In the dim past of Europe, by the shores of the Aegean Sea,
the ancient bards told stories of a golden age long ago,
a time when men were heros larger than life,
when the daring Theseus battled the Minotaur,
and soldiers clashed over the face of the beautiful Helen
who brought down the walls of Troy.
For hundreds of generations these tales will pass down as myths.
Then in the 19th century,
two remarkable men dared to believe that
the myths were clues to the treasures of a forgotten past.
Their extraordinary adventures
uncovered the roots of Western civilization.
In the 19th century, archeology was in its infancy.
Ancient Greece was considered the beginning of Western civilization,
its architecture the most beautiful;
its ideas the foundation for everything to come.
Yet its roots before the 8th century B.C. Were shrouded in mystery.
Did this extraordinary civilization spring out of nowhere?
Or did another, almost as advanced, come before it?
The only accounts of an earlier age were legends
that nearly everyone dismissed as myths.
The first grade works of Western literature,
the lliad and the Odyssey, were considered fiction, nothing more.
Who could have guessed that Homer's beloved stories
could lead the way to a real past?
In Athens today a classical temple
marks the grave of Heinrich Schliemann, to some, the father of archeology.
To others, an impetuous fool.
To Schliemann, Homer's stories of the Trojan War were true,
and he set out to prove it.
His incredible discoveries pushed back European history a thousand years.
Schliemann's story has been romanticized
in films, books, even grand opera.
But none more fantastical than his own stories about himself.
I think he thought that he was the center of the world.
And I think he had a kind of medieval map of the world
in which he was at the center and everything else
was in concentric circles around him.
I think he was the most frightful big head.
Schliemann throughout his life was pretty cavalier with the truth.
He, I don't think, distinguished so clearly as most of us do
between what is true and what is false.
He tended to tell the story that suited the moment.
Schliemann's personal myths stretched all the way back to his childhood.
He was born in 1822 in northeastern Germany.
At the age of 7, he tells how his father gave him a history book
with a picture of the ancient city of Troy in flames.
Electrified by the site,
the young Heinrich asked what had become of the great city.
His father explained that Troy had burned to the ground leaving no trace.
Unconvinced, Heinrich disagreed:
"Father," retorted I, "if such worlds once existed,
they cannot have been completely destroyed.
Vast ruins of them must still remain hidden away beneath the dust of ages."
In the end we both agreed that I should one day excavate Troy.
It's a wonderful story, but there's really no reason why we need to believe it.
He tells us not a day went by where he thought about this goal
of earning enough money to go out and excavate Troy.
But we have thousands of letters and many diaries when he was a young man.
There's no mention of going out and excavating Troy.
Schliemann may have been trying to mask the truth of a painful childhood.
His mother died young,
but not before his minister father lost his job
by committing adultery with the housemaid.
Schliemann had to drop out of school to help support his brothers and sisters.
All this, I think, etched itself deeply onto Schliemann's mind.
He was left with a bitter, bitter resentment about it in later life.
On the other hand,
the drive for all that he achieved came out of this unhappy childhood.
Schliemann's story continues like a fairy tale.
He ran away to sea, was shipwrecked,
and then became a clerk for a trading house in Amsterdam.
Toiling endlessly, he taught himself languages
by copying passages and then learning them by heart.
He mastered at least ten languages this way.
As Schliemann himself said:
Talent means energy and persistence, and nothing more.
Schliemann's talent was making money.
With energy and persistence,
the obsessive German became an international merchant,
trading in commodities like indigo.
In 1849, prospectors struck gold in California.
Ever the opportunist, Schliemann joined the Gold Rush.
In Sacramento, he opened a bank, buying gold dust from the miners
and lending them money at 12 percent interest per month.
After two years, he left California a very rich man.
My biggest fault- being a braggart and a bluffer-
yielded countless advantages.
And there were even more to come.
Russia was on the brink of war,
so Schliemann cornered the market on saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder.
