The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  When we come into contact with the works of the past we want to be sure they are authentic, that no one has corrected them, no one has got in to pretty them up, finish them, make them more comprehensible. We want to throw a bridge across the abyss of time to the gods and people of past millennia by ourselves, without the aid of intermediaries. Not being excessively spiritual myself, I have always looked for material traces to establish comprehension and covenant. That is why I was invariably moved by potholes along Roman roads, cathedral steps worn by pilgrims, a mason’s mark on a stone.

  The visitor of the palace at Knossos is deprived of these delights. The modern building materials, the columns painted in ruddy dark red paint with black fundamentals and capitals dispel the presence of the old inhabitants.

  It must be said that Evans met with criticism of his methods quite early on. One of his first opponents was the director of the British Archaeological School in Athens, Hogarth. At first the scholars worked in agreement, but quickly their paths diverged. Hogarth reproached Evans with squandering funds (which were from the start partly public funds) on fancy reconstructions intended more for laymen than for specialists. And indeed, Evans’s penchant for the spectacular could prompt reservations. “The restoration of the ‘Throne Hall,’ for example, was not the result of scientific methods but merely satisfied a desire to recreate in palpable form what should be left to the imagination,” Hogarth wrote to Evans, threatening to cut his grant.

  The grant was in fact cut in 1902. Evans must have taken all this into account, since he writes in a letter to his father in November 1900 (more than a year before the excavation began): “The palace at Knossos was my idea and my work, and it has turned out to be the kind of discovery that is scarcely to be anticipated in the course of a single life, or even the course of many human lives. Whether the Society (the Cretan Excavation Society) should help me is another question. If it were to give the money to me personally, that would be entirely acceptable. But we may also keep at least part of Knossos in the family! I am quite decided on it […], because I and I alone must retain control over what I have undertaken. Certainly there are people who would do things differently, but I know this is my position. Perhaps it is not the best course, but it is the only possible one for me if I am to continue the work.”

  This is a very characteristic mark of Evans’s personality. Knossos remained his private passion and possession for thirty years. He did not wish to share the glory with anyone, so responsibility for the form the palace took falls to him alone. The work consumed a significant part of the finder’s personal fortune—a quarter of a million pounds sterling, then a mighty currency.

  Evans’s unassailable achievement was not only gathering the vast material but the first great attempt to systemize it and create a chronology of ancient Crete. He also tried to grasp all the interdependencies and links between the newly found civilization and the history of Troy, the Cyclades and Hellas, and particularly links with the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia (the two oldest and best known of cultures). This was possible due to the discovery of Anatolian, Syrio-Phoenician, and Egyptian objects on Crete, as well as Cretan objects that archaeologists found in the East. The relations between Egypt and Crete were of special interest to Evans, and it was the history of Egypt, grasped in the greatest detail thanks to written sources, that had a decisive influence on the periodization of Cretan civilization.

  Evans called the period from the end of the Neolithic age up to the invasion of Crete by the Achaeans the Minoan age. A homage to the nameless kings of the island state.

  The discoverer of Knossos divided Minoan civilization into three ages, based in part on ceramics: the early Minoan age of 3400–2100 B.C., characterized by “smoked” ceramics, often monochromatic; the middle Minoan age of 2100 to 1580 B.C., with the ceramics called Kamares (from the name of a town) with colored patterns on a dark background, and finally the late Minoan age of 1580–1200 B.C., which corresponds with the ceramics that show dark patterns on a light background.* The ages are divided into periods and phases, and it is typical of Evans to repeat the triadic myth cycle as if under the influence of the legend of Zeus, who extended the reign of King Minos every ten years.

