1 00:00:10,075 --> 00:00:14,512 This is the house in Athens of the German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann. 2 00:00:14,947 --> 00:00:19,281 He died in 1890, exhausted by his passionate and obsessive quest 3 00:00:19,451 --> 00:00:23,410 to find truth in the ancient legend of the Trojan War. 4 00:00:23,922 --> 00:00:25,685 But he never solved the riddle. 5 00:00:28,827 --> 00:00:32,456 Was the search an illusion, invention of the bards? 6 00:00:32,831 --> 00:00:35,197 Had the city never existed at all? 7 00:00:38,270 --> 00:00:39,897 Schliemann had begun the search. 8 00:00:40,105 --> 00:00:41,629 Now others would follow - 9 00:00:41,940 --> 00:00:44,272 his assistant, Wilhelm Dorpfeld... 10 00:00:45,811 --> 00:00:48,075 ...the Briton, Arthur Evans... 11 00:00:49,648 --> 00:00:51,980 ...the American, Carl Blegen, 12 00:00:52,418 --> 00:00:54,545 as the new science of archaeology attempted to 13 00:00:54,720 --> 00:00:58,588 bring to life "the age of the heroes". 14 00:01:59,918 --> 00:02:03,547 Once upon a time, there was a town called Troy. 15 00:02:04,490 --> 00:02:06,014 So said the Greek poet Homer, 16 00:02:06,191 --> 00:02:08,386 who lived around 700 BC. 17 00:02:14,533 --> 00:02:17,366 Troy, he said, was a great and wealthy city 18 00:02:17,536 --> 00:02:19,401 which stood near the Dardanelles. 19 00:02:20,939 --> 00:02:23,772 On a visit to Greece, the prince of Troy, paris, 20 00:02:23,942 --> 00:02:27,434 eloped with the wife of the king of Sparta, Helen. 21 00:02:28,947 --> 00:02:32,280 The Greeks gathered a thousand ships to take her back. 22 00:02:34,186 --> 00:02:35,983 Their leader was Agamemnon, 23 00:02:36,155 --> 00:02:39,420 king of Mycenae, rich in gold. 24 00:02:40,959 --> 00:02:42,085 After 10 years of war, 25 00:02:42,261 --> 00:02:46,789 the city was sacked when it was entered by the famous trick of the wooden horse. 26 00:02:48,433 --> 00:02:49,957 That was the story. 27 00:02:50,302 --> 00:02:51,860 But was it just a story? 28 00:03:07,553 --> 00:03:09,783 At Mycenae, in 1876, 29 00:03:10,022 --> 00:03:12,422 Heinrich Schliemann set out to prove it. 30 00:03:17,796 --> 00:03:21,425 There he found the tombs of rich Bronze Age kings, 31 00:03:21,600 --> 00:03:25,627 literally laden with gold, just as Homer had said... 32 00:03:27,873 --> 00:03:31,104 ...armed to the teeth with weapons of bronze. 33 00:03:40,819 --> 00:03:42,946 At Tiryns, near Mycenae, 34 00:03:43,822 --> 00:03:46,416 behind the mighty walls of which Homer had sung, 35 00:03:46,592 --> 00:03:49,254 Schliemann uncovered remains of a Bronze Age palace 36 00:03:49,428 --> 00:03:52,022 resembling those described by the poet. 37 00:03:57,936 --> 00:04:01,565 Here were even wall paintings showing images of people who had lived 38 00:04:01,740 --> 00:04:06,700 at the time the war was thought to have taken place, around 1200 BC. 39 00:04:18,624 --> 00:04:20,990 But 300 miles across the Aegean Sea, 40 00:04:21,159 --> 00:04:24,151 mystery still surrounded Troy itself. 41 00:04:29,401 --> 00:04:32,495 Schliemann claimed he had found it at a little hill called Hisarlik, 42 00:04:32,671 --> 00:04:34,798 in what is now north-western Turkey. 43 00:04:35,407 --> 00:04:38,843 There he had excavated a small prehistoric citadel. 44 00:04:43,382 --> 00:04:46,613 But could this tiny place, only 100 yards across, 45 00:04:46,785 --> 00:04:50,152 really have been the splendid city of Homer's story? 46 00:04:51,757 --> 00:04:52,519 Schliemann's proof, 47 00:04:52,691 --> 00:04:54,215 the so-called jewels of Helen, 48 00:04:54,393 --> 00:04:56,258 with which he had bedecked his Greek wife, 49 00:04:56,428 --> 00:04:59,864 were soon shown to be 1,000 years too early. 50 00:05:10,008 --> 00:05:11,839 The search, however, continued. 51 00:05:12,110 --> 00:05:13,236 In Manchester, 52 00:05:13,412 --> 00:05:16,313 my search turned to Schliemann's loyal assistant, 53 00:05:16,481 --> 00:05:18,779 the architect Wilhelm Dorpfeld. 54 00:05:18,950 --> 00:05:23,887 He was determined to take up Schliemann's torch and prove the doubters wrong. 55 00:05:25,524 --> 00:05:28,015 Archaeology is a romantic science. 56 00:05:28,193 --> 00:05:30,627 It attempts to bring back lost time, 57 00:05:30,796 --> 00:05:33,924 and that's especially evident in this romantic story. 