In Search of the Trojan War (16 page)

Evans was influenced in arriving at his viewpoint by the key discovery of writing – it was what he had been after all along. Masses of Linear B tablets came to light first in the magazines where Kalokairinos had dug, and later all over the palace: the Bronze Age had been literate after all. But a problem immediately arose. The writing was found in the
last phase
of the palace, the phase with which Evans initially associated not only the tablets, but the throne-room and most of the painted frescoes, those so-called masterpieces of Minoan art: the phase which he later termed the ‘reoccupation’ by ‘squatters’. As he evolved his ideas about the basic structure of the Bronze Age this became an intractable problem, and so he altered his opinion that the tablets were of the reoccupation period, asserting instead that the last phase had been illiterate. For how could such a sophisticated
civilisation have been illiterate, and yet the ‘squatter phase’ literate? It went against all the contemporary ideas of historical progress. And so Evans put forward his theory of the structure of Bronze-Age chronology: Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age and their subdivisions (what experts call Early, Middle and Late Minoan for Crete, Helladic for the mainland, Cycladic for the islands, with their subdivisions, e.g. MM II, LH III B). The basic idea of Evans’ chronology rested on a comparison with the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of ancient Egypt, but there was perhaps an equally important analogy behind it in late-nineteenth-century ideas about art and civilisation. This was the assumption that all civilisations had a period of beginnings, a period of flowering, and a period of decadence, and it was clearly the model behind Evans’ picture of Cretan civilisation. Even in 1935, after renewed excavations at Mycenae and Tiryns had cast doubts on his interpretation of the Late Bronze Age, the eighty-four-year-old Evans attacked Alan Wace’s correct (as we now know) dating of the Treasury of Atreus to the thirteenth century BC (LH III B) – how, he asked, could he possibly date the finest example of Mycenaean architecture to ‘the last age of decadence?’ Much of Evans’ work has triumphantly stood the test of time, and there is no denying his great stature in the annals of archaeology, but on the history of relations between Crete and the mainland in the Late Bronze Age it now appears he was wrong, and it is worth asking why: how did Evans’ theories come about?

As with Schliemann, we should try to put ourselves in Evans’ shoes. To do so, we need to know something about the intellectual climate of the time when Evans first announced his theory of tripartite chronology to the Anthropology section of the British Association, in 1904. As mentioned earlier, Evans was born in 1851 and his father was a noted antiquarian, the first British scholar to embrace Darwin’s ideas and apply them to the study of prehistory. Darwin’s theories of human evolution, as we have seen, strongly influenced human disciplines and especially prehistory and archaeology in the late nineteenth century. A
formidable scholar, far more so than Schliemann, Evans could hardly have been better equipped, temperamentally and intellectually, to evolve a system of classification for Aegean prehistory, and this is what he did: ample models existed already, as in Lubbock’s coining of the terms of Palaeolithic and Neolithic (
see here
). However in broader matters of cultural change in art and civilisation it was German scholars who were most influential. In particular Winckelmann’s famous dictum on the phases of ancient art (the necessary, the beautiful, and the superfluous or decadent) had been a prime model in nineteenth-century scholarship as it had been for artists like Goethe. Broad theories like this were applied to sociology and anthropology in the 1830s and 1840s by scholars like Auguste Comte. Let us again remember the conjuncture of politics and ideology at this time, especially in Britain. Evans’ father had warmly welcomed Darwin’s great book in 1859; to many scholars the idea that Man had descended from animals had become impossible to resist even before this, as archaeological evidence accumulated in the 1850s – the apelike skull of Neanderthal Man, for instance, was found in 1856. The relevance of such ideas to history was obvious. The leading landmark of ‘cultural anthropology’ in England, Tylor’s
Primitive Culture
of 1871, saw the evolution of culture in three broad stages, from primitive ‘animism’ (a word coined by Tylor), to the higher monotheistic religions, to the eventual triumph of science, which late-nineteenth-century intellectuals saw as capable of explaining increasingly wide areas of human experience without reference to the spiritual world. The tendency, then, was to think that a ‘systematic law’ could be worked out in history.

