Arthur Evans

Arthur John Evans was born 8 July 1851 in Britain. In the late 1890s he learned of earlier digs at Knossos—started in 1877 by Minos Kalokairinos, shut down by Ottoman authorities after three weeks—and used private money to purchase the site outright. He began excavating in 1900. What he unearthed forced a rethinking: the structures and artifacts didn't fit Mycenaean Greece, so Evans proposed a distinct, older culture, which he called Minoan. He also identified and named two Cretan scripts, Linear A and Linear B, plus an earlier pictographic system. He died 11 July 1941, three days after his ni…