58 00:05:34,099 --> 00:05:35,691 It's true, above all, 59 00:05:35,867 --> 00:05:39,234 of the second great figure in our search, Dorpfeld. 60 00:05:39,471 --> 00:05:43,840 If anything, he was a greater romantic than Schliemann himself. 61 00:05:44,009 --> 00:05:48,776 He spent much of his later life living on the Greek island of Levkas, 62 00:05:48,947 --> 00:05:52,348 attempting to prove it was Homer's lthaca, 63 00:05:52,517 --> 00:05:53,609 the home of King Odysseus. 64 00:05:53,785 --> 00:05:54,877 He's buried there. 65 00:05:55,120 --> 00:05:58,351 Like Schliemann, he remained a lover of Greece to the end. 66 00:05:58,623 --> 00:06:02,889 He, as he put it himself, "was inspired by the master, Schliemann." 67 00:06:03,061 --> 00:06:07,361 He would endeavour to bring Schliemann's unfulfilled dreams to reality, 68 00:06:07,532 --> 00:06:10,524 to prove the truth of Homer's vision of Troy. 69 00:06:10,736 --> 00:06:14,069 What the two shared was the same driving imagination. 70 00:06:14,239 --> 00:06:16,707 The difference perhaps, as Dorpfeld admitted, 71 00:06:16,875 --> 00:06:18,433 was sheer luck. 72 00:06:18,677 --> 00:06:22,078 For Schliemann, even in his childhood dreams, 73 00:06:22,247 --> 00:06:25,978 could hardly have dared imagine what Dorpfeld would now find. 74 00:06:32,924 --> 00:06:37,418 The site of Hisarlik, we now know, was extraordinarily complicated, 75 00:06:38,130 --> 00:06:41,031 with nine cities superimposed on top of each other. 76 00:06:41,299 --> 00:06:45,099 But we can strip off its layers with the help of modern technology. 77 00:06:46,405 --> 00:06:49,966 Before we go to Hisarlik at Dorpfeld's side, 78 00:06:50,275 --> 00:06:55,770 let's not forget what he didn't know about the site, and what he knew or could deduce. 79 00:06:56,081 --> 00:07:00,780 Schliemann had established the basic stratification, the levels of the site. 80 00:07:01,019 --> 00:07:03,283 Dorpfeld knew there was a Roman city on the top, 81 00:07:03,455 --> 00:07:05,116 these yellow lines. 82 00:07:06,057 --> 00:07:09,857 He knew there was a Greek city underneath it, llion, 83 00:07:10,028 --> 00:07:11,893 visited by Alexander the Great. 84 00:07:12,364 --> 00:07:15,356 He knew there was an intermediate settlement, 85 00:07:15,801 --> 00:07:18,269 which Schliemann called the sixth city, 86 00:07:18,503 --> 00:07:20,300 which they couldn't date precisely. 87 00:07:20,906 --> 00:07:23,374 He knew that deep in the prehistoric layers 88 00:07:23,875 --> 00:07:27,470 there was the city Schliemann had thought Homer's Troy. 89 00:07:28,046 --> 00:07:29,843 But when the two of them had dug 90 00:07:30,015 --> 00:07:34,076 together outside this site, in 1890, 91 00:07:34,252 --> 00:07:36,777 they discovered a building and wall 92 00:07:36,955 --> 00:07:38,513 associated with Mycenaean pottery. 93 00:07:38,690 --> 00:07:44,595 In other words, it was this bit, if any, that was connected with the Trojan War. 94 00:07:45,130 --> 00:07:47,724 Dorpfeld next put the clues together. 95 00:07:48,200 --> 00:07:50,225 Part of a house demolished by Schliemann. 96 00:07:50,569 --> 00:07:52,503 Fragments of a circuit wall 97 00:07:52,671 --> 00:07:54,298 Schliemann had hit earlier. 98 00:07:54,773 --> 00:07:57,333 And part of a northern circuit wall that 99 00:07:57,509 --> 00:08:00,273 Schliemann had demolished 20 years before. 100 00:08:00,445 --> 00:08:01,969 Only an architect, perhaps, 101 00:08:02,147 --> 00:08:04,911 could have seen that and put them together. 102 00:08:05,116 --> 00:08:06,845 When Dorpfeld put them together, 103 00:08:07,185 --> 00:08:11,212 something like that must have appeared in his mind's eye. 104 00:08:11,857 --> 00:08:14,451 The question was, what would there be there, 105 00:08:14,626 --> 00:08:17,220 and how much of it would still be standing? 106 00:08:23,602 --> 00:08:28,562 In 1893, paid for by Sophie Schliemann and the German kaiser, 107 00:08:28,773 --> 00:08:31,640 Dorpfeld went back to Hisarlik to find out. 108 00:08:42,754 --> 00:08:45,052 Under 50 feet of earth and debris 109 00:08:45,223 --> 00:08:46,781 and the ruins of later cities, 110 00:08:47,025 --> 00:08:50,688 in a great sweep around the south and east of Schliemann's city, 111 00:08:50,996 --> 00:08:53,294 Dorpfeld uncovered the tremendous walls 112 00:08:53,465 --> 00:08:55,592 of late Bronze Age Troy, 113 00:08:55,800 --> 00:08:59,827 including this marvellous angular watchtower, 114 00:09:00,005 --> 00:09:01,836 which is now hidden from public view, 115 00:09:02,007 --> 00:09:05,306 which could have been the great tower of llium itself. 