- 6/6/2025
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00:00In 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 heroes larger than life.
00:30When the daring Theseus battled the Minotaur, and soldiers clashed over the face of the beautiful Helen, who brought down the walls of Troy.
00:43For hundreds of generations, these tales were passed down as myths.
00:49Then, in the 19th century, two remarkable men dared to believe that the myths were clues to the treasures of a forgotten past.
01:00Their extraordinary adventures uncovered the roots of Western civilization.
01:07For the future.
01:08For the future.
01:09For the future.
01:10For the future.
01:11For the future.
01:12For the future.
01:14For the future.
01:15For the future.
01:46In the 19th century, archaeology was in its infancy.
01:55Ancient Greece was considered the beginning of Western civilization, its architecture
02:02the most beautiful, its ideas the foundation for everything to come.
02:10Yet its roots before the 8th century B.C. were shrouded in mystery.
02:19Did this extraordinary civilization spring out of nowhere?
02:25Or did another, almost as advanced, come before it?
02:34The only accounts of an earlier age were legends that nearly everyone dismissed as myths.
02:39The first great works of Western literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were considered fiction, nothing more.
02:48Who could have guessed that Homer's beloved stories could lead the way to a real past?
02:55In Athens today, a classical temple marks the grave of Heinrich Schliemann, to some the father of archaeology, to others an impetuous fool.
03:11To Schliemann, Homer's stories of the Trojan War were true, and he set out to prove it.
03:20His incredible discoveries pushed back European history a thousand years.
03:26Schliemann's story has been romanticized in films, books, even grand opera.
03:33But none more fantastical than his own stories about himself.
03:39I think he thought that he was the center of the world.
03:44I think he had a kind of medieval map of the world, you know, in which he was at the center and everything else was in concentric circles around him.
03:53And I think he was the most frightful big head.
03:58Schliemann throughout his life was pretty cavalier with the truth.
04:02He, I don't think, distinguished so clearly as most of us, I think, do between what is true and what is false.
04:11He tended to tell the story that suited the moment.
04:15Schliemann's personal myths stretched all the way back to his childhood.
04:20He was born in 1822 in northeastern Germany.
04:25At the age of seven, he tells how his father gave him a history book with a picture of the ancient city of Troy in flames.
04:32Electrified by the sight, the young Heinrich asked what had become of the great city.
04:39His father explained that Troy had burned to the ground, leaving no trace.
04:48Unconvinced, Heinrich disagreed.
04:50Father, retorted I, if such walls once existed, they cannot have been completely destroyed.
04:58Vast ruins of them must still remain, hidden away beneath the dust of ages.
05:03In the end, we both agreed that I should one day excavate Troy.
05:07It's a wonderful story, but there's really no reason why we need to believe it.
05:15He tells us not a day went by, but that he thought about this goal of earning enough money to go out and excavate Troy.
05:23But we have thousands of letters and many diaries when he was a young man.
05:28There's no mention of going out and excavating Troy.
05:35Schliemann may have been trying to mask the truth of a painful childhood.
05:40His mother died young, but not before his minister father lost his job by committing adultery with the housemaid.
05:48Schliemann had to drop out of school to help support his brothers and sisters.
05:54All this, I think, etched itself deeply onto Schliemann's mind, and he left him with a bitter, bitter resentment about it in later life.
06:05On the other hand, the drive for all that he achieved came out of his unhappy childhood.
06:16Schliemann's story continues like a fairy tale.
06:18He ran away to sea, was shipwrecked, and then became a clerk for a trading house in Amsterdam.
06:26Toiling endlessly, he taught himself languages by copying passages and then learning them by heart.
06:33He mastered at least ten languages this way.
06:38As Schliemann himself said,
06:40Talent means energy and persistence and nothing more.
06:48Schliemann's talent was making money.
06:52With energy and persistence, the obsessive German became an international merchant, trading in commodities like indigo.
06:59In 1849, prospectors struck gold in California.
07:10Ever the opportunist, Schliemann joined the gold rush.
07:14In Sacramento, he opened a bank, buying gold dust from the miners and lending them money at 12% interest per month.
07:22After two years, he left California a very rich man.
07:29My biggest fault, being a braggart and a bluffer, yielded countless advantages.