  “To this great expanse of time,” writes the discoverer of Knossos, “covering more than two thousand years, we have applied a division into three principal ages: the early, middle and late Minoan, and then for each of these, three periods, although one should not take this too punctiliously or with clockmaker’s precision. Each period lasts on average 250 years, and the periods of an earlier age are naturally longer. This division, if we look at the development of the whole of Minoan civilization or at its stages, is essentially both logical and scientific. For in each characteristic phase of a culture we observe times of bloom, maturity, and decline. The three principle ages of Minoan history correspond roughly with the Old, Middle and Early periods of the New Egyptian State.”

  In fact the chronology proposed by Evans had a number of weak points and has undergone many amendments, additions, and changes. It relates mainly to Knossos, but falls short in other Minoan cities like Mallia or Phaestos, as if they had kept to local clocks and had a different measure of time. Moreover, new archaeological discoveries undermined virtually the whole chronology of the ancient Orient and Egypt. The Hyksos invasion of Egypt should be moved forward to around 1720 B.C. The discovery in 1942 of letters of the kings of Chorsabad obliged historians to modify the chronology of Mesopotamia. The reign of Hammurabi, first determined to have been in the years 2123–2081 B.C., is nowadays set at 1848–1806 B.C., or even 1792–1750 B.C. That is why the new researchers Glotz, Matz, and Nikolaos Platon search for grounds for dating Cretan history more solid than Evans’s hypotheses and which are supported by the introduction of meal or the toppling of the island palaces.

  Evans’s life work is The Palace of Minos at Knossos. The first volume of this monumental book, a great saga of ancient Cretan civilization, appeared in 1921, the last volume fifteen years later. The whole fills six volumes, more than three thousand pages and about 2500 illustrations.

  The Palace of Minos was written in Evans’s commodious home in Youlbury furnished largely with books, in intervals between excavation seasons. His half-sister made the following sketch of the scholar in action in her memoirs: “Here he could work on his book—dividing and classifying material in a simple way, namely by putting up a new table on sawhorses for each new chapter and walking from one to the next, like a chess player playing many games simultaneously […]. He truly needed a lot of space; the material was overwhelming; and in addition, while struggling with it, he made no use of any modern conveniences. He had neither a secretary nor a typewriter, and he always used a goose quill.”

  An indefatigable old man. When he was seventy-five he survived an earthquake on Crete, watching it coolly and attentively like Pliny watching the eruption of Vesuvius. He felt a hunch that it was in this terrifying natural phenomenon that one should see the explanation for the destruction of the culture he discovered and so loved. At eighty he traveled across Crete by hydroplane and had a great fondness for that form of locomotion. Virtually to the end of his life he wielded power over Knossos with an iron hand.

  A few years before the outbreak of World War II he visited Dalmatia and the old house in Dubrovnik where he had passed the brief happy years of his marriage with the unforgotten Margaret. “I always come here every fifty years.”

  He dies in the glare and rumble of bombs. The patriarch of Mediterranean archaeology, strewn with honors and titles from many universities, knighted by the king, deserved a gentler death after such a stormy life. He works up to the end, taking a lively interest in the course of the war. He suffered deeply the defeat of his beloved countries: France, Yugoslavia, finally Greece. In his Cretan house, named Villa Ariadne, Hitler’s military set up their headquarters. In 1941 he visits the British Museum, which has been devastated by bombs from enemy planes.

  How to evaluate this extraord
inary figure? It is not for us to do so. The scholar’s successors will make it their ruthless business. And because our generation thinks a little more kindly of the Victorian age than did the generation immediately following it, it will not be too cutting for us to call him the Tennyson of archeology.

  IV

  Tout traité d’archéologie passe4.

  CHARLES PICARD

  IT MIGHT SEEM THAT Evans said everything that could be said about Knossos and Minoan culture; one might suppose that after the great work of discovery nothing was left to his successors but footnotes and submissive repetitions of what Sir Arthur wrote. But in the study of the past, as in any other sphere of knowledge, the discoverer does not have the last word. Marcel Brion says with some melancholy that nothing is completely certain and definite in a science in constant motion like archaeology.