116 00:09:05,477 --> 00:09:08,810 It's beautifully built out of dressed limestone, 117 00:09:08,980 --> 00:09:12,074 so well done it looks like later classical work. 118 00:09:12,250 --> 00:09:17,278 It helps you understand why Schliemann demolished things like this. 119 00:09:17,856 --> 00:09:19,824 It still stands 25 feet high. 120 00:09:19,991 --> 00:09:22,482 It must have been at least 30 feet high of limestone 121 00:09:22,661 --> 00:09:26,062 and then above it a brick superstructure. 122 00:09:26,231 --> 00:09:27,755 It must have dominated the plain, 123 00:09:27,933 --> 00:09:30,697 jutting out like the prow of an old battleship. 124 00:09:48,119 --> 00:09:50,144 Out of the soil came beautiful walls 125 00:09:50,322 --> 00:09:51,584 which are shown as they were 126 00:09:51,756 --> 00:09:54,919 first seen in Dorpfeld's photographs. 127 00:09:57,495 --> 00:10:01,693 Immediately they seemed to recall the city in Homer's "lliad". 128 00:10:02,567 --> 00:10:04,330 Homer calls the city well-built 129 00:10:04,502 --> 00:10:09,804 and here indeed were walls which made those of Mycenae look crude, even barbaric. 130 00:10:13,645 --> 00:10:17,672 Dorpfeld uncovered the bases of what had once been imposing towers 131 00:10:17,949 --> 00:10:21,817 and again Homer describes Troy's fine towers and gates. 132 00:10:25,256 --> 00:10:27,383 One of them the Scaean Gate, 133 00:10:27,559 --> 00:10:30,426 flanked by the great tower of llios. 134 00:10:34,733 --> 00:10:38,464 Dorpfeld found that the defences had a curious slope. 135 00:10:38,703 --> 00:10:39,362 In the "lliad", 136 00:10:39,537 --> 00:10:43,064 Homer says that three times the Greek hero patroclus 137 00:10:43,241 --> 00:10:48,474 tried with his bare hands to clamber up the angle of Troy's wall. 138 00:10:57,756 --> 00:10:58,950 The place was still small, 139 00:10:59,124 --> 00:11:02,025 its 700-yard circuit less than Mycenae, 140 00:11:02,460 --> 00:11:05,122 but its fine masonry and elegant architecture 141 00:11:05,397 --> 00:11:09,265 showed it had once been the most beautiful fortress in the Aegean. 142 00:11:19,044 --> 00:11:20,705 Dorpfeld was elated. 143 00:11:20,979 --> 00:11:23,880 "The long argument over Troy is over," he wrote. 144 00:11:24,049 --> 00:11:26,643 "The actual remains of the city of priam 145 00:11:26,851 --> 00:11:28,944 "and Hector have come to light. 146 00:11:29,254 --> 00:11:31,552 "Schliemann has been vindicated. 147 00:11:31,790 --> 00:11:34,054 The Trojans have triumphedl" 148 00:11:41,966 --> 00:11:44,491 Dorpfeld hadn't proved it was called Troy, 149 00:11:44,769 --> 00:11:45,963 but he had proved there was 150 00:11:46,137 --> 00:11:47,934 a late Bronze Age citadel here, 151 00:11:48,139 --> 00:11:49,231 with Mycenaean contacts, 152 00:11:49,407 --> 00:11:51,807 in the right place by the Dardanelles 153 00:11:51,976 --> 00:11:56,879 with uncanny resemblance to what the bardic tradition of Homer said. 154 00:11:57,148 --> 00:12:00,811 But what was his evidence that it had been destroyed by war? 155 00:12:02,821 --> 00:12:07,986 He says, "Signs of a great fire were evident in many places. 156 00:12:08,226 --> 00:12:11,024 "The upper parts of the walls and towers had been toppled. 157 00:12:11,196 --> 00:12:13,460 "The inner buildings had been levelled. 158 00:12:13,765 --> 00:12:15,027 "Evidently," he said, 159 00:12:15,233 --> 00:12:18,168 "the city had been destroyed by the hand of an enemy. 160 00:12:18,436 --> 00:12:21,098 "Durch Feindeshand zerstort." 161 00:12:22,774 --> 00:12:25,072 Dorpfeld's dig on Hisarlik makes him 162 00:12:25,243 --> 00:12:27,302 the most important of its excavators. 163 00:12:27,545 --> 00:12:29,945 But his great book, "Troy and llion" 164 00:12:30,181 --> 00:12:31,910 was never translated out of German. 165 00:12:32,517 --> 00:12:37,011 Indeed, even before it went to press in 1900, 166 00:12:37,355 --> 00:12:40,847 the finds which it announced up here by the Dardanelles 167 00:12:41,025 --> 00:12:47,225 were to be totally eclipsed by sensational discoveries in Crete, 168 00:12:47,465 --> 00:12:50,366 where a revolution in archaeology was about to take place, 169 00:12:50,568 --> 00:12:56,165 single-handedly achieved by an Englishman of genius, Arthur Evans. 