07:35And there were even more to come.
07:39Russia was on the brink of war, so Schliemann cornered the market in saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder.
07:45The Crimean War made his fortune.
07:51It seemed that everything he touched turned to gold, except his social standing.
07:57His unhappy marriage to the daughter of a St. Petersburg lawyer didn't help.
08:04The uneducated merchant was Shonda's nouveau riche.
08:08Now in his mid-forties, Schliemann realized he wanted more out of life than making money.
08:13He wanted respect.
08:18The situation in 1868 was that he was adrift.
08:22He'd divorced his first wife, a Russian woman.
08:27He'd sold up his business in St. Petersburg, and he didn't know what to do.
08:31He was going through a kind of mid-life crisis.
08:34And he took a journey to the Mediterranean, to Italy and to Greece.
08:39And 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.
08:48In June of 1868, Schliemann arrived at the ruins of Pompeii.
08:57Buried under layers of volcanic ash for almost 1800 years, this lost city was in the midst of a spectacular rediscovery.
09:05Excavations had uncovered magnificent public spaces, and rescued intimate frescoes from the buried houses.
09:25Schliemann was captivated by this journey into a lost world.
09:28For the first time, he met a real archaeologist, Giuseppe Fiorelli.
09:39It was the Italians' innovation to inject plaster into the ancient ash, revealing the forms of the Pompeians, caught in their last moments of life.
09:51At this point, archaeology was more romance than science, with few precedents and even fewer rules.
10:07Needless to say, it was right up Schliemann's alley.
10:11As he continued his travels, his diaries began to reflect a new direction.
10:26He would set off on a grand archaeological adventure, and uncover the biggest challenge of all, the legendary city of Troy.
10:33But first, he had to find it.
10:45When Heinrich Schliemann set out on his quest for Troy, most people believed the city was a myth.
10:52For one thing, it wasn't on the map.
10:55Legend had placed Troy on the Dardanelles, near the coast of present-day Turkey.
10:59But no ruins identified the great city.
11:07It was as if the site of the Trojan War, the greatest war story ever told, had never existed.
11:14But for thousands of years, people had repeated Homer's tale.
11:20How Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships, had been taken away to Troy.
11:25How the Greeks had battled for ten long years to get her back, led by the great king Agamemnon.
11:36How the war was finally won, with a wooden horse full of soldiers.
11:43In Homer's tale, the Greeks destroyed the great city of Troy, burning it to the ground.
11:54Schliemann was just captured by the Iliad.
11:58The descriptions of what goes on, everything about the human condition is found in the Iliad in a very poetic and magnificent manner.
12:09And 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.
12:20With his copy of Homer as a guide, Schliemann examined the mound thought to be the likeliest location of Troy.
12:29In the Iliad, two springs marked the foot of the great city's hill.
12:35To his dismay, Schliemann found many more here.
12:38And trial excavations turned up nothing but dirt.
12:47But just as he was about to leave the area, the German got lucky.
12:52He met an Englishman named Frank Calvert, who owned another mound, the site of many prior civilizations.
13:00Calvert believed his mound held the real Troy, far beneath the surface.
13:05Frank Calvert explained to Schliemann that he had done some excavations there,
13:11which took him down below the Greek and Roman levels into deep deposits which were earlier.
13:18So he said there is a very good chance that in these deep earlier deposits you will find the Troy of the Trojan War.
13:26And that convinced Schliemann and it gave him something to do.
13:29But Schliemann didn't have a clue how to begin.
13:32Dear Mr. Calvert, have I to take a tent and iron bedstead and pillow with me?
13:39What sort of hat is best against the scorching sun?
13:43Please give me an exact statement of all the implements of whatever kind and of all the necessaries which you advise me to take with me.
13:50With Calvert's encouragement, Schliemann began digging in earnest in October 1871.
14:00On the first day, he hired eight men.
14:06By day three, there were 80.
14:10Caution was not his style.
14:16Assuming Homer's Troy lay at the bottom of the mound, Schliemann had his men dig a great gash right through the center of it.
14:24One must plunge immediately into the depths. Only then will one find things.
14:35On their way down, the men uncovered not one city, but many of them.
14:40But Schliemann didn't let these other Troys get in his way.
