by Dilys Powell
v
The general public may have been little more than mildly concerned about the archaeological excitement generated by the Ventris-Chadwick reading of Linear B. They were certainly not allowed to ignore the next outbreak of hostilities.
In the summer of 1960 a distinguished Oxford philologist, Professor L. R. Palmer, published in The Observer an article which claimed to demolish Evans’s system of Cretan dating. Evans believed that Knossos was destroyed in 1400 B.C.; that with ‘squatters’ in occupation the civilisation of the place fell into decay; and that the Linear B inscriptions belonged to the period before the catastrophe. But if the language was Greek, Mycenaean Greek as Ventris and Chadwick called it, some new thinking was called for. Pylos, a Mycenaean-age city, fell about 1200 B.C. – and Blegen had found Linear B in the ruins. Could the tablets belong to a period much later than Evans had maintained? And was it possible that the great days of Knossos came to an end not in 1400 B.C. but two centuries later when the Mycenaean palaces of the mainland were destroyed?
The theory had already been advanced by archaeologists who questioned Evans’s dating; and excited by the encouragement given by Blegen’s discoveries and the Ventris-Chadwick decipherment Professor Palmer set to work to provide supporting evidence. In the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford he found the excavation Day Book kept by Evans’s assistant Duncan Mackenzie. The Day Book, with entries from the beginning of the Knossos exploration in 1900, showed certain discrepancies between its on-the-spot record and the exposition in The Palace of Minos – discrepancies in details of stratification. They hardened Professor Palmer’s suspicion that Evans had got his dates wrong by a couple of hundred years.
Observers of an excavation in progress might think it possible for the notes of the first days to be modified by later reflection or indeed by later discoveries. But it is not for me to risk an opinion; one tries to avoid a minefield. The newspaper which published the Palmer article was less inhibited. Perhaps, it suggested, Evans, ‘carried away by the splendour of his discoveries’, had ‘unconsciously mis-reported the evidence’. Alternatively, had Professor Palmer ‘exposed a conscious misrepresentation, reminiscent of the Piltdown Man fraud’?
Hastily Professor Palmer repudiated the notion of fraud or deliberate misrepresentation on Evans’s part. He dissociated himself, he said, from ‘the mischievous suggestion’ which had been made not in his own article but ‘in a news column’. The repudiation was prompt. But one can never be prompt enough; anyway the fight was on. Professor Palmer had said he had ‘discovered’ the Mackenzie reports. No question, came a retort, of discovery. The existence of the Day Books was known to many Minoan scholars. He had not found the Mackenzie reports, he had asked for them. He had been provided with them by officials of the Ashmolean Museum who had long been classifying and using them. There were cries of ‘mischief’ and ‘unnecessary personal attack’. Even the palaeontologists were affronted. They jibbed at being lumped in with archaeologists: the experts in the Piltdown case, they said, were all honourable men, incapable of hanky-panky with the evidence.
In the mêlée Professor Palmer showed that he was very well able to take care of himself. Some of his opponents admitted that Evans might have been mistaken about the history of Knossos after 1400 B.C. Sinclair Hood, who as Director of the British School at Athens had for the previous three years been in charge of exploration at Knossos, was among those who accepted the possibility that the dates could do with reconsidering. He agreed, he said, with the Palmer theory of a Palatial period after what had long been widely accepted as the final destruction at the end of the fifteenth century B.C. Why, at one time Evans himself, he pointed out, had thought that the Linear B script was still in use in the later period. But now the British School had a fact to offer. In those three years of excavation fragments of tablets had been found in a deposit which belonged to the period before 1400, before the destruction of what Evans had called the Last Palace. In this case at least, Mr Hood wrote, ‘the date given by Evans for the Linear B tablets of Knossos is confirmed’.