170 00:12:57,208 --> 00:13:01,474 Evans would destroy Schliemann and Dorpfeld's romantic vision 171 00:13:01,646 --> 00:13:03,477 of a Homeric Bronze Age. 172 00:13:17,061 --> 00:13:19,188 Evans was born in 1851 173 00:13:19,364 --> 00:13:22,333 into an atmosphere of Victorian industry, 174 00:13:23,301 --> 00:13:25,166 a family firm which later provided him 175 00:13:25,336 --> 00:13:27,861 with the fortune he spent on archaeology. 176 00:13:30,041 --> 00:13:33,135 His father, John, owned a big paper mill in Hertfordshire 177 00:13:33,311 --> 00:13:37,179 but John Evans was also a leading prehistoric scholar of the day, 178 00:13:37,348 --> 00:13:39,612 correspondent of Heinrich Schliemann. 179 00:13:41,853 --> 00:13:43,787 The young Evans grew up 180 00:13:43,955 --> 00:13:46,856 fascinated by history and by writing. 181 00:13:57,235 --> 00:13:59,260 Unlike the self-taught Schliemann, 182 00:13:59,470 --> 00:14:03,429 Evans had a classical education, public school and Oxford. 183 00:14:06,277 --> 00:14:07,301 And he returned to Oxford 184 00:14:07,478 --> 00:14:10,811 to devote himself to his passion, archaeology. 185 00:14:20,391 --> 00:14:23,849 Oxford in the 1880s was a ferment of new ideas 186 00:14:24,028 --> 00:14:26,189 about geology and pre-history, 187 00:14:26,831 --> 00:14:30,528 provoked by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, 188 00:14:30,735 --> 00:14:32,396 a friend of Evans's father. 189 00:14:40,411 --> 00:14:44,074 The discovery of new cultures, a by-product of their imperialism, 190 00:14:44,249 --> 00:14:46,649 seized the late-Victorian imagination, 191 00:14:46,851 --> 00:14:47,818 shaping their belief 192 00:14:47,986 --> 00:14:49,510 in the evolutionary development 193 00:14:49,687 --> 00:14:54,124 from the so-called primitive societies to the higher civilisations. 194 00:14:55,393 --> 00:14:58,419 Such ideas formed Evans's view of historical progress 195 00:14:58,596 --> 00:15:02,157 long before he went to Greece to try to solve the enigma 196 00:15:02,333 --> 00:15:03,732 which had eluded Schliemann - 197 00:15:04,602 --> 00:15:09,232 why had Mycenaean civilisation left no trace of writing? 198 00:15:10,208 --> 00:15:13,666 The climactic year for Arthur Evans was 1893, 199 00:15:13,945 --> 00:15:16,743 when the course of his life was determined. 200 00:15:17,115 --> 00:15:18,912 It was also a tragic year for him. 201 00:15:19,284 --> 00:15:22,879 His wife died. He was a still youthful 41. 202 00:15:23,121 --> 00:15:28,684 But that February, in Athens, Evans was rummaging in the flea market 203 00:15:29,027 --> 00:15:30,722 when he came across a number of these. 204 00:15:31,663 --> 00:15:36,293 Three or four-sided incised and drilled seal stones. 205 00:15:37,535 --> 00:15:39,196 He was told they came from Crete. 206 00:15:39,604 --> 00:15:41,765 With his eye for microscopic detail, 207 00:15:42,040 --> 00:15:46,409 he thought he could distinguish signs of a hieroglyphic system of writing. 208 00:15:46,844 --> 00:15:50,405 Such systems were known in the ancient Near East, like Egypt, 209 00:15:50,648 --> 00:15:54,140 but the idea of writing like this in prehistoric Europe 210 00:15:54,319 --> 00:15:57,447 would seem far-fetched to most scholars at that time. 211 00:15:58,089 --> 00:16:01,581 The idea had been floated by Schliemann, among others. 212 00:16:01,826 --> 00:16:04,920 He and a number of people thought that in Crete 213 00:16:05,096 --> 00:16:09,829 they might find the first example of the adoption of writing in the West. 214 00:16:10,168 --> 00:16:14,264 So it was to Crete that Evans turned to find his answers. 215 00:16:14,439 --> 00:16:18,273 And there, one can only say, destiny awaited him. 216 00:16:32,557 --> 00:16:34,787 Crete was steeped in legend. 217 00:16:35,259 --> 00:16:37,420 Here had been the seat of King Minos, 218 00:16:37,595 --> 00:16:38,789 who had ruled the Aegean 219 00:16:38,963 --> 00:16:41,261 with his navy long before the Trojan War. 220 00:16:44,502 --> 00:16:46,129 It was the site of the labyrinth, 221 00:16:46,304 --> 00:16:51,003 lair of a monstrous half-man, half-bull, the Minotaur. 222 00:16:55,279 --> 00:16:59,113 Here Daedalus had fashioned the wings with which Icarus 223 00:16:59,283 --> 00:17:03,049 had escaped from Crete only to fly too near the sun. 224 00:17:07,325 --> 00:17:09,156 From here, according to Homer, 225 00:17:09,360 --> 00:17:13,956 King Idomeneus sailed to Troy with his 80 black ships. 