The Crimean War made his fortune.
It seemed that everything he touched turned to gold,
except his social standing.
His unhappy marriage to the daughter of a St. Petersburg lawyer didn't help.
The uneducated merchant was shunned as nouveau riche.
Now in his mid-40s,
Schliemann realized he wanted more out of life than making money.
He wanted respect.
The situation in 1868 was that he was adrift.
He'd divorced his first wife, a Russian woman.
He had sewed up his business in St. Petersburg,
and he didn't know what to do.
He was going through a kind of mid-life crisis.
And he took a journey to the Mediterranean, to Italy and to Greece.
It was during the course of that journey,
he was looking for something to do with the rest of his life and he found it.
In June of 1868, Schliemann arrived at the ruins of Pompeii.
Buried under layers of volcanic ash for almost 1800 years,
this lost city was in the midst of a spectacular rediscovery.
Excavations had uncovered magnificent public spaces.
And rescued intimate frescos from the buried houses.
Schliemann was captivated by this journey into a lost world.
For the first time he met a real archeologist, Giuseppe Fiorelli.
It was the Italian's innovation to inject plaster into the ancient ash,
revealing the forms of the Pompeiians caught in the last moments of life.
At this point, archeology was more romance than science,
with few precedents and even fewer rules.
Needless to say, it was right up Schliemann's alley.
As he continued his travels,
His diaries began to reflect a new direction.
He would set off on a grand archeological adventure
and uncover the biggest challenge of all:
The legendary city of Troy.
But first he had to find it.
When Heinrich Schliemann set out on his quest for Troy,
most people believed the city was a myth.
For one thing, it wasn't on the map.
Legend had placed Troy on the Dardanelles,
near the coast of present-day Turkey
But no ruins identified the great city.
It was as if the site of the Trojan War-
the greatest war story ever told- had never existed.
But for thousands of years people had repeated Homer's tale.
How Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships,
had been taken away to Troy.
How the Greeks had battled for ten long years to get her back,
led by the great king Agamemnon.
How the war was finally won with a wooden horse full of soldiers.
In Homer's tale,
the Greeks destroyed the great city of Troy; burning it to the ground.
Schliemann was just captured by the lliad,
the descriptions of what goes on,
everything about the human condition is found in the lliad
in a very poetic and agnificent manner.
And the idea of finding the site where all of these great tensions
between love and strife,
between divine and human interaction were worked out
was something that just swallowed him up.
With his copy of Homer as a guide,
Schliemann examined the mound thought to be the likeliest location of Troy.
In the lliad, two springs marked the foot of the great city's hill.
To his dismay, Schliemann found many more here.
And trial excavations turned up nothing but dirt.
But just as he was about to leave the area, the German got lucky-
He met an Englishman named Frank Calvert who owned another mound,
the site of many prior civilizations.
Calvert believed his mound held the real Troy far beneath the surface.
Frank Calvert explained to Schliemann that he had done some excavations there
which took him below the Greek and Roman levels,
into deep deposits where were earlier.
So he said there was a very good chance that in these deep burial deposits
you will find the Troy of the Trojan War.
And that convinced Schliemann; it gave him something to do.
But Schliemann didn't have a clue how to begin.
Dear Mr. Calvert, have I to take a tent and iron baluster and pillar with me?
What sort of hat is best against the scorching sun?
Please give me an exact statement of all of the implements of whatever kind
and of all the necessaries you would advise me to take with me.
With Calvert's encouragement Schliemann began digging in earnest in October 1871.
On the first day, he hired 8 men.
By day three there were 80.
Caution was not his style.
Assuming Homer's Troy lay at the bottom of the mound,
Schliemann had his men dig a great gash right through the center of it.
One must plunge immediately into the depths.
Only then will one find things.
On their way down the men uncovered not one city, but many of them.
But Schliemann didn't let these other Troys get in his way.
You can see when he began that his methods were very, very crude.