On this foundation of theory and counter-theory, evidence and counter-evidence Herakleion held its 1961 Cretological Congress, and the Villa Ariadne once again housed visiting archaeologists. It was not only from Ourania that I heard about the meeting. It had been an international affair with representatives of more than a dozen countries; among the British were Sinclair Hood, John Boardman, Reader in Classical Archaeology at Oxford (he had been working on the Chios dig when Ventris was there), and the formidable Palmer himself. Dr Yamalakis was among the listeners. Like a good many Cretans he shrank from any thought of dethroning Evans, Crete’s great benefactor. The audience, he said, was shocked when Palmer lectured; they didn’t, they couldn’t applaud. Perhaps he was speaking out of loyalty. There were others, though, who felt that the conference went to support, except in matters of detail, Evans’s basic conclusions. John Boardman, for instance, felt it. At the start of the controversy there had been a plan for him to collaborate with Professor Palmer in a book presenting the evidence on the Linear B material. Now he found that he disagreed not only on the evidence but on the way it should be used. The way out chosen was to publish two independent studies, and in 1963 under the title On the Knossos Tablets they appeared, looking askance at one another under the same covers.
The exchange of academic civilities went on. Professor Palmer found and published a letter to Evans in which Mackenzie, writing in 1905, testily insisted that the evidence for stratification in the Early Minoan period was totally inadequate. Why had he never made his disagreement public? Perhaps he had not been a free agent, Professor Palmer hinted, quoting a reproachful passage in which Mackenzie speaks of financial straits and asks for six months’ overdue fees. But, somebody replied, there was no question of reluctance on the part of Mackenzie to speak out; what about looking up what he had said on that very matter of stratification in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1903, two years before the letter?
Explorers in lands of shifting uncertainties, driven by a desperate curiosity, the archaeologists and the philologists struggled on. At Thebes, the Thebes of Oedipus and Cadmus, in the deposit of a Mycenaean palace were found not only fragments of Linear B clay tablets but Babylonian cylinder seals, one of which could with as much assurance as learning affords be assigned to round about the second quarter of the fourteenth century B.C. – and that anchored the tablets to the same date. It was not perhaps as late as Professor Palmer would have liked. But it was later than Evans’s system of chronology strictly demanded.
The excavator in this case was that Professor Platon whose resource had done so much during the war to preserve the Palace of Minos. Soon his name was to become internationally famous.
At the beginning of the century when Evans was making his first discoveries at Knossos Hogarth carried out a dig at Kato Zakros on the shores of the extreme eastern end of Crete. He discovered house foundations, pottery, fine seal impressions. But he concluded that Zakros was a Minoan, or rather, for the word Minoan was not yet in use, a Mycenaean trading settlement; he did not persist in his search. John Pendlebury of course passed that way. In 1938 he was in Eastern Crete with Hilda. There are two villages at Zakros. The Pendleburys stayed in Ano Zakros, the upper of the two, then had ‘a short quiet day’ at Kato or Lower Zakros, where they ‘heard stories of Hogarth … and Evans in the old days’. His letter to his father says nothing more of the antiquities. A few days later he writes from Knossos about a visit to a private collection belonging to ‘a very nice Dr Yamalakis’. The doctor, whose name was to be so closely linked with the Resistance in Crete, just before the war possessed some gold objects believed to have come from Zakros. Whether he owned them at the time of the Pendlebury visit one cannot tell; though Zakros is several times mentioned in The Archaeology of Crete John makes no reference to finds of gold. Kato Zakros in fact remained obscure. Then after the war the Greek archaeological authorities took a hand. Professor Platon, investigating, suspected that t
he site had been something more than a port. A liberal American patron, Leon Pomerance, offered funds. In 1962 digging began in earnest. And there in the coastal plain were the foundations not simply of houses but of a Minoan palace, two-storeyed, with a central courtyard, a throne-room, a banqueting-hall, a kitchen, perhaps two hundred and fifty rooms in all; and everywhere the relics, the decorations, the vases, the store-rooms of an advanced civilisation.
Up to that time the great palace sites in Crete had been discovered and explored chiefly by foreigners, British, Italian, French. Now the Greeks had a fourth palace to set beside Knossos, Phaistos and Mallia. It was still, when I went there in 1966, a remote place, a four-hour drive from Hagios Nikolaos along roads often ferociously potholed or blocked by boulders. We skirted the Gulf of Mirabello. Along hairpin bends we came down to Sitia, where Cumberlege and Nicholas Hammond, hurrying back to Herakleion to meet Pendlebury on that desperate day in 1941, had put in and found a mysterious break in telephone communications. Arid empty landscapes led us to the upper village of Zakros and the road down to the sea and the plain. On the left of the descent a ravine split the hillside. Even in the morning light it was a cavern of darkness. But the sea blazed, a fringe of reeds glowed emerald at the shore; where on the level ground the foundations were exposed a cluster of men worked peacefully. The rulers of Zakros, perhaps, had felt safe in their valley.