226 00:17:39,057 --> 00:17:40,490 Evans first arrived in Crete 227 00:17:40,658 --> 00:17:42,421 in March 1894, 228 00:17:42,727 --> 00:17:44,490 "Feeling the worse for a bad 229 00:17:44,662 --> 00:17:47,927 24-hour voyage from piraeus," he wrote. 230 00:17:48,566 --> 00:17:50,158 He had come, he said grandly, 231 00:17:50,334 --> 00:17:52,825 "to find the origin of Greek civilisation 232 00:17:53,004 --> 00:17:57,202 "and with it the origin of all great culture that has ever been." 233 00:18:15,526 --> 00:18:17,687 Crete is a continent in miniature, 234 00:18:17,962 --> 00:18:22,331 a stepping stone between Europe, the Near East and Africa. 235 00:18:22,500 --> 00:18:24,968 Its people are descended from prehistoric folk - 236 00:18:25,136 --> 00:18:27,468 Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Turks. 237 00:18:27,738 --> 00:18:32,198 All have left their mark on the landscape and the faces of the island. 238 00:18:34,145 --> 00:18:37,581 But where would Evans's search for writing lead now? 239 00:18:38,749 --> 00:18:44,016 On his very first day he wandered around the market in Iraklion. 240 00:18:45,089 --> 00:18:47,353 There he found more seal stones. 241 00:18:47,825 --> 00:18:49,656 "A clue was in my hands," he wrote, 242 00:18:49,827 --> 00:18:51,488 "and I resolved to follow it, 243 00:18:51,662 --> 00:18:55,894 "if possible to the innermost recesses of the labyrinth itself." 244 00:19:04,709 --> 00:19:10,147 For the seal stones had indeed come from the site of the legendary labyrinth, 245 00:19:10,715 --> 00:19:15,584 a then insignificant hill now known to the world as Knossos. 246 00:19:16,587 --> 00:19:20,717 The paths of history and myth had begun to converge. 247 00:19:20,992 --> 00:19:22,118 Knossos. 248 00:19:42,647 --> 00:19:44,444 The hill Evans saw was very different 249 00:19:44,615 --> 00:19:46,480 from the one we see today. 250 00:19:46,851 --> 00:19:51,379 After his excavation, Evans decided to partially reconstruct the palace. 251 00:19:51,689 --> 00:19:54,852 To an extent, what there is now is his. 252 00:20:04,669 --> 00:20:09,936 But what did he see when he first put spade to soil in March 1900? 253 00:20:24,155 --> 00:20:27,454 His finds were nothing less than a revelation. 254 00:20:32,096 --> 00:20:33,688 Only inches below the surface 255 00:20:33,864 --> 00:20:37,356 he found a throne room 3,500 years old. 256 00:20:38,502 --> 00:20:40,970 It was in an unbelievable state of preservation, 257 00:20:41,138 --> 00:20:44,596 fragments of painting still hanging on the walls. 258 00:20:47,678 --> 00:20:50,909 In the store rooms, rows ofjars still contained grain, 259 00:20:51,082 --> 00:20:52,982 dried beans and lentils. 260 00:21:00,091 --> 00:21:02,821 It was obvious to Evans what the palace was. 261 00:21:03,060 --> 00:21:05,392 It was, of course, Mycenaean. 262 00:21:12,637 --> 00:21:16,437 A Cretan palace which had been conquered by Mycenaean mainlanders 263 00:21:16,607 --> 00:21:19,576 and finally destroyed around 1200 BC. 264 00:21:20,177 --> 00:21:21,542 The interpretation and the date 265 00:21:21,712 --> 00:21:25,512 fitted Homer's picture of a Greek king, Idomeneus, 266 00:21:25,683 --> 00:21:28,811 on the throne of Knossos at the time of the Trojan War. 267 00:21:33,924 --> 00:21:36,688 The palace resembled those in mainland Greece, 268 00:21:36,994 --> 00:21:39,326 paintings like those at Tiryns. 269 00:21:42,833 --> 00:21:44,027 Stone rosettes like those 270 00:21:44,201 --> 00:21:46,931 on the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae. 271 00:21:51,976 --> 00:21:54,274 Above all, stirrupjars, 272 00:21:54,512 --> 00:21:55,137 as Evans wrote, 273 00:21:55,313 --> 00:21:58,077 "The most common form of Mycenaean pottery." 274 00:22:00,117 --> 00:22:03,211 But who were these so-called Mycenaeans? 275 00:22:13,364 --> 00:22:16,060 The answer clearly lay in Evans' key find. 276 00:22:16,334 --> 00:22:20,430 Only days into the dig he had turned up strange baked-clay tablets. 277 00:22:20,705 --> 00:22:24,539 They were inscribed with an unknown system of writing. 278 00:22:32,817 --> 00:22:35,308 Confident he would soon decipher their script, 279 00:22:35,553 --> 00:22:37,646 Evans persuaded the Oxford University press 280 00:22:37,822 --> 00:22:40,416 to cast a type fount for his new language. 