He was going in with winches and crowbars and battering rams.
The horrifying tales are spelled out in some of his writings.
Nowadays, one just blenches at the thought of it.
Numbers of immense blocks of stone which we continually come upon
cause great trouble and have to be got out and removed.
All of my workmen hurry to see the enormous weight roll down
and settle itself at some distance in the plain.
Schliemann was discarding priceless relics
from thousands of years of civilization on the site.
Thankfully, rains closed the season early.
But the next year he was back, this time attacking the mound
with 150 men under the command of a railroad engineer.
Often by Schliemann's side was his new Greek wife, Sophia,
who won his heart by reciting from the lliad.
Forging ahead,
Schliemann continued to aim straight for the bottom of the mound,
haphazardly uncovering ancient stone walls
and collecting pottery and other artifacts along the way.
What Schliemann did was to go down deep into this complex, complex site.
And he did try to understand
how the layers had built up one on top of the other.
He wasn't bad at either; he was quite observant.
Of course now we would do it in much finer detail than he did,
but he was the one to reveal
that this sort of thing could be done in a site of this sort.
In the third season of digging the hard work finally paid off.
Near the bottom of the mound
workman uncovered the charred ruins of a citadel.
It didn't look like much,
but Schliemann declared it must be the place of King Priam
burned in the Trojan War.
As he himself told the story,
he dismissed his workman and began to attack the palace walls himself.
I cut out the treasure with a large knife,
which was impossible to do without the most fearful risk of my life.
But I never thought of any danger.
It would, however, been impossible for me to have removed the treasure
without the help of my dear wife who stood by me ready to pack the things
that I cut out in her shawl and carry them away.
It was a fabulous find.
Ancient silver and copper vessels.
Bronze weapons.
And most extraordinary of all, elaborate gold jewelry.
With Schliemann's usual panache,
he announced that he had uncovered the treasure of Priam
and the jewels of Helen of Troy.
A photograph of Sophia Schliemann modeling Helen's jewels
became one of the most celebrated images of the 19th century.
Yet, Schliemann's account of the discovery
was controversial from the start.
The story is certainly fiction in at least one major element,
and that is that Sophie was not there.
Sophie had left about three weeks earlier, gone back to Athens.
So she was certainly not there packing the stuff
in her shawl and carrying them off.
The question is how much else is true?
I think that although Sophie wasn't there-
and we know that Schliemann was telling a lie about that-
that doesn't necessarily mean that the treasure itself is a hoax.
I think, in fact, there are very good signs that it was genuine.
There are discrepancies with regard to where the treasure was found,
the day on which it was found, and exactly what was found.
He makes wrong connections.
For example, he misremembers exactly where things were found.
He associates them with the wrong features and so forth.
But I think you also have to consider
what he has left us with at the end of the day,
and what he has left us with is an enormous volume of material
because he was so energetic,
and spent so much money and spent so much time at Troy.
A master of 19th century media,
Schliemann informed the world of his success.
But first he carefully smuggled his treasures out of Turkey,
ignoring his permit stipulation that all finds belonged to the Turks.
The crafty German was triumphant.
Convinced that he'd uncovered Homer's Troy,
buried in myth for more than 3,000 years.
Being Schliemann, however,
even fame and recognition couldn't occupy him for long.
Homer pointed him in a new direction, to a city rich in gold.
He turned his sights to Mycenae, home of Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks.
According to Homer, the conqueror of the Trojans had met a violent fate.
Agamemnon returned home to Mycenae,
only to find that his wife had taken up with another man.
Late one night, the two murdered the great hero.
It was another compelling tale- sufficient motivation for Schliemann.
And with Mycenae, the fledgling archeologist had an easier assignment.
Unlike Troy, the city had never been lost.
It's picturesque ruins still dominated a hill in Greece,
not far from the Aegean Sea.
Hungry for gold, Schliemann began to dig in August 1876.