14:43You can see when he began that his methods were very, very grude.
14:48He was going in with winches and crowbars and battering rams, the horrifying tales spelt out in some of his writings.
14:56And nowadays one just blenches at the thought of it.
14:59The numbers of immense blocks of stone, which we continually come upon, cause great trouble after we got out and removed.
15:12All of my work went hurry to see the enormous weight roll down and settle itself at some distance in the plain.
15:18Schliemann was discarding priceless relics from thousands of years of civilization on the site.
15:32Thankfully, rains closed the season early.
15:38But the next year, he was back.
15:41This time, attacking the mound with 150 men under the command of a railroad engineer.
15:49Often by Schliemann's side was his new Greek wife, Sophia, who won his heart by reciting from the Iliad.
15:59Forging ahead, Schliemann continued to aim straight for the bottom of the mound,
16:04haphazardly uncovering ancient stone walls and collecting pottery and other artifacts along the way.
16:12What Schliemann did was to go down deep into this complex, complex site.
16:18And he did try to understand how the layers had built up one on top of another.
16:25And he wasn't bad at it either. He was quite observant.
16:30Of course, now we would do it in much finer detail than he did.
16:34But he was the one to reveal that this sort of thing could be done in a sight of this sod.
16:45In the third season of digging, the hard work finally paid off.
16:49Near the bottom of the mound, workmen uncovered the charred ruins of a citadel.
16:59It didn't look like much, but Schliemann declared that it must be the palace of King Priam, burned in the Trojan War.
17:05As he himself told the story, he dismissed his workmen and began to attack the palace walls himself.
17:15I cut out the treasure with a large knife, which it was impossible to do without the most fearful risk of my life.
17:29But I never thought of any danger.
17:30It would, however, have been impossible for me to have removed the treasure without the help of my dear wife,
17:39who stood by me ready to pack the things which I cut out in her shawl and carried them away.
17:44It was a fabulous find.
17:51Ancient silver and copper vessels, bronze weapons, and most extraordinary of all, elaborate gold jewelry.
18:01With Schliemann's usual panache, he announced that he had uncovered the treasure of Priam and the jewels of Helen of Troy.
18:10The photograph of Sophia Schliemann modeling Helen's jewels became one of the most celebrated images of the 19th century.
18:24Yet Schliemann's account of the discovery was controversial from the start.
18:29The story is certainly fiction in at least one major element, and that is that Sophie was not there.
18:37Sophie had left about three weeks earlier, gone back to Athens, and so she was certainly not there packing the stuff in her shawl and carrying them off.
18:49The question is, how much else is true?
18:53I 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 was a hoax.
19:08I think in fact there are very good signs that it was genuine.
19:10There are discrepancies with regard to where the treasure was found, the day on which it was found, and exactly what was found.
19:23He makes wrong connections, for example, he misremembers exactly where things were found, he associates them with the wrong features, and so forth.
19:34But 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.
19:44Because he was so energetic and spent so much money and spent so much time at Troy.
19:55A master of 19th century media, Schliemann informed the world of his success.
20:01But first, he carefully smuggled his treasures out of Turkey, ignoring his permit's stipulation that all finds belonged to the Turks.
20:14The crafty German was triumphant.
20:18Convinced that he'd uncovered Homer's Troy, buried in myth for more than 3,000 years.
20:26Being Schliemann however, even fame and recognition couldn't occupy him for long.
20:32Homer pointed him in a new direction, to a city rich in gold.
20:38He turned his sights to Mycenae, home of Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks.
20:48According to Homer, the conqueror of the Trojans had met a violent fate.
20:53Agamemnon returned home to Mycenae, only to find that his wife had taken up with another man.
21:05Late one night, the two murdered the great hero.
21:08It was another compelling tale, sufficient motivation for Schliemann.
21:16And with Mycenae, the fledgling archaeologist, had an easier assignment.
21:21Unlike Troy, the city had never been lost.
21:27Its picturesque ruins still dominated a hill in Greece, not far from the Aegean Sea.
21:36Hungry for gold, Schliemann began to dig in August 1876.
21:39Within a few weeks, he discovered evidence of a sacred site.
21:48The man's luck seemed unbelievable.
