaic of cultures, its splendid landscape and its people conscious of their past
and fighting for liberty in isolation. The scion of a conservative family becomes a liberal, a supporter of Gladstone. He decides to defend the cause of the Slavs held in bondage by the Turks, against prevailing public opinion in his own country and the intrigues of the Great Powers.

  This chapter of Evans’s life could be titled “Political Adventures of an Archaeologist.” The future discover caught the political bug, something that happens to many young and clever people of all times. Misfortunes on his university career path also played a role. The young scholar finished his course of studies brilliantly, but he was not popular in the conservative milieu of Oxford, and as if in revenge he became a political enfant terrible.

  Even though Evans clearly acted to spite his family, his undertakings are full of common sense, vigor, and consequence. He bravely steps into the dense thicket of Balkan problems (and is even arrested and accused of spying for Russia), writes a book on Bosnia-Herzegovina which he sends to prominent politicians, and in 1877 he becomes a special correspondent for the excellent and influential newspaper the Manchester Guardian and settles in Raguza (now Dubrovnik).

  He is a born correspondent, a reporter with a fine style, frequently risking his personal safety, engaged in the affairs of the oppressed Slavs, consumed by a passion for bearing witness to the truth. Untiring, he crosses the peaks and wilds of Montenegro, swims across rivers, wanders on foot and on horseback, reaches the rebels’ headquarters, writes with horror of the cruelties of the Turks toward the local populations, and when the British consul announces that his articles are the stuff of fantasy, he sends the Guardian a detailed list of burnt villages and names of officers of the Turkish terror.

  During this time he marries the daughter of an Oxford historian and friend of his and purchases a lovely Venetian house in Dubrovnik called the Casa San Lazzaro. This by no means betokens an abandonment of his journalistic and political activities. When the next rebellion against Austria breaks out, Evans remains in contact with the rebels and writes enthusiastically of their victories. And here he oversteps the bounds of patience of the occupation authorities. He is arrested by the Austrians, and in the spring of 1881 he and his wife are ordered to leave Dalmatia. To the satisfaction of his family, he returns to England. “He has learnt his lesson now and will stay at home—I hope,” writes one of his relatives.

  A vain hope. The rebellious Evans could not find a place for himself in any traditional framework. He is irritated by the absence of broad horizons in official academic archaeology, with its shallow cult of Classical and only Classical art, and by pedantic scholarly pigeon-holes. “It is as if there were a separate geography of the islands and the continents, or deluvial geology and alluvial geology bearing no relation to one another” he writes scornfully in one of his letters. Intuition led him in the right direction, but he had to obtain the factual material.

  Evans then travels to Greece for serious scientific reconnaissance. In Athens he visits the great Heinrich Schliemann. They are separated by a significant age difference (almost 30 years) and by fame. The German archaeologist has all his great discoveries behind him: Troy, Tiryns, and Mycenae; his younger British colleague is merely the promising graduate of a great university: if he had died at that time he would have sunk to the depths of oblivion with his untested contestation of the contemporary state of knowledge about the past.

  What did they talk about? One can imagine what the meeting was like. Schliemann probably talked about Homer, Evans listened respectfully, but completely immersed, looking at the golden objects from Mycenae, as well as the jewelry and stamps—holding the treasures a few centimeters from his hopelessly myopic eyes. These objects have been his passion for a long time. They have decorative motifs remote from those of Classical Greece which school effectively brought him to loathe. Schliemann’s treasures bring to mind Assyria and Egypt. But again, this is an intuition, an aesthetic impression. And perhaps, like a physicist or astronomer anticipating an undiscovered element or star, Evans guesses, believes, posits the existence of an undiscovered civilization connecting ancient Eastern culture to the “Greek miracle” in a clear causal chain.

  It is difficult to say whether the meeting with Schliemann was a turning-point for Evans. But years later he will remember his predecessor with reverence and sympathy: “Something of the Romantic experience of his earlier years had stuck to him; I was left with a memory almost of mystery when I was sitting across from that man dressed in black, slender, delicately built, with an earthy complexion, wearing oddly-shaped pince-nez through which he stared penetratingly into the earth.”