Within a few weeks, he discovered evidence of a sacred site.
The man's luck seemed unbelievable.
Pressing on, he unearthed a series of royal graves
filled with treasures and skeletons adorned with gold.
Leaping to conclusions yet again,
Schliemann declared he had discovered the golden mask of Agamemnon.
As it turned out, later archaeologists decided it wasn't the mythical king.
But it didn't really matter.
Schliemann had uncovered evidence of a rich and sophisticated civilization
which had flourished 1,000 years before the days of classical Greece.
The objects he'd unearthed were elegant and skillfully crafted.
He'd even found a helmet made of boar's teeth that matched Homer's description.
Schliemann fabulous discovery at Mycenae brought him international fame,
even the respect of many of his critics.
Throughout the next decade, he dug at other Greek citadels,
accumulating evidence of the wealth
and splendor of this previously unknown civilization.
But Schliemann wasn't satisfied.
In his heart, he knew his new discoveries cast doubt
on the primitive treasures he'd found at Troy.
How could he be sure that the walls he uncovered deep beneath that mound
were the same ones that kept Agamemnon's forces at bay?
That down those broken street Helen once walked?
It was time to return to Troy
and make sense of that perplexing mound once and for all.
This time, Schliemann proceeded slowly and cautiously,
digging on the edge of the mound.
And bit by bit, the old treasure hunter uncovered a layer in the middle
that he'd missed in his earlier days.
Here, finally, was what he had been searching for all along:
The ruins of broad streets, massive walls, and a much bigger citadel.
Schliemann should have been thrilled.
But instead, his heart sank.
It meant there was a lot of rethinking to do.
In a sense,
he saw before his eyes 20 years of work just going down the drain.
For four days Schliemann retreated to his tent, searching for answers.
From the beginning,
he'd assumed that Homer's Troy lay at the bottom of the mound.
Now his new discovery changed everything.
If he'd finally found the Troy of the Trojan War in this middle lanyer,
then 20 years ago he'd made a tragic mistake.
For in his haste to dig to the bottom,
he destroyed much of what he'd been looking for.
He'd never know what treasures had been lost.
Exhausted, Schliemann vowed to continue the following season.
But it was not to be.
Suffering from a terrible pain in his ear,
he traveled to Germany for surgery,
then headed home to Greece.
He never got there.
Buried in Athens with a state funeral,
Schliemann was mourned even by his critics.
For 20 years he'd lit up the world of early archeology
with his drive and enthusiasm.
Pursuing his childhood dreams of ancient Greek heros to the end,
he pushed back the frontiers of European history.
In the process, he put the young science of archeology on the map.
Among the many he inspired was a brilliant young man named Arthur Evans
who visited Schliemann several years before his death.
Reaching beyond Schliemann's discoveries,
the intrepid Englishman would also track down a legend
into the far corners or Europe's hidden past.
He would reawaken an even older civilization buried in myth and oblivion
for more than 3,000 years.
Unlike Schliemann, Arthur Evans seemed destined to become an archeologist.
His father, a wealthy paper manufacturer,
was a pioneer in studying the past.
Born in 1851, Arthur spent his childhood
in the English countryside digging for Roman coins.
But as the boy grew older, his nickname grew increasingly annoying-
"Little Evans," son of John Evans the great.
He's kind of, in his early years, like a rebel without a cause.
He's looking for something to get hold of to be different
than his father and to prove his own worth.
And so as an expression of this sort of rebelliousness,
he did the most romantic thing he could think of,
which was to travel to the Balkans.
From his first sight of the Balkans in 1871,
Evans rejected any notion of returning to his father's business.
Instantly at home, he haunted the bazaars,
delighting in the colorful mixture of East and West.
To Evans the fact that the land was at war only added to its appeal.
The Slavs were rebelling against the Ottoman Turks after years of domination.
Evans became a roving reporter for the Manchester Guardian.
Affected with bad eyesight, he disdained glasses.