  In the middle of 1960, nineteen years after Evans’s death, a vehement controversy broke out over a question that might on the face of it seem of interest only to specialists in the field, but which quickly overran their sphere and raged for a good couple of years in the pages of newspapers, in cultural journals, and on the radio. A passionate argument among archaeologists, linguists, and scholars of civilization turned into what was virtually a public spectacle.

  The protagonist of the dispute, which was never definitely resolved, was a British scholar and professor at Oxford, Leonard Robert Palmer. He proposed a new chronology, revolutionary because it contradicted the views of the majority of experts, and a new dating for the Greek Bronze Age.

  In response to the crucial question when the Greeks arrived on the peninsula which was from then on to be their homeland, history textbooks and the majority of specialists in the field offer an approximate date: shortly after 2000 B.C. Palmer concedes that there was indeed an invasion of the peninsula in that period, but says there is no evidence to lead one to ascribe it to the Greeks. They in his view settled in the lands henceforth called Greece shortly after 1600 B.C., introducing what archaeologists call late Hellenic or Mycenean culture.

  As we will see in a moment this is not merely a pedantic quibble about dates, but a controversy entailing a multitude of real problems, as well as a revalorization of the roles and influences of specific cultural spheres. The question was again posed: where are the sources of our civilization, and which peoples were the true force and motor of that civilization?

  Another very important problem is the attempt to answer the question: when did the Greeks conquer Crete? Here once again the majority of scholars, following Evans, give an approximate date: around 1450 B.C. Moreover, for these scholars that date is synonymous with the catastrophe of Minoan culture, with its sudden collapse. The period 1400–1100 B.C. is generally considered the period of the final decline, crumbling to dust, and extinction of the civilization that flourished for so many centuries. A favorite pupil of Evans, the distinguished young archaeologist and palace curator, John Pendlebury (who fell fighting heroically alongside the Cretan partisans in World War II), says with pictorial flair that in those times, Knossos was a ruin with ravaged stairs and scattered walls, amid which wandered the dim ghosts of the past, and wild, barbaric tenants unaware of what this place had once been.

  Palmer also took serious issue with this view, which had seemed firmly founded in history. He thought, unlike most researchers, that the period called a period of decline was an age of artistic excellence and economic prosperity for Crete. True, the island was under Greek rule, but it was still the center of a vibrant culture.

  In the church of scholars, archaeologists, linguists, historians of Greece’s Bronze Age, the following heresy emerged. As in a trial, if one wishes to appeal a verdict, one must refer to new evidence; the defenders of Evans demanded facts justifying the revelatory hypothesis. Palmer states that his dramatic revision is based above all on the Linear B script deciphered in 1952 (the script which had been an enigma to Evans) and on the discovery by the American scholar Blegen in the palace of Nestor in 1939 of a whole archive of tablets covered with Linear B script, the same script that Evans had found in Knossos. Now, the tablets from the Greek continent (more of them were found at Pylos) date beyond all doubt to 1200 B.C. How to explain this hiatus of two centuries between the continental tablets and those from the island? Had Evans not (consciously) made a mistake in his dating? Are the Minoans really, as the discoverer of Knossos would have it, the inventors of the script, or was it, on the contrary, created on the continent?

  Well, scholars are human beings, not devoid of passion. It is therefore not strange that they like to attribute to the civilizations they discover more importance, more splendor, a greater reach of influence than they really had.

  Analyzing the content of the deciphered tablets from Nestor’s archive, Palmer comes to the conclusion that around 1200 B.C., Knossos was exporting to the continent many ceramic and metal artifacts (bronze tripods for example), and therefore in his view one cannot speak of a decline in Minoan culture at that time.