Such theories convinced Evans that there was a close relationship between art and archaeology, just as there was no boundary between archaeology and anthropology: ‘The same object is showed by both – to illustrate the laws of evolution as applied to human arts,’ he wrote as early as 1884. Though, as with Schliemann, we still lack a definitive biography of Evans, it seems reasonable to link his own ideas about historical change, progress
and decline with those of his time. This biological view of human evolution, for instance, may have tempted Evans to date the Linear B tablets earlier than we now know they are. In his eyes Linear B had to be ‘a considerable advance in the Art of Writing’, as he wrote in 1909, and later, in 1921, ‘the highest development of the Minoan system of writing’, and yet again ‘a graphic expression of the tendency which produced the beautiful “Palace Style” of Art’. Therefore the tablets could hardly be of the last period of the palace, which Evans thought a time of decline. Accordingly he tried to justify a fifteenth-century dating for the tablets by reinterpreting their find circumstances as recorded in his field notes: this is what has caused the massive discrepancies between the
Palace of Minos
and the original day books and reports, discrepancies which have caused bitter scholarly argument and even led to accusations of fraud in the popular press. In fact Linear B was the language of foreign, Greek, conquerors and none of the caches of tablets can be certainly, or even convincingly, dated before the last phase of the palace, the one which ended
c
.1200 BC in the conflagration of which Evans found evidence in his first days in the dig in 1900.

Of course Evans was dealing with a very complex site whose history extended back to Neolithic times. Like Schliemann he was a pioneer, and pioneers inevitably make mistakes. The bulk of Evans’ work, including his remarkable comparative chronology for the Bronze-Age Aegean, has triumphantly stood the test of time. But it is interesting with hindsight to see how Evans read his evidence as it came out of the soil in the spring of 1900, and how later his desire to impose an all-embracing system on it persuaded him to modify his ideas with dramatic effect on subsequent ideas about the Late Bronze Age in Crete.

THE MAINLANDERS

Why were we so timid at Mycenae ten years ago when we came to draw conclusions from your discoveries in the beehive tombs? It seems to me we were too much frightened by what we found and
that we have rather badly misdated [the Treasury of] Atreus. You know, this old traditional view that we have all swallowed without question and that the ‘Cretans’ are always proclaiming is certainly all wrong – I mean the view that Late Helladic III [1400–1200] was a period of decadence … [it] was the climax of Mycenaean greatness in wealth, power and splendour; and the greatest height was reached in the thirteenth century.

CARL BLEGEN
in a letter to Alan Wace, 29 March 1931

Evans’ view dominated his field for half a century, helped by his failure to publish the Linear B tablets in full. But of course from Schliemann’s time onwards, a mass of important work was done all over the Aegean world through which a coherent picture of Mycenaean civilisation gradually emerged. All along there were many scholars who felt that Evans’ picture of the Bronze Age was wrong and that Mycenaean civilisation was Greek. As early as the 1890s the Greek archaeologist Tsountas, who had succeeded Schliemann at Mycenae, was putting forward this view; it was shared among others by the English Homerist Walter Leaf. In the period between the excavation at Knossos and the beginning of the Second World War more work was done on a number of important mainland sites – Orchomenos, Tiryns, Gla, Thebes, Asine, Midea and Athens, to name only the most important ones – and in some, fragmentary Linear B inscriptions were found, suggesting that the language might not necessarily be Cretan. During this period the mainland chronology was established by detailed attention to stratigraphy and pottery styles. The landmarks were the digs of the British archaeologist Alan Wace at Mycenae in 1922–3 and the American Carl Blegen at Korakou, Zygouries and Prosymna.