21:51Pressing on, he unearthed a series of royal graves.
21:55Filled with treasures and skeletons adorned with gold.
22:07Leaping to conclusions yet again, Schliemann declared that he had discovered the golden mask of Agamemnon.
22:17As it turned out, later archaeologists decided it wasn't the mythical king.
22:22But it didn't really matter.
22:25Schliemann had uncovered evidence of a rich and sophisticated civilization,
22:30which had flourished a thousand years before the days of classical Greece.
22:38The objects he'd unearthed were elegant and skillfully crafted.
22:46He'd even found a helmet made of boar's teeth that matched Homer's description.
22:51Schliemann's fabulous discovery at Mycenae brought him international fame, even the respect of many of his critics.
23:02Throughout the next decade, he dug at other Greek citadels, accumulating evidence of the wealth and splendor of this previously unknown civilization.
23:12But Schliemann wasn't satisfied.
23:21In his heart, he knew his new discoveries cast doubt on the primitive treasures he'd found at Troy.
23:26How could he be sure that the walls he'd uncovered deep beneath that mound were the same ones that kept Agamemnon's forces at bay?
23:40That down those broken streets, Helen once walked?
23:41It was time to return to Troy and make sense of that perplexing mound once and for all.
23:55This time, Schliemann proceeded slowly and cautiously, digging in a new spot on the edge of the mound.
24:12And bit by bit, the old treasure hunter uncovered a layer in the middle that he'd missed on his earlier digs.
24:18Here, finally, was what he'd been searching for all along, the ruins of broad streets, massive walls, and a much bigger citadel.
24:36Schliemann should have been thrilled, but instead his heart sank.
24:39It meant there was a lot of rethinking to do, and in a sense, he saw before his eyes 20 years of work just going down the drain.
24:58For four days, Schliemann retreated to his tent, searching for answers.
25:02From the beginning, he'd assumed that Homer's Troy lay at the bottom of the mound.
25:16Now, his new discovery changed everything.
25:21If he'd finally found the Troy of the Trojan War in this middle layer, then 20 years ago, he'd made a tragic mistake.
25:32For in his haste to dig to the bottom, he'd destroyed much of what he'd been looking for.
25:40He'd never know what treasures had been lost.
25:48Exhausted, Schliemann vowed to continue the following season.
25:55But it was not to be.
25:56Suffering from a terrible pain in his ear, he traveled to Germany for surgery, then headed home to Greece.
26:06He never got there.
26:10Buried in Athens with a state funeral, Schliemann was mourned even by his critics.
26:15For 20 years, he'd lit up the world of early archaeology with his drive and enthusiasm.
26:26Pursuing his childhood dreams of ancient Greek heroes to the end, he'd pushed back the frontiers of European history.
26:33In the process, he put the young science of archaeology on the map.
26:37Among the many he inspired was a brilliant young man named Arthur Evans, who visited Schliemann several years before his death.
26:55Reaching beyond Schliemann's discoveries, the intrepid Englishman would also track down a legend into the far corners of Europe's hidden past.
27:03He would reawaken an even older civilization, buried in myth and oblivion for more than 3,000 years.
27:20Unlike Schliemann, Arthur Evans seemed destined to become an archaeologist.
27:23His father, a wealthy paper manufacturer, was a pioneer in studying the past.
27:33Born in 1851, Arthur spent his childhood in the English countryside, digging for Roman coins.
27:43But as the boy grew older, his nickname grew increasingly annoying.
27:48Little Evans, son of John Evans the Great.
27:51He's kind of, in his early years, like a rebel without a cause.
27:56He's looking for something to get hold of, to be different from his father, to prove his own worth.
28:03And 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.
28:11From his first sight of the Balkans in 1871, Evans rejected any notion of returning to his father's business.
28:21Instantly at home, he haunted the bazaars, delighting in the colorful mixture of East and West.
28:31To Evans, the fact that the land was at war only added to its appeal.
28:45The Slavs were rebelling against the Ottoman Turks after years of domination.
28:50Evans became a roving reporter for the Manchester Guardian.
28:53Afflicted with bad eyesight, he disdained glasses.
29:00Instead, he used his walking stick, which he named Prodger, as a kind of antenna.
