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 ninetieth birthday.