Wace and Blegen are important figures in our story, and both believed from the start that Mycenaean civilisation was Greek. Their archaeological arguments saw no cultural break, no intrusion of new people, between the Middle Bronze Age and the Dark-Age Greek world: hence the Greeks must already have been present at least as far back as the early second millennium
BC. These ideas were supported by other discoveries. Linguists working on the structure, origins and relationships of the Indo-European languages arrived at much the same date for the coming of the Greeks. Similarly, Nilsson’s studies in Greek mythology and religion showed, for instance, that all the great classical Greek myths were tied to Mycenaean centres: the Atreids at Mycenae, Oedipus at Thebes, Jason at Iolkos, Herakles at Tiryns, and many more including obscure sites like Lerna, Nemea, Troizen, Sicyon, Midea and so on. If Greek mythology was so anchored in prehistoric times, then must not those times have been Greek? This view was held so strongly by archaeologists like Wace and Blegen (who, unlike Evans, were experts in mainland sites) that in the 1920s they were confidently putting the arrival of the Greeks in Greece at around 1900 BC. This thesis was underlined in an article signed by them both which was published in 1939 before Blegen’s sensational finds at Pylos; this piece remains a
tour de force
in its use of the totality of the evidence, in which Mycenaean influence was traced all over the Aegean in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC and the Mycenaean conquest of Crete was argued with firm assurance. This epoch-making article was, however, tucked away in a German periodical, such was Evans’ influence over British publications; indeed there are still some who resist Wace and Blegen’s conclusions.

So a broad picture of the internal chronology, and a model for the mainland Mycenaean society, were assembled without recourse to the controversial evidence from Knossos. The natural step for Blegen, after his successes on mainland sites, was to turn back to the place which had started the whole search: Troy itself. So many questions needed answers; so much had been destroyed or inadequately described by Schliemann that he had left almost as many mysteries as facts. Dörpfeld had done an admirable job of untangling the main architectural sequence of the site, but the study of Mycenaean pottery had been in its early days then, and Dörpfeld had not been able to offer precise dating for the Late-Bronze-Age sequences. In fact the pottery of the whole of the
Late Bronze Age (what we call Troys VI and VIIa and b) had been lumped together for the purposes of classification – no more precision had been possible in the 1890s, and Dörpfeld had left the approximate end of Bronze-Age Troy at around 1000 BC. Blegen was determined to return to Troy to make a sober and scientific re-excavation of parts of the site, including some areas left untouched by Schliemann and Dörpfeld. But sober and scientific as he undoubtedly was, at the back of his mind clearly lay another question. With so much more sophisticated strati-graphical techniques at his disposal than were available to Schliemann and Dörpfeld, might it be possible to determine at which level in Hisarlik Homer’s Troy had existed? It will not perhaps be a great surprise to the reader to discover that, not for the first time in the search for Troy, the archaeologists found what they hoped to find.

Blegen’s dig at Troy lasted seven seasons, from 1932 to 1938. It was one of the most skilful excavations carried out anywhere in the world up to that time, and remains a landmark in archaeology: for the third time Hisarlik became, as it were, a testing ground for archaeological technique. It is documented in the publication
Troy
, vols I–IV, and by a vast set of photographs now in the University of Cincinnati along with a considerable quantity of film – perhaps the first time that an Aegean Bronze-Age dig was thus documented (one reel preserves Dörpfeld’s visit to the site in 1935). The significance of the dig to the history of science had nothing to do with the Trojan War, of course, but with the growth of our knowledge of the development of civilisation in north-west Anatolia in the Bronze Age: its true importance lay in the earlier levels, Troys I and II. Blegen was able to establish about fifty lesser strata within the nine major ‘cities’ superimposed on Hisarlik, taking the history of occupation on the site back into the fourth millennium BC (we would now date the foundation of Troy I to about 3600 BC). But inevitably the curiosity of the archaeologists was at its sharpest when they re-examined strata of Troy VI, which Dörpfeld had claimed as Homer’s Troy. Blegen soon became convinced that the
destruction here could not have been by the hand of man, as Dörpfeld had thought. In one place the foundation of the wall had actually shifted; elsewhere whole internal walls had fallen over and still lay heaped, covered by later deposits. There seemed no way out of this – even Dörpfeld himself, who looked at the piled rubble on site, had to agree. Troy VI, the city of the great walls, had been destroyed by an earthquake, not by Agamemnon’s army. But in other places, where he could examine untouched strata above the ruins of Troy VI, Blegen made a truly dramatic discovery.

THE SIEGE OF TROY DISCOVERED?

We believe that Troy VIIa has yielded actual evidence showing that the town was subjected to siege, capture, and destruction by hostile forces at some time in the general period assigned by Greek tradition to the Trojan War, and that it may safely be identified as the Troy of Priam and of Homer.