29:06The mad Englishman with the walking stick became a familiar sight, and a thorn in the side of the authorities.
29:12He was quite a romantic, much more volatile than his father.
29:20He did things like wearing a red cloak and riding on a black horse into Turkish villages.
29:25Really quite dangerous and difficult territory, and he did it with a sense of drama.
29:30He wanted to be a spy, and he did some very rash things.
29:35Evan's sympathies were with the Slavs in their struggle for independence.
29:39As the years went on and the conflict intensified, his articles became more and more impassioned.
29:51His recklessness began to worry his wife Margaret, whom Evans had married after several years in the Balkans.
29:58The young couple had settled in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Arthur's version of paradise.
30:03But in 1882, Evans' articles caught up with him.
30:15Thrown into jail as a spy, he languished there for seven weeks.
30:22Characteristically, the young adventurer found a novel way to communicate with his wife.
30:26Breaking a tooth off his pocket comb, he drew blood from his arm.
30:35Dear Margaret, he wrote in his blood.
30:39I'm fine, but it would be wise to get a lawyer.
30:43His family did succeed in getting him released, but Evans was expelled from the Balkans.
30:49For him, paradise was lost.
30:53Once home in England, the landscape looked gray and leaden.
30:59Arthur missed the Mediterranean, and found that he couldn't sit still.
31:04So he and Margaret took off on a grand tour, a holiday that would have a lasting impact on his future.
31:16In Greece, the young couple visited the customary sites revered by educated Europeans as the essence of beauty.
31:24Evans was unimpressed.
31:32He was more interested in truly ancient ruins, like the ones of Mycenae.
31:39Ever since the first newspaper accounts more than a decade before, Evans had been fascinated by the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann.
31:48He visited the German archaeologist at his home in Athens.
31:58With great pride, Schliemann showed the younger man the objects he'd unearthed at Mycenae.
32:05Evans was captivated.
32:11His near-sighted eyes would often notice details others missed.
32:15And what excited him here were the tiny seal stones, used to press a design into wax or clay.
32:29Their intricate symbols reminded him of picture writing, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
32:35Could it be that this early European civilization had also mastered the art of writing?
32:41And if it was so advanced, thought Evans, then surely another civilization must have preceded it.
32:55He seemed to feel almost instinctively that there had to be something earlier.
32:59And I think that was 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.
33:10And so he had this sense that there must be something earlier to find.
33:13And that, of course, was one of the things that pointed him in the direction of Crete.
33:16In 1893, Evans' wife Margaret died of tuberculosis.
33:26The couple had been living in Oxford for ten years, where Evans served as director of the Ashmolean Museum.
33:33Without his companion, Evans was bereft.
33:38For the rest of his life, he would only write on black-bordered notepaper.
33:47Clearly, he needed a new adventure.
33:51His mind returned to his meeting with Schliemann and the enigma of the seal stone.
33:57He'd heard that the island of Crete was full of these little treasures.
34:02It was time to see for himself.
34:04In 1894, Arthur Evans went to Crete, a sleepy island in the Aegean Sea.
34:22In ancient times, it had been fabled as a rich and populous land.
34:27Now, under the control of the Ottoman Turks, it was timeless and unspoiled.
34:37Exactly the sort of place Arthur Evans liked.
34:43He traveled all over the island, looking for seal stones unearthed by the plow.
34:48Here, women called them milk stones and wore them around their necks to ensure enough milk for their babies.
35:03Finally, he came to a great mound, still identified by the locals as the site of Knossos.
35:08In Greek mythology, the palace of King Minos.
35:15Arthur Evans couldn't resist the power of the myth that beneath this hill once lay the labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur.
35:24As the story goes, every year, the city of Athens was required to send tribute to King Minos.
35:39Seven youths and seven maidens were sent into the labyrinth to face the Minotaur.
35:44A terrifying monster, half man and half bull.
35:47No one came out alive.
35:51No one came out alive.
35:58Then, a youth named Theseus devised a scheme to mark his trail with a ball of thread.
36:04The hero met the Minotaur in a great battle.
36:18Triumphant, he followed the thread to freedom.
36:38When Arthur Evans arrived at the Great Mound, it looked like any other hill,
36:43with no evidence of a palace, let alone a labyrinth.