281 00:22:46,564 --> 00:22:49,431 He was convinced he had found the missing link 282 00:22:49,600 --> 00:22:53,001 between the cultures of the Near East and of early Greece, 283 00:22:53,204 --> 00:22:55,968 one of the great languages of the ancient world. 284 00:22:59,944 --> 00:23:00,933 Like his other finds, 285 00:23:01,145 --> 00:23:03,010 he called it Mycenaean. 286 00:23:04,348 --> 00:23:07,613 But within months, he completely changed his mind. 287 00:23:08,419 --> 00:23:11,718 It was not Mycenaean, but Minoan. 288 00:23:15,526 --> 00:23:18,620 Evans took the name from the legendary King Minos. 289 00:23:18,796 --> 00:23:21,128 Minos came to stand for the Minoan culture 290 00:23:21,298 --> 00:23:24,062 which Evans thought had ruled mainland Greece, 291 00:23:24,301 --> 00:23:26,531 including Schliemann's Mycenae. 292 00:23:26,771 --> 00:23:30,229 The bull of Minos had replaced the mask of Agamemnon 293 00:23:30,408 --> 00:23:33,343 as the symbol of the Aegean Bronze Age. 294 00:23:38,749 --> 00:23:40,944 The palace of Minos, Evans thought, 295 00:23:41,152 --> 00:23:45,054 had been the centre of an empire which had dominated the Aegean 296 00:23:45,222 --> 00:23:47,019 just as the legend had it. 297 00:23:54,031 --> 00:23:57,899 Its people were sophisticated, controlled, but fun-loving, 298 00:23:58,102 --> 00:23:59,729 devotees of outdoor sports 299 00:23:59,904 --> 00:24:03,340 like the strange bull-leaping depicted on the frescos. 300 00:24:20,691 --> 00:24:24,559 For Evans, the Minoans were lovers of the natural world, 301 00:24:24,728 --> 00:24:29,688 their rituals and festivals presenting the image of a lost Golden Age. 302 00:24:36,974 --> 00:24:39,909 Presided over by their bull-masked king 303 00:24:40,077 --> 00:24:42,477 who issued Europe's first law code 304 00:24:42,646 --> 00:24:45,308 from the throne of the palace of Minos. 305 00:24:50,221 --> 00:24:53,349 Evans identified intensely with that vision. 306 00:24:53,657 --> 00:24:56,785 Perhaps that's why he felt impelled to reconstruct the palace - 307 00:24:56,961 --> 00:24:59,828 literally to make the vision concrete. 308 00:25:03,234 --> 00:25:05,702 I'm sure most people who come to Knossos 309 00:25:05,870 --> 00:25:10,569 must at some point wonder about these reconstructions of Sir Arthur Evans 310 00:25:10,741 --> 00:25:12,902 and the psychology behind them. 311 00:25:13,277 --> 00:25:14,904 Did he do it for the general public or 312 00:25:15,079 --> 00:25:19,914 to gratify some inner need to make it all more tangible? 313 00:25:20,117 --> 00:25:24,884 Schliemann's driving obsession, his inner demon, 314 00:25:25,055 --> 00:25:27,819 is so near to the surface, so naive. 315 00:25:28,058 --> 00:25:29,855 With Evans it seems different, 316 00:25:30,060 --> 00:25:33,496 but he was just as much a man of his time. 317 00:25:33,864 --> 00:25:38,062 It was a troubled time, the 1890s and the early years of the 20th century. 318 00:25:38,269 --> 00:25:40,430 A lot of creative people were dismayed 319 00:25:40,604 --> 00:25:45,837 by what they saw as the rising tide of industrialism and imperialism. 320 00:25:46,110 --> 00:25:50,171 It wasn't just artists like Gauguin rushing off to Tahiti 321 00:25:50,347 --> 00:25:52,508 to find the lost innocence of the world. 322 00:25:52,716 --> 00:25:54,980 It was intellectuals too, like H G Wells. 323 00:25:55,252 --> 00:25:59,484 I think Arthur Evans found his lost innocence here. 324 00:26:00,658 --> 00:26:02,819 His sister said that he was a romantic 325 00:26:02,993 --> 00:26:06,429 who needed to escape from the present 326 00:26:06,697 --> 00:26:10,599 and that he found this new civilisation so wonderfully to his taste, 327 00:26:10,801 --> 00:26:16,068 and here at Knossos he was able to create a world where his mind and eye could dwell, 328 00:26:16,307 --> 00:26:18,639 a world where he could escape the painfulness of 329 00:26:18,809 --> 00:26:21,607 the present where he found no peace. 330 00:26:29,587 --> 00:26:34,115 So there was no room for Homer in Evans's view of the Aegean Bronze Age. 331 00:26:34,758 --> 00:26:37,784 The benevolent imperialists from Knossos 332 00:26:37,962 --> 00:26:39,429 were the history makers, 333 00:26:39,597 --> 00:26:41,087 the new Victorians. 