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mound with two steep slopes to the east and south, but roughly level with
the surrounding terrain on the other two sides, a mound called
Kephala
.
By the end of the month he had the first inscribed
clay tablet in hand, and by the end of the first week
of April a wealth of them to behold, with the same
script as he saw on those sealstones that had lured
him there. But he found more than he had sought.
There were pieces of art, so refined and beautiful
that they could only have been created by a great
civilization. Evans hired more workers until those
under his command numbered over one hundred.
Then on April 5, his first — perhaps greatest —
visual find, a picture (see Figure 1.19, page 34) of
one of the peoples who had inhabited Knossos on
that mound at Kephala, and he named him a Mi-
noan after Minos, the presumed ruler of Crete, and
mythological son of Zeus. It was becoming increas-
ingly clear that the Kephala mound held majes-
tic palaces, ranging six acres in magnitude, truly
the remains of a magnificent civilization. The first
palaces at Knossos were believed to have been built
around 2000 BC. He had bored back two millennia
BC and saw the opportunity to unlock the mystery
of nearly 2000 years of human civilization. The key
was in the script.
Evans saw four distinct kinds of script, so he be-
gan to classify them. The oldest, the type he had
seen on the sealstones, was pictographic, and he
called these hieroglyphic script of class A. The styl-
ized form of this that he found on clay tablets, (of
which over 3000 were eventually unearthed), which
seemed to be an evolutionary spinoff of class A from
the Mycenaean period, he called hieroglyphs script
of class B. There were two further simplifications
of classes A and B, which were more linear than
the aforementioned hieroglyphic types. These he
dubbed linear script of class A and the most recent,
the linear script of class B. It turns out that linear B, as it eventually came to
be known, was found only at Knossos, but linear A, again a simplification as
it came to be known, could be found all over Crete. It was determined that
the two classes of linear A and B did not live together. Linear B had replaced
linear A. But the interrelationships were not clear among the four classes. Clas-
sification became more refined dividing symbols into sets based on agricultural
types, ideographs, phonetic, or numerical. However, all this classification was
not deciphering. He still could not read the language.
It should be noted that although Evans used the term “hieroglyphs” with
Figure 1.15: Knossos
Linear B Tablet
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