36:48But Evans met a man who had found some huge storage jars close to the surface.
36:54He claimed there was much more waiting beneath the earth.
37:01Evans began to negotiate with the land's Turkish owners.
37:04It took him five years and the patience to wait until Crete gained its independence from the Turks.
37:15Evans had learnt as a collector that the only way really to control an artifact was to own it.
37:24So Evans decided to own his greatest artifact and to buy Knossos,
37:29because he knew that as landowner he would have a right to do whatever he wanted on it.
37:35On the 23rd of March, 1900, Arthur Evans broke ground at Knossos.
37:41In an effort to heal scars from the recent war for independence,
37:57he hired both Muslims and Christians, men and women, to work the dig.
38:04Evans himself was almost overcome with excitement.
38:07There is a bit of schizophrenia almost in Evans where he is trained by his father as the scientific archaeologist,
38:18at the same time the romantic explorer is desperate to get at the treasure.
38:28It didn't take long.
38:29Exactly one week after he began digging, Arthur Evans found clay tablets inscribed with two different systems of writing never seen before.
38:40Evans called them Linear A and Linear B.
38:44He would spend the rest of his long life trying to decipher them.
38:49Even more extraordinary treasures lay in wait.
39:02Arthur Evans found in the very first weeks of his excavation a wonderful gypsum throne, a stone throne.
39:09Still in place in a room beautifully decorated with frescoes.
39:15It was flanked by griffins.
39:17And he was instantly able to announce to the world, this is the oldest throne in Europe.
39:22This is the beginning of European civilization.
39:25The civilization Evans was uncovering seemed amazingly advanced.
39:38While the rest of Europe was still living in huts, these ancient people had resided in comfort and splendor.
39:44Essentially, it really was like a grand European palace where you had running water actually running through the building itself.
40:01The sort of thing that really 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.
40:14Elated by the extraordinary treasures of Canossus, Evans boldly announced to the world that he had found a completely unknown, unimagined civilization.
40:33Older than Schliemann's Mycenae and more than 1500 years older than classical Greece.
40:40He decided these remarkable ancient Europeans needed a name.
40:46Minoan, he called them, after the legend of King Minos.
40:53This time, Arthur Evans had found a cause equal to his boundless imagination.
40:57As the years went on, the challenges set in.
41:07Winter storms damaged the vulnerable ruins.
41:12Evans realized he had to devise a way to protect them.
41:16It was only the beginning of his conservation problems.
41:25Soon, his workmen found evidence that the palace had actually had several stories.
41:29Evans sent two experienced silver miners tunneling into the earth.
41:42They dug for weeks, eventually revealing the remains of four magnificent flights of stone steps.
41:48Evans found the only way to preserve the staircase was to restore it to its form of glory.
41:59All it would take was a bit of imagination.
42:04Really, what started off as a first aid, basically to keep the building intact, grew out of hand a little bit.
42:15Because he began to really enjoy what he was doing.
42:19Little by little, Evans began to restore Knossos.
42:23Using his own fortune, he transformed the ruins into rooms, based on his personal vision of Minoan architecture.
42:40The project was controversial from the start.
42:44Evans used modern materials, like steel and reinforced concrete.
42:48Melding the ancient with the latest in 20th century architecture.
42:57Evans was trying to recreate a total experience.
43:02In the same way that we try to set up virtual reality mazes where people can experience architecture,
43:08Evans was trying to do the same thing at Knossos.
43:12He was criticized for building a movie set, and in a sense that's what he was doing.
43:18He wanted people to be able to walk through and experience the building.
43:28But really, one is experiencing Evans' vision more than anything else when you visit Knossos.
43:37Even Evans' critics today admit that the palace would be a confusing maze without his unifying vision.
43:52As more and more ruins continued to be unearthed, Evans hired architects to help him make sense of the twisting corridors and rooms.
44:03He began to think that the palace itself had inspired the myth of the labyrinth, for he found 1400 rooms, stretched over six acres.
44:16The palace was reasonably well preserved, but nothing like as well preserved as it now feels.
44:27And it's really quite important to walk into a place and have a sense of walls and ceilings, as well as just foundations that come up to about knee level.