334 00:26:51,542 --> 00:26:54,033 Across the Aegean in the 15th century BC, 335 00:26:54,278 --> 00:26:56,178 King Minos ruled the waves, 336 00:26:56,447 --> 00:26:57,880 master and civiliser of what 337 00:26:58,048 --> 00:27:00,846 Schliemann had thought Homeric Greece. 338 00:27:07,558 --> 00:27:10,823 The valleys of Mycenae were farmed by Cretan colonists, 339 00:27:10,995 --> 00:27:13,486 nabobs in a Minoan raj, 340 00:27:18,168 --> 00:27:20,329 The great building achievements, 341 00:27:20,537 --> 00:27:22,937 like the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae, 342 00:27:23,240 --> 00:27:24,400 were the work of Cretans, 343 00:27:24,675 --> 00:27:29,169 perhaps even of the architect Daedalus himself. 344 00:27:31,982 --> 00:27:35,383 After the fall of Knossos in around 1400 BC, 345 00:27:35,719 --> 00:27:39,348 Evans thought Mycenae was left a decadent backwater. 346 00:27:39,723 --> 00:27:43,921 From here no imperial expedition could ever have set sail. 347 00:27:44,294 --> 00:27:47,559 The Trojan War was a mere fairy tale. 348 00:28:04,715 --> 00:28:06,012 In the academic world, 349 00:28:06,283 --> 00:28:09,377 Evans's ideas became the Establishment view. 350 00:28:10,020 --> 00:28:14,184 He himself appeared a stern figure who brooked no argument. 351 00:28:16,060 --> 00:28:21,327 But his godson, James Candy, who lived with him before the First War 352 00:28:21,498 --> 00:28:23,489 knew a different side of the great man. 353 00:28:24,902 --> 00:28:29,362 This is the place. By Jove, you're going to see a view here! 354 00:28:30,040 --> 00:28:32,133 Wait till we get up to these doors. 355 00:28:32,342 --> 00:28:37,439 And then I'm going tojust push it open and you go straight in. 356 00:28:37,614 --> 00:28:38,911 Look at that! 357 00:28:39,817 --> 00:28:42,809 - Isn't that lovely? - It's wonderful. 358 00:28:43,954 --> 00:28:47,412 - I used to come here and giggle. - What an extraordinary place! 359 00:28:48,692 --> 00:28:53,254 Here Evans built an artificial lake and a house to share with his wife. 360 00:28:53,731 --> 00:28:55,665 Her early death shattered that hope 361 00:28:55,833 --> 00:28:57,460 but when not in Knossos, 362 00:28:57,634 --> 00:29:00,865 the childless Evans retreated to this private world. 363 00:29:03,140 --> 00:29:07,076 The house, with its Minoan fantasies, is gone now, 364 00:29:07,277 --> 00:29:09,472 though the gardens Evans planted remain. 365 00:29:10,080 --> 00:29:13,982 Here, the boy Candy knew him in a way his fellow scholars never did. 366 00:29:14,251 --> 00:29:17,345 - He grew his fingernail? - The others were all right. 367 00:29:17,521 --> 00:29:21,082 That one was his personal excavator! 368 00:29:22,359 --> 00:29:26,728 Because, you see, he'd look at things, as he was myopic, 369 00:29:26,997 --> 00:29:32,799 he'd look at things - rare coins or pottery - 370 00:29:33,003 --> 00:29:34,493 he would... 371 00:29:38,108 --> 00:29:39,598 - Marvellous. - Marvellous! 372 00:29:39,810 --> 00:29:41,107 What sort of man was he? 373 00:29:41,311 --> 00:29:43,905 I'm wondering if he was a bit of a romantic. 374 00:29:44,081 --> 00:29:47,380 In his academic work he seems rather severe. 375 00:29:47,751 --> 00:29:49,548 There were two sides to him. 376 00:29:49,720 --> 00:29:56,057 In fact, his contemporaries, when they came down to stay here, 377 00:29:57,327 --> 00:29:58,589 saw Sir Arthur, they said, 378 00:29:58,762 --> 00:30:01,094 "This is not the Sir Arthur that I know 379 00:30:01,331 --> 00:30:07,566 at Knossos or the Athenaeum or the British Museum or the Ashmolean." 380 00:30:07,738 --> 00:30:09,831 - He frightened them. - Frightened them to death! 381 00:30:10,007 --> 00:30:13,443 - His reputation was as a tyrant. - Yes, very autocratic! 382 00:30:13,610 --> 00:30:17,046 So he really shared his real thoughts with you? 383 00:30:17,281 --> 00:30:20,717 He was happy when he was with children. 384 00:30:21,618 --> 00:30:23,483 He loved playing charades, dressing up, 385 00:30:23,654 --> 00:30:29,752 because he had a beautiful collection of Balkan shawls and covers and so on, 386 00:30:29,927 --> 00:30:32,623 on his sofas and that sort of thing. 387 00:30:32,896 --> 00:30:36,491 The boys had yellow little ribbons put on 388 00:30:36,667 --> 00:30:38,134 and the girls had blue. 389 00:30:39,069 --> 00:30:41,765 You had to match up with them. 390 00:30:42,039 --> 00:30:43,802 And then you'd dance. 