  And finally one must reckon with what the Master Poet says. Homer has never let an archaeologist down. He led the way to Troy. He said that Agamemnon ruled in Mycenae and Schliemann found his castle. He put Nestor in Pylos and Blegen found his palace. Why would the Infallible and Great Poet be wrong—when he said that Idomeneus, the king of Crete, grandson of Minos, whose capital was in Knossos, took part in the Trojan War (around 1100 B.C.) and was one of its heroes? Idomencus put up eighty ships, after all (only ten less than the mighty Nestor); he was also nominated as the warrior to meet Hector in single combat. And finally, he was one of the stealthy Trojan horse’s crew—one of the first to make his way into the city. This is how Palmer seeks to unite lovers of Homer in support of his thesis arguing for the greatness of Crete in the period of the island’s alleged decline.

  And finally, something straight from a crime novel: material proof hidden in the cellars of a museum, a document unknown to scholars discovered by Palmer, which casts a shadow on the memory of the discoverer of Knossos. And here the scholarly polemic turned into a scandal about falsification.

  “By February 19605,” Palmer writes, “I felt I could no longer accept Evans’s dating of the Linear B tablets found at Knossos. I began a series of studies which revealed new documents deriving from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Above all, and most importantly, we found the Day Book of the Knossos Excavations kept by Duncan Mackenzie, Evans’s assistant. This document became a great aid in establishing the facts. Now, Evans’s main basis for establishing the dates of the tablets was a stratification made in a little room called the Stirrup Vase room (after a type of ceramics with a characteristic ornament). The excavation day book says something completely different, and is in accordance with Evans’s own notes, which I have had the opportunity to study. And finally, we now have the copies made by Sir Arthur himself of the Linear B tablets; these were found last month in the Ashmolean Museum. These documents indicate that the tablets to which the discoverer of Knossos attached so much significance were not found in the aforementioned room but in an entirely different part of the Palace. All these heretofore unknown facts force us to question Evans’s stratification and dating.”

  One couldn’t be clearer or more ruthless.

  This conclusion of Palmer’s requires a few words of clarification. One might ask: why make such a fuss over a couple of broken pots—in this case, those stirrup motif vases? Is it not better to trust the intuition and experience of the discoverer? But science is not built on faith in authorities, and like a court judge, an archaeologist must give a clear and exact answer to three fundamental questions: what was found, where, and with what? This “with what,” meaning in the company of what kind of objects, is of vital importance, because it allows us to date not only objects of art but whole periods of civilization. It is ceramics that most often plays the role of the “archaeological clock”—the measure of time. For we know the most about its development, sequence, and changes of style through time, and besides, to speak plainl
y, broken pots stay where they are, in the archaeological layer where they were thrown, because they are not an object of desire for looters, like gold artifacts or works of art.

  But let us return to the quarrel. Palmer’s accusations were grave and it is not surprising that they provoked a polemical storm. The discoverer and highest authority on questions of Minoan culture was accused—to put it mildly—of having distorted the research results and bent them to an a priori thesis. Palmer also pointed out that Evans had arbitrarily—that is, without basing his claim on real results of excavation—taken Minoan civilization to be significantly older than it really was. The same is the case in the delicate matter of influences. If we accept Palmer’s thesis, the role of Crete as a source of Mycenean and Greek civilization is considerably weaker.

  The corrections and additions that researchers will make to the epochal work of the discoverer of Knossos are significant, even if they are quieter and have less of a taste of public scandal than Palmer’s heretical hypotheses. The deciphering of older inscriptions and new archaeological discoveries may yet bring many a revelation. The problem of Crete, its most famous history, the role and importance of this civilization is far from being conclusively settled.

  Several years ago a German scholar, professor Hans Georg Wunderlich, came forward with a bold hypothesis concerning what the palace discovered by Evans had really been. Let us add that Wunderlich is not an archaeologist but a palaeontologist. But it often happens that scholars in other fields throw a new light on riddles that seemed already solved, or at the very least initiate a fertile discussion. This probably happens because they are less attached to intellectual schemas and do not take as a given what may still be an object of reflection and doubt.