Arthur Evans

Arthur Evans (1851-1941), British archaeologist who is remembered chiefly for his excavation of the ancient city of Knossos and for discovering Minoan civilization. He was born in Nash Mills, Hertfordshire, and was educated at Harrow School, Brasenose College, Oxford University, and the University of Göttingen. From 1884 to 1908 he was a curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Evans’s interest in the seals, bearing a mysterious script, and coins already discovered on Crete led him to visit the island in 1894, where he studied inscriptions on ancient seal stones. At Knossos, in Crete, during the period 1900-1906, he unearthed a royal palace that he named the Palace of Minos, a huge edifice that covers more than 2 hectares (5 acres), and he continued excavations there until 1935. The labyrinthine ground plan of the palace suggested to him the legend of Minos, hence his designation of the Cretan civilization as Minoan. Evans’s excavations at Knossos also produced some 3,000 clay tablets inscribed in two scripts, one pictorial and later known as Linear A (or Minoan script, which has not been deciphered), and the other, later known as Linear B (deciphered and identified as an early form of Greek by Michael Ventris).

Evans’s major publications are Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script (1895), Scripta Minoa (vol. 1, 1909; vol. 2, 1952), in which he dealt with the problem of decipherment of the linear and pictorial scripts, The Palace of Minos (4 vols., 1921-1935), and Jarn Mound (1933). He was knighted in 1911.