Instead, he used is walking stick
which he named 'prodger' as a kind of antenna.
The mad Englishman with the walking stick became a familiar sight,
and a thorn in the sight of authorities.
He was quite a romantic.
Much more volatile than his father.
He did things like wearing a red cloak
and riding on a black horse at the Turkish Burgess,
really quite dangerous difficult territory.
He did it with a sense of drama.
He wanted to be a spy, and he did some very rash things.
Evans sympathies were with the Slavs and their struggle for independence.
As the years went on and the conflict intensified,
his articles became more and more impassioned.
His recklessness began to worry his wife Margaret,
whom Evans had married after several years in the Balkans.
The young couple had settled into Brovnia, Croatia,
Arthur's version of paradise.
But in 1882, Evans articles caught up with him.
Thrown into jail as a spy, he languished there for seven weeks.
Characteristically, the young adventurer found a novel way
to communicate with his wife.
Breaking a tooth off his pocket comb, he drew blood from his arm.
"Dear Margaret"
He wrote in his blood,
"I'm fine, but it would be wise to get a lawyer."
His family did succeed in getting him released.
But Evans was expelled from the Balkans.
For him, paradise was lost.
Once home in England the landscape looked grey and leaden.
Arthur missed the Mediterranean and found that he couldn't sit still.
So he and Margaret took off on a grand tour,
a holiday that would have a lasting impact on his future.
In Greece, the young couple visited the customary sights
revered by educated Europeans as the essence of beauty.
Evans was unimpressed.
He was more interested in truly ancient ruins,
like the ones at Mycenae.
Ever since the first newspaper accounts more than a decade before,
Evans had been fascinated by the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann.
He visited the German archeologist at his home in Athens.
With great pride, Schliemann showed the younger man
the objects he'd unearthed at Mycenae.
Evans was captivated.
His nearsighted eyes would often notice details others missed.
And what excited him here were the tiny sealstones used to press
a design into wax or clay.
Their intricate symbols reminded him of picture writing
like the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Could it be that this early European civilization
had also mastered the art of writing?
And if it was so advanced, thought Evans,
then surely another civilization must have preceded it.
He seemed to feel almost instinctively that there had to be something earlier.
I think that as one of the great contributions, really,
that Evans made was the sense
that Mycenaean art wasn't the beginning of something;
it was the end of something.
So he had this sense that there must be something earlier to find.
And that, of course, was one of the things that pointed him
in the direction of Crete.
In 1893, Evans' wife Margaret died of tuberculosis.
The couple had been living in Oxford for ten years
where Evans served as director of the Ashmolean Museum.
Without his companion, Evans was bereft.
For the rest of his life he would only write on black bordered note paper.
Clearly, he needed a new adventure.
His mind returned to his meeting with Schliemann
and the enigma of the sealstone.
He'd heard that the island of Crete was full of these little treasures.
It was time to see for himself.
In 1894, Arthur Evans went to Crete, a sleepy island in the Aegean Sea.
In ancient times it had been fabled as a rich and populous land.
Now under the control of the Ottoman Turks,
it was timeless and unspoiled.
Exactly the sort of place Arthur Evans liked.
He traveled all over the island looking for sealstones unearthed by the plow.
Here women called them 'milkstones' and wore them around their necks
to ensure enough milk for their babies.
Finally, he came to a great mound,
still identified by the locals as the site of Knossos,
in Greek mythology, the palace of King Minos.
Arthur Evans couldn't resist the power of the myth,
that beneath this hill once lay the labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur.
As the story goes, every year the City of Athens
was required to send tribute to King Minos.
Seven youths and seven maidens were sent into the labyrinth
to face the Minotaur,
the terrifying monster half man and half bull.
No one came out alive.
Then a youth named Theseus devised a scheme
to mark his trail with a ball of thread.
The hero met the Minotaur in a great battle.
Triumphant, he followed the thread to freedom.
