Original Reviews

          Cathy Gere’s book is not critiquing Arthur Evans’ reconstruction of this ancient prehistoric site in Crete; Evans has been ‘deconstructed’ by others. Rather she discusses how the excavation of Knossos in the first decade of the twentieth century influenced psychoanalysts, linguists, artists, classicists, and poets. Gere calls them prophets of modernism.

          Evans and his fellow travelers were confident that much could be ascertained about prehistoric peoples, such as the Minoans, based on the physical remains of their settlements. Evans was confident of his ability to divine from the stones, mortar and fragments of frescoes at Knossos. He also believed that works of art and artifacts were the products of social forces not very different from the laws of human life in his own day.

          Archeologists digging around Palestine in the same years interpreted the physical remains of the ancient Israelites as validating biblical accounts. In a like fashion Evans, excavating the Crete ruins, found evidence of the veracity of Greek myths. He proposed the notion of a ‘Minoan civilization’ because one structure that he had unearthed resembled, in his mind, the labyrinth attributed to the legendary King Minos.

          His reconstructions were conjectural at best, often, according to Gere, fanciful. Initially he decided to shelter uncovered ruins by incorporating wood and plaster columns and canopies inspired by the site’s architectural features, rather than the usual metal sheds. To shore up those parts of the palace complex which had been excavated, he used reinforced concrete, a relatively new building material in the 1900s. He employed artists to reconstruct the frescoes, again based on skimpy remains.

          Much of this reconstruction reflect an androgyny prevalent at the time. Thus the famous manly girl-athletes in the bull-leaping paintings. And the male figures, thought to be priest-kings, dressed in costumes that resembled those of the females’.

          The males were painted red, the females white. That was the convention in contemporaneous Egyptian art. Evans readily acknowledged the likely influence of Egypt and Libya on Minoan art. That acknowledgment was, Gere contends, in contrast to an earlier archeologist who had inspired Evans, Henrich Schliemann.  Schliemann excavated Troy and went on to uncover Mycenaea and create the concept of a Mycenaean civilization. But Schliemann was also a proponent of another notion, the Aryan race. He believed his Mycenaeans to have been the “first Europeans” and to have originated in German-Aryan lands.

          In fact Evans’ ideas turned out to be similar to the argument for the African origins of classical civilization articulated by a Senegalese, Chickh Anta Diop, in the 1970s. Egyptian and Libyan prehistoric cultures were, in turn, Diop argued, indebted to Sub-Saharan black Africa. Diop’s notion was popularized in North America by Martin Bernal, a scholar at Cornell University in his Black Athena. In that book Bernal accused classical archeologists of being racists. Perhaps, but Gere contends that Evans can be exonerated from that charge.

          Of the various writer-prophets that Gere identifies as having been influenced by Evans’ Minoan civilization, Friedrich Nietzsche is the most convincing. Gere also reminds us of Sigmund Freud’s views in Moses and Monotheism. In this his most speculative book, Freud made allowance for a Minoan mother-goddess in his otherwise patriarchal constructions.

          Perhaps the most remarkable thing that Evans got wrong was the supposed peacefulness of the Minoans, which he contrasted to the war-like Mycenaeans. Evans was writing in the 1920s in the shadow of a world war that had killed hundreds of thousands of young men. Recent scholarship and archeological digs in eastern Crete from the same period  have corrected that construction. But Evans with his peaceful Minoans, Gere maintains, had his heart in the right place.

          A visitor to Knossos is appreciative of Evans for creating a site of which some sense can be make. The guides to the site, however, provide a corrected version of Evans’ Minoans, and that prompts a more thoughtful looking.