  After his return to England, Evans is appointed curator of the Ashmolean Museum, founded in Oxford in the nineteenth century and then in an atrocious state—collections of differing value, many periods, and often dubious provenance. He continues his intensive research trips. During one of them his beloved wife Margaret suddenly dies—the faithful companion of his arduous scientific expeditions, known in family circles for the witty letters in which she described the daily life of the “hunter of the past,” including a hunt for bedbugs in some godforsaken Balkan inn.

  In the spring of 1894 Arthur Evans set foot on the island of his destiny for the first time. He felt an immediate affection for Crete. He found everything there that had delighted him in Dalmatia: a courageous people under Turkish occupation, a dramatic landscape, monuments and traces of a long Hellenic, Roman, French, Venetian, and Turkish history. Under this colorful mosaic of many cultures, Evans thought he would find something that no one had yet named, no one had yet touched.

  Before the excavation work had started, he noted: “The golden age of Crete lies far away, beyond the boundaries of history as we know it,” and continued with a sentence that seems paradoxical to us: “Nothing moves an archaeologist studying the relicts of the distant past more than those he finds in a place where objects from historical periods are relatively rare and insignificant.”

  Another return to England, and then in March 1899 the expedition to Crete, this time with the concrete aim of starting excavation work. There are three of them: Evans, David George Hogarth—younger than Evans but more experienced in archaeological techniques, and Duncan MacKenzie, a Scottish redhead, polyglot, and expert in keeping an excavation day book. They sail off like the Argonauts to undertake one of the most splendid adventures in the modern humanities. There is a storm at sea. The long gone Minoans are defending their secret.

  Without delay excavation work is started in the vicinity of Knossos, on the hill of Kefalos. And already in the first days a vast labyrinthine construction emerges before the archaeologists’ eyes.

  Under the date March 27, 1899, Evan notes in his journal: “An extraordinary phenomenon—we found nothing Greek, nothing Roman—apart from one fragment of black enamel. We were somewhat led astray by the geometrical ceramics from the seventh century bc, as well as by tombs found near the main road […]. The flowering of Knossos should be dated much earlier. I’ll say more than that: the great peak of this civilization has to be put back as far as the pre-Mycenean period.”

  And thus was born a new sphere of knowledge about our past. Suddenly a light fell on the Greek world which was seemingly fully known. The traditional, nineteenth-century isolation of the “Greek miracle” from the surrounding world of barbarians had to be sent to the scrap-heap of unconfirmed theories.

  Evans was faced with a task that exceeded—from our point of view today—the strength of one man. If the discovery had been made half a century later, a powerful international organization and a large staff of scientists would probably have watched over the excavations.

  It was Evans’s dream to decipher Cretan script. For many decades he pursued this aim stubbornly and in vain. In fact, on the day he stood at the foot of the hill of Kefalos and thirty workers stuck their shovels in the earth, he did not at all expect fate to grant him the rare privilege and the title of discoverer of an unknown civilization.

  He was forty-nine years old, almost the same age as
Schliemann when he had started the excavations at Troy. He did not discover golden masks, treasure-chests, precious stones—as at Mycenae—but stood eye to eye with a mature and exquisite art, an architecture full of charm and subtlety, and an astonishingly sweet, I want to say decadent, way of life that emanated from the uncovered ruins. The labyrinth of steps, rooms, corridors, terraces, and courtyards seemed unending and Evans patiently moved ahead step by step, holding onto Ariadne’s thread. Soon he had to triple the number of hired workers. The undertaking was truly on an unprecedented scale.

  Evans hired professional architects, and not—as was the custom—in the final stage of work, to put the last maps, the horizontal and vertical layout of the found remains, into order—but from the start of the excavation. His first collaborator was Theodore Fyfe—an architect from the British Archaeological School in Athens; then Christian Doll and finally Piet de Jong. What does this mean? It means that at the very outset Sir Arthur made the decision which so many specialists cannot forgive him, namely the decision to do a reconstruction.

  In Evans’s defense it can be said that the material of which Knossos was built was enough to drive anyone to despair. It was as if the palace was made of mist and dreams, it fled before the archaeologist, the walls covered with murals crumbled to dust at the lightest touch, the burnt wooden columns, or rather the traces of them, did not hold up any ceiling. So Evans resolved to pursue his own vision of the palace. Writing of his work, the Austrian scholar Camillo Praschniker permitted himself a very malicious but not wholly untrue remark. He calls Knossos a “film set of a city,” no less, where “you wander among hypotheses which though they are made of fortified concrete, are incredibly fragile.”