When Arthur Evans arrived at the great mound,
it looked like any other hill with no evidence of a palace,
let alone a abyrinth.
But Evans met a man who had found some huge storage jars close to the surface.
He claimed there was much more waiting beneath the earth.
Evans began to negotiate with the land's Turkish owners.
It took him five years and the patience
to wait until Crete gained its independence from the Turks.
Evans had learned as a collector
that the only way really to control an artifact was to own it.
So Evans decided to own his greatest artifact,
and to buy Knossos because he knew that as landowner
he would have a right to do
whatever he wanted on it.
On the 23rd of March 1900, Arthur Evans broke ground at Knossos.
In an effort to heal scars from the recent war for independence,
he hired both Muslims and Christians, men and women, to work the dig.
Evans himself was almost overcome with excitement.
There is a bit of schizophrenia almost in Evans
where he is trained by his father as the scientific archeologist.
At the same time,
the romantic explorer is desperate to get at the treasure.
It didn't take long.
Exactly one week after he began digging,
Arthur Evans found clay tablets
inscribed with two different systems of writing never seen before.
Evans called them 'Linear A' and 'Linear B.'
He would spend the rest of his long life trying to decipher them.
Even more extraordinary lay in wait.
Arthur Evans found in the very first week of his excavation
a wonderful gypsum throne,
a stone throne still it in a place,
in a room beautifully decorated with frescos, it was flanked by griffins.
And he was instantly able to announce to the world
this is the oldest throne in Europe,
this is the beginning of European civilization.
The civilization Evans was uncovering seemed amazingly advanced.
While the rest of Europe was still living in huts,
these ancient people had resided in comfort and splendor.
Essentially it really was like a grand European palace
where you had running water actually running through the building itself.
This sort of thing, most of Evans' readers in the London Times didn't have.
You know, flushing toilets in their own houses and fresh water
running through the houses.
Elated by the extraordinary treasures of Knossos,
Evans boldly announced to the world that he had found a completely unknown,
unimagined civilization.
Older than Schliemann's Mycenae,
and more than 15,000 years older than classical Greece.
He decided these remarkable ancient Europeans needed a name.
'Minoan' he called them after the legend of King Minos.
This time Arthur Evans had found a cause
equal to his boundless imagination.
As the years went on, the challenges set in.
Winter storms damaged the vulnerable ruins.
Evans realized he had to devise a way to protect them.
It was only the beginning of his conservation problems.
Soon his workmen found evidence that
the palace had actually had several stories.
Evans sent two experienced silver miners tunneling into the earth.
They dug for weeks,
eventually revealing the remains of four magnificent flights of stone steps.
Evans found the only way to preserve the staircase
was to restore it to its former glory.
All it would take was a bit of imagination.
Really what started off as a first- aid to keep the building in tact
grew out of hand a little bit
because he began to really enjoy what he was doing.
Little by little, Evans began to restore Knossos.
Using his own fortune, he transformed the ruins into rooms,
based on his personal vision of Minoan architecture.
The project was controversial from the start.
Evans used modern materials like steel and reinforced concrete,
melding the ancient with the latest in 20th century architecture.
Evans was trying to recreate a total experience in the same way
that we try to set up virtual reality mazes
where people can experience architecture.
Evans was trying to do the same thing at Knossos.
He was criticized for building a movie set,
and in a sense that is what he was doing.
He wanted people to be able to walk through and experience the building.
But really one is experiencing Evans' vision
more than anything else when you visit Knossos.
Even Evans critics today admit that the palace would be a confusing maze
without his unifying vision.
As more and more ruins continued to be unearthed,
Evans hired architects to help him
make sense of the twisting corridors and rooms.
He began to think that
the palace itself had inspired the myth of the labyrinth,
for he found 1400 rooms stretched over 6 acres.
The palace was reasonably well preserved,
but nothing like as well preserved as it now feels.
