Arthur Evans

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Profile Overview of Arthur Evans

Sir Arthur John Evans (8 July 1851 – 11 July 1941) was a British archaeologist and pioneer in the study of Aegean civilization in the Bronze Age.

This profile of Arthur Evans covers Family Background, Education and Training, Agent in the Balkans, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and Excavations at Aylesford.

The first excavations at the Minoan palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete began in 1877. They were led by Cretan Greek Minos Kalokairinos, a native of Heraklion. Three weeks later Ottoman authorities forced him to stop (at the time, Crete was under Ottoman rule). Almost three decades later, Evans heard of Kalokairinos's discovery. With private funding, he bought the surrounding rural area including the palace land. Evans began his own excavations in 1900.

Based on the structures and artefacts found there and throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Evans found that he needed to distinguish the Minoan civilisation from Mycenaean Greece. Evans was also the first to define the Cretan scripts Linear A and Linear B, as well as an earlier pictographic writing.

Family Background of Arthur Evans

Arthur Evans was born in Nash Mills, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England, the first child of John Evans (1823–1908) and Harriet Ann Dickinson (born 1824), the daughter of John's employer and maternal uncle, John Dickinson (1782–1869), the founder of Messrs John Dickinson, a paper mill business. Arthur Evans's grandfather, Arthur Benoni Evans, had been headmaster of Dixie Grammar School at Market Bosworth, Leicestershire. John knew Latin and could quote the classical authors.

In 1840 John Evans started work in the mill owned by his maternal uncle, John Dickinson. He married his first cousin, Harriet, in 1850, and in 1851 became a junior partner in the family business. Profits from the mill would help fund Arthur Evans's excavations, restorations at Knossos, and resulting publications. For the time being they were an unpretentious and affectionate family. They moved into a brick terraced house built for the purpose near the mill, which came to be called the "red house" because it lacked the sooty patina of the other houses. Harriet called her husband "Jack." Grandmother Evans called Arthur Evans "darling Trot," asserting in a note that, compared to his father, he was "a bit of a dunce." In 1856, with Harriet's declining health and Jack's growing reputation and prosperity, they moved into Harriet's childhood home, a mansion with a garden, where the children ran free.

John Evans maintained his status as an officer in the company, which eventually became John Dickinson Stationery, but also became distinguished for his pursuits in numismatics, geology, and archaeology. His interest in geology came from an assignment by the company to study the diminishing water resources in the area with a view toward protecting the company from lawsuits. The mill consumed large amounts of water, which was also needed for the canals. He became an expert and a legal consultant. John became a distinguished antiquary, publishing numerous books and articles. In 1859, he conducted a geological survey of the Somme Valley with Joseph Prestwich.

Arthur Evans's mother, Harriet, died after childbirth in 1858 when he was seven. He had two brothers, Lewis (1853) and Philip Norman (1854), and two sisters, Harriet (1857) and Alice (1858). He would remain on excellent terms with all of them all of his life. He was raised by a stepmother, Fanny (Frances), née Phelps, with whom he also got along well. She had no children of her own and also predeceased her husband. John's third wife was a classical scholar, Maria Millington Lathbury. When he was 70, they had a daughter, Joan, who became an art historian. John Evans died in 1908 at 85, when Arthur Evans was 57.

Education and Training of Arthur Evans

After a preparatory school, Evans entered Harrow School in 1865 at the age of 14. He was co-editor of The Harrovian in his final year, 1869/70. At Harrow he was friends with Francis Maitland Balfour. They competed for the Natural History Prize; the outcome was a draw. They were both highly athletic, including riding and swimming, and also mountain climbing, during which activity Balfour was killed later in life. Evans's field of vision was blurry beyond a close distance. He compensated by carrying a cane, which he called Prodger, to explore the environment. His wit was sharp, too sharp for the administration, which stopped a periodical he had started, The Pen-Viper, after the first issue.

Arthur matriculated on 9 June 1870 and attended Brasenose College, Oxford. His housemaster at Harrow, F. Rendall, had eased the way to his acceptance with the recommendation that he was "a boy of powerful original mind." At Brasenose College, he read Modern History.

His summertime activities with his brothers and friends were perhaps more important to his subsequent career. Having been given an ample allowance by his father, he went looking for adventure on the continent, seeking out circumstances that might be considered dangerous by some. In June 1871, he and Lewis visited Hallstatt, where his father had excavated in 1866, adding some of the artefacts to his collection. Arthur Evans had made himself familiar with these. Subsequently, they went on to Paris and then to Amiens. The Franco-Prussian War had just concluded the month before. Arthur Evans had been told at the French border to remove the dark cape he was wearing so that he would not be shot for a spy. Amiens was occupied by the Prussian army. Arthur found them prosaic and preoccupied with souvenir-hunting. He and Lewis hunted for stone-age artefacts in the gravel quarries, Arthur Evans remarking that he was glad the Prussians were not interested in flint artefacts.

In 1872, he and Norman adventured into Ottoman territory in the Carpathians, already in a state of political tension. They crossed borders illegally at high altitudes, "revolvers at the ready." This was Arthur Evans's first encounter with Turkish people and customs. He bought a set of clothes of a wealthy Turkish man, complete with red fez, baggy trousers, and an embroidered short-sleeved tunic. His detailed, enthusiastic account was published in Fraser's Magazine in May 1873.

In 1873, he and Balfour tramped over Lapland, Finland, and Sweden. Everywhere he went he took copious anthropological notes and made numerous drawings of the people, places and artefacts. During the Christmas holidays of 1873, Evans catalogued a coin collection being bequeathed to Harrow by John Gardner Wilkinson, the father of British Egyptology, who was too ill to work on it himself. The headmaster had suggested "my old pupil, Arthur John Evans – a remarkably able young man."

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Evans), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.