44:35So things like the grand staircase, of which he was hugely proud, I think a lot of people have caused 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 frescoes on the walls.
44:56It has been a wonderful experience.
45:08Evans was inspired by the frescoes.
45:10The fragments suggested a world surprisingly modern, a handsome people who lived in harmony with nature.
45:26But the images were indistinct and broken.
45:30So Evans took another leap.
45:34He hired a team of artists to help him fill in the blanks.
45:39What emerged from Evans' palette was a world of grace and sensuality, unlike any other in ancient times.
45:46There were no images of war.
45:53Women were on an equal footing with men.
45:58Priestesses led the worship of a mother goddess.
46:03Yet how much of this inviting world was truly Minoan?
46:08And how much the creation of Arthur Evans?
46:11He idealized the Minoans.
46:15He idealized the Minoans.
46:17He had no real concept that there could be any darker side to their nature, any war-likeness.
46:24They were for him sort of Latter-day hippies, really.
46:27They were people who lived in an almost perfect world.
46:30A world which I think Evans saw in contrast to the real world.
46:34They were almost a sort of escape to him.
46:35During Evans' years at Knossos, the outside world was shattered by the violence of World War I.
46:49Evans was horrified by the brutal technology and raw power of the 20th century.
46:54Just as he had escaped from industrial England in his youth, he found solace in the refined world of the Minoans.
47:05They became almost real to him, a perfect people who lived in an ideal world.
47:14In his writings, only once did Evans ever admit that his Minoans might have had a violent side.
47:28He couldn't help noticing that everywhere he looked in the palace, he saw menacing images of bulls.
47:34They reminded him of the innocent youths and maidens sacrificed to the Minotaur.
47:46One fresco haunted him.
47:49A charging bull with a young acrobat in the midst of a suicidal leap.
47:53What could be the meaning of this cruel sport?
47:58So like the bloody rituals of the Roman amphitheatre.
48:02The sports of the Roman amphitheatre may thus in Crete be traced back to prehistoric times.
48:15Perhaps the legends of Athenian prisoners devoured by the Minotaur preserve a real tradition of such cruel sports.
48:25Arthur Evans.
48:34But most of the time, Evans Minoans seem to have lived with all the grace and polish of their eminent discoverer.
48:40He was Sir Arthur now, widely honored and renowned.
48:50He entertained frequently, but remained a private person, more at home in the world he'd created.
49:03He spent much of his later years writing a history of the Minoans called the Palace of Minos.
49:08In defiance of modern technology, he wrote all four volumes in longhand with a white goose feather quill pen.
49:18Many of his friends said his handwriting was even beginning to look like Linear A.
49:31Throughout his writings, Evans insisted on the superiority of his Minoans.
49:38He believed they had dominated the Aegean, lording over the more warlike tribes of mainland Greece.
49:47Even in the face of conflicting evidence, he insisted that only an earthquake had precipitated their fall.
49:53Other archaeologists disagreed.
49:57They pointed to evidence which showed that the Minoans had been conquered by the Mycenaeans, sweeping in from Greece about 1450 B.C.
50:06Evans could never accept the image of his Minoans as a captive people.
50:19To the end of his life, Evans remained true to his dream of the Minoans.
50:33All over Crete, other excavators were digging, revealing the outlines of other palaces that had flourished at the same time as his Knossos.
50:47Their methods were not the same as his.
50:52Science had taken over archaeology.
50:55No longer would a single vision recreate a civilization.
51:00The days of the treasure seekers were over.
51:05There are instances where we can see him as being wrong-headed, pig-headed, just plain wrong.
51:13But what really strikes me very forcibly is that if you're starting any piece of Minoan research,
51:20if you're asking any question, you can almost always go back to Arthur Evans' writings and find a starting point.
51:25You may not agree with what he says about it, but he's almost always been there first and thought of the question.
51:34Regardless of whether it was true or not, Evans' image of Minoan culture, its elegance and grace, captivated the Western imagination.
51:47It continues to inspire more than a million visitors to Knossos every year.
51:51The treasure he'd unearthed was more than gold.
51:57It was the vision of a civilized world, deep in the dark recesses of the European past.
52:04of the European past.
52:34The Thereof
52:35The
52:36The
52:40The
52:42The
52:43The
52:44The
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