It is really quite important to walk into a place and have a sense of walls
and ceilings as well as just foundations
the come up to about knee level.
So with things like the grand staircase,
of which he was hugely proud,
I think a lot of people have cause to be grateful to Evans
for allowing them the chance to walk down a Minoan staircase
and to be surrounded by Minoan columns and even restored frescos on the wall.
It has been a wonderful experience.
Evans was inspired by the frescos.
The fragments suggested a world surprisingly modern,
a handsome people who lived in harmony with nature.
But the images were indistinct and broken.
So Evans took another leap.
He hired a team of artists to help him fill in the blanks.
What emerged from Evans palette was a world of grace of sensuality,
unlike any other in ancient times.
There were no images of war.
Women were on an equal footing with men.
Priestesses led the worship of a mother goddess.
How much of this inviting world was truly Minoan,
and how much the creation of Arthur Evans?
He idealized the Minoans.
He had no real concept that there could be
an darker side to their nature, any war-likeness.
They were, for him, sort of latter-day hippies, really.
They were people who lived in an almost perfect world,
a world which I think Evans saw in contrast to the real world.
They were always a bit of an escape for him.
During Evans years at Knossos,
the outside world was shattered by the violence of World War I.
Evans was horrified by the brutal technology
and raw power of the 20th century.
Just as he had escaped from industrial England in his youth,
he found solace in the refined world of the Minoans.
They became almost real to him,
a perfect people who lived in an ideal world.
In his writings only once did Evans admit
that his Minoans might have had a violent side.
He couldn't help noticing that
everywhere he looked in the palace he saw menacing images of bulls.
They reminded him of
the innocent youths and maidens sacrificed to the Minotaur.
One fresco haunted him,
a charging bull with a young acrobat in the midst of a suicidal leap.
What could be the meaning of this cruel sport,
so like the bloody rituals of the Roman amphitheater?
"The sports of the Roman amphitheater may thus in Crete
may be trace back to prehistoric times.
Perhaps the legends of Athenian prisoners devoured by the Minotaur
preserve a real tradition of such cruel sports."...Arthur Evans
But most of the time Evans Minoans seemed to have lived with all the grace
and polish of their eminent discoverer.
He was Sir Arthur now, widely honored and renowned.
He entertained frequently,
but remained a private person, more at home in the world he created.
He spent much of his later years writing a history of the Minoans called,
"The Palace of Minos."
In defiance of modern technology,
he wrote all four volumes in longhand with a white goose-feather quill pen.
Many of his friends said his handwriting
was even beginning to look like Linear A.
Throughout his writings Evans insisted on the superiority of his Minoans.
He believed they had dominated the Aegean,
lording over the more warlike tribes of mainland Greece.
Even in the face of conflicting evidence,
he insisted that only an earthquake precipitated their fall.
Other archaeologists disagreed.
They pointed to evidence which showed that the Minoans had been conquered
by the Mycenaeans sweeping in from Greece about 1450 B.C.
Evans could never accept the image of his Minoans as a captive people.
To the end of his life Evans remained true to his dream of the Minoans.
All over Crete other excavators were digging,
revealing the outlines of other palaces
that had flourished at the same time as his Knossos.
Their methods were not the same as his- science had taken over archeology.
No longer would a single vision recreate a civilization.
The days of the treasure seekers were over.
There are instances where we can see him
as being wrongheaded, pigheaded, just plain wrong.
But what really strikes you very forcibly is that
if you're starting any piece of Minoan research,
if you're asking any questions,
you can almost always go back to Arthur Evans' writings
and find a starting point.
You may not agree with what he says about it,
but he almost always been there first and thought of the question.
Regardless of whether it was true or not, Evans image of Minoan culture-
its elegance and grace- captivated the Western imagination.
It continues to inspire more than a million visitors to Knossos every year.
The treasure he'd unearthed was more than gold.
It was the vision of a civilized world
deep in the dark recesses of the European past.