It was with a commendable lack of malice that Professor Platon, leading me round, pointed to the spot where the British explorers had dug sixty years earlier; Hogarth missed the Palace by a few yards. As for the Pendleburys, ‘We must’, Hilda said to me once, ‘have been sitting on the very site – and we saw nothing.’ But John may be forgiven. Generations of men had failed to rediscover the Palace; alone among the great Minoan sites it had never been plundered.
Professor Platon believes with Professor Marinatos that it was destroyed as the result of an eruption on the volcanic island of Thera to the north and that earthquake rather than invasion or revolution wrecked the great Cretan palaces in about 1450 B.C. All but Knossos, which he thinks survived until 1380 B.C. (a date close to that suggested by the Babylonian cylinder seal found at Thebes). And perhaps indeed Thera, where Marinatos has lately been uncovering beneath volcanic ash the frescoed houses of a rich city, is a key to the enigmas of Crete. The outsider can do no more than record the views of the insiders – noting as he does it that there is precious little finality in the affairs of archaeology.
vi
In 1962 the rebuilding in the centre of Herakleion was finished, and as, reflecting on the rôle of the Villa in the Cretological Congress, I sat at dinner I watched groups of little girls in red or white dresses dancing on spider legs round the Lion Fountain. Before I went back to the hotel I walked through the market. In the dark it was shuttered and blind; outside the deserted butchers’ stalls the terrible drum-shaped chopping-blocks, white-splashed, might have been execution blocks. A solitary cat glided past as if on castors and vanished up a side-alley. Russian cosmonauts might be circling the moon, and indeed the Cretan papers were full of the story. But here in Herakleion nothing much had altered.
At Knossos, however, there were changes.
Michael Vlakhakis at the kiosk had taken a wife. The bridegroom was over fifty while the bride was only twenty-nine; it was a great joke in the village. But Michael was delighted with himself. ‘I left it late,’ he said, ‘but still …’; and unasked he told me all over again the story of the exhumation of John Pendlebury. Up at the Villa Manoli and Ourania continued to reflect gloomily on the action of the School in handing the house over to the Greek Archaeological Service. ‘The rooms have been closed,’ they reported, ‘since the Conference last summer; it is a terrible waste.’
It was a relief to find the Palace of Minos in livelier shape. A day of blistering white sun; the heat was stunning on the lower slopes where one or two buildings had been roofed in with a kind of ribbed plastic; but visitors went stubbornly round, crossing the shadowless courts, peering into the light-wells, examining the fresco reproductions. While I sat on a bench eating a lunch of grapes and figs and biscuits I saw with pleasure party after party stopping to look at the Evans bust and to read the inscription. When I went out I bought a few postcards.
‘Where’, the man at the desk asked, ‘did you learn Greek?’
‘Here, in Athens, in the country.’
‘Did you ever know Evans’s foreman?’
‘Why, yes, Manolaki who was killed fighting in the Battle of Crete – of course I knew him.’
‘I am Akoumianakis too – he was my uncle.’
Warmly we shook hands. We talked of Micky, and I reflected that in Crete nearly all men are if not brothers at any rate cousins.
That year I did not go to see Kosti, for by him at least I had, I felt, already done my duty. After his obstinate pleading – and after my visit to Maria, whose silence had affected me more deeply – I knew in my bones that words were not enough; something had to be done. I was not under the impression that Kosti needed the money. He owned land, probably a vineyard or two; one of the friends to whom I wrote for help remarked that she was possibly much worse off than he was. She stumped up all the same. I think she felt, as I believe all those who joined in felt, that British prestige was involved, that it was not fitting for old retainers of the School to be left regarding themselves, no matter how unreasonably, as shabbily treated. Perhaps we were subscribing not so much to a gift for Kosti and Maria as to a tribute to the great past of the estate which they had served and to which we were all indebted. We could not let down the name of the house. We might have called ourselves Friends of the Villa Ariadne.
Archaeologists are not often rich. But in the ready response to my appeal for subscriptions there was generosity as well as a grateful and perhaps an amused recognition of the part played by Kosti and Maria in the Knossos legend; one friend, I remember, a phonetician whose connection with the School was remote, actually asked to be included. In the end there was £175 to distribute. The list of donors had a special link not only with the Villa but with its founder. Evans’s half-sister Joan subscribed; that was not surprising. What one could hardly have counted on was that she should be in Crete in 1960. In 1935 she had come out to meet Evans. But it was the troubled time of the Venizelist revolt, and she got no farther than Athens. Perhaps – for in the last year or two of the 1950s illness had prevented her from travelling – she had not thought to see Crete again. But in 1960 something decided her. She felt better; and with two friends, the Dyneley Husseys, exactly a quarter of a century since her brother’s last visit, she arrived in Herakleion.
For the purposes of the Kosti and Maria fund the timing could not have been better. The money was waiting. I was in the offing to make any necessary arrangements. After the tranquil nights of sleeping in the Taverna I could move to the Hotel Astir to meet Joan and her party.
Not that I could altogether stifle my anxiety. There was the question of place – whether to bring Kosti and Maria down to Knossos for the presentation and thus make sure that both were available at the right moment, or to ask of Joan, who in England some months earlier had been hardly able to walk, to go by car and endure the exhaustion of a rustic excursion. I took local advice. At last the village trip was elected; we must risk finding that Kosti was visiting a cousin at the other end of the island.
Luckily by the late afternoon of the chosen day the brilliant Cretan sky dimmed; it was cool enough when the four of us, Joan, the Husseys and I, were being driven in a large hired car towards the hills. I can still feel the relief I felt then when on our arrival at Alagni Kosti’s son Minos appeared to say that his father was at hand and should be promptly fetched. He was, I need hardly say, in his vineyard.
The appearance of a member of the Evans family gave the occasion a flourish even more splendid than I had hoped. I was well aware that without Joan the presentation would be wanting in authority. Even so I had not realised quite what distinction her presence w
ould confer on the function. She played up with something which I can describe only as majesty. To begin with she wore a hat, a formal hat with a wide brim and a swathe of veiling. The people of Alagni had not seen an English lady in an English lady’s hat for two generations, and as with a sweep of skirts she alighted from the car a susurration ran through the village. Immediately – the Evans magic was at work – Kosti was there; and he ran, legs turning black or not he ran to kneel and kiss her hand. It was with the air of a royal procession that we moved off to his house for refreshment. It was in the royal tradition that Joan, whose doctor had forbidden her to drink alcohol, made as she held her glass the gesture of one taking a swig of rakí.
The formalities were at first hampered by Kosti’s insistence on displaying a small bundle of letters and testimonials from Sir Arthur. I myself may have contributed to the delay. Seeing an aged woman in black come into the house and sit resolutely down I made a move to greet her. I was hurriedly brushed away.
‘No, no,’ said Vasiliki, Kosti’s wife, ‘she is nobody, she is a neighbour. She has just come to look.’
But at last we got under way. Joan made a speech in English, I offered a translation sadly lacking in the elegance of the original; then, using the correct Greek phrases which I owed to a friend and which I had committed to memory. ‘A few of your well-wishers in England’, I said, ‘wanted to make you a small present as an acknowledgement of your friendship and of the happy days at the Villa.’
I had written on the envelope containing the money a rough transliteration of the subscribers’ names, and for the benefit of Kosti I read them out as Joan made the presentation. Several times he stopped me to make an identification. Once a name (it belonged to one of the most generous donors) was greeted with disapproval. When I came to Piet and Effie ‘How much’, Kosti asked sourly ‘did she give?’ ‘Plenty,’ I snapped back. My mood was not improved when after a sum of money handsome enough in the circumstances had been handed over Vasiliki turned to me with a request. ‘Can’t you’, she said, ‘get a job for our son Minos?’