391 00:30:43,974 --> 00:30:48,035 But he would lead the little girl onto the floor of the hall. 392 00:30:54,785 --> 00:30:59,688 It went rather like a labyrinth, all the way round, so you had to follow it. 393 00:30:59,957 --> 00:31:04,223 But, in time, you came to the middle. 394 00:31:04,428 --> 00:31:08,057 And there would Sir Arthur be, on top of the Minotaur. 395 00:31:08,398 --> 00:31:10,628 And, of course, these children would come up and 396 00:31:10,801 --> 00:31:14,168 he'd go "Rahhhrr!" 397 00:31:14,371 --> 00:31:18,740 Like that, and throw the child up in the air and catch it! 398 00:31:18,942 --> 00:31:19,465 Then put it down. 399 00:31:19,643 --> 00:31:23,238 "Next one!" Make the noise of a bull. 400 00:31:24,314 --> 00:31:28,410 That went on till... There were about 20 or 30 children. 401 00:31:28,619 --> 00:31:33,147 And, of course, one or two, "Ooh, I don't like the bull!" 402 00:31:33,357 --> 00:31:37,418 And the others thought that was absolutely marvellous! 403 00:31:37,761 --> 00:31:40,992 Did he talk to you about his Cretan discoveries? 404 00:31:41,164 --> 00:31:45,328 Did he help you imagine what he'd found, what the Minoans were like? 405 00:31:45,502 --> 00:31:47,800 - Did he see them as real people? - Yes. 406 00:31:47,971 --> 00:31:53,375 - How did he paint it? - As real people in a simplified form. 407 00:31:53,543 --> 00:31:59,413 He didn't say this was a certain... 2000 BC, and all the technical side. 408 00:31:59,583 --> 00:32:01,744 He brought them alive to you. 409 00:32:01,985 --> 00:32:06,945 I mean, his description of lying in the villa Ariadne, 410 00:32:07,124 --> 00:32:12,357 in the big earthquake, when everybody was screaming and rushing around, 411 00:32:12,629 --> 00:32:19,501 he lay there and he was most intrigued because under the bed, the great rumblings, 412 00:32:20,003 --> 00:32:22,233 as he said in the letter to me, 413 00:32:22,406 --> 00:32:25,102 he said, "It was the bull bellowing." 414 00:32:27,044 --> 00:32:28,306 - Wonderful. - Yeah. 415 00:32:31,014 --> 00:32:34,950 That's what fascinated me and still fascinates me, 416 00:32:35,152 --> 00:32:36,915 that he was two people. 417 00:32:49,299 --> 00:32:50,391 Evans stood over the field 418 00:32:50,567 --> 00:32:52,694 for 50 years like a giant. 419 00:32:53,036 --> 00:32:56,199 "The palace of Minos" is perhaps the greatest work 420 00:32:56,373 --> 00:32:58,603 of archaeological scholarship ever. 421 00:32:58,809 --> 00:33:01,801 No man has ever dominated a field like he did. 422 00:33:02,045 --> 00:33:04,070 But major problems were unresolved, 423 00:33:04,247 --> 00:33:09,082 especially the writing, which had led him to Knossos in the first place. 424 00:33:09,720 --> 00:33:11,278 He'd put his thoughts down on paper 425 00:33:11,455 --> 00:33:14,583 in 1909 in "Scripta Minoa" 426 00:33:14,891 --> 00:33:16,654 but the mysterious tablets, 427 00:33:16,827 --> 00:33:20,126 "the Minoan writing", as he called it, Linear B, 428 00:33:20,430 --> 00:33:22,227 still remained untranslated. 429 00:33:22,599 --> 00:33:24,328 "The one thing they could not be," 430 00:33:24,601 --> 00:33:27,297 he asserted time and again, "was Greek." 431 00:33:27,871 --> 00:33:31,102 But opponents felt Mycenae had 432 00:33:31,274 --> 00:33:33,105 always been independent of Crete 433 00:33:33,377 --> 00:33:36,437 and that in the 13th century it had ruled the Aegean 434 00:33:36,613 --> 00:33:40,208 and headed a confederacy which could have attacked Troy. 435 00:33:41,051 --> 00:33:44,817 Chief among the opponents was an American, Carl Blegen. 436 00:33:55,766 --> 00:33:58,064 With the young and confident Americans, 437 00:33:58,268 --> 00:34:01,533 Aegean archaeology enters the age of film. 438 00:34:02,372 --> 00:34:06,103 After the authoritarian Germans and the old-school Britons, 439 00:34:06,276 --> 00:34:09,803 the New World would bring a fresh and more scientific eye 440 00:34:09,980 --> 00:34:12,073 to the Old World's greatest story. 441 00:34:15,519 --> 00:34:19,387 And coming out of the Depression, it must have seemed a swell party. 442 00:34:34,037 --> 00:34:35,937 Blegen was born in 1886 443 00:34:36,106 --> 00:34:37,596 and trained as an archaeologist 444 00:34:37,774 --> 00:34:40,140 when Evans was at his most influential. 445 00:34:40,410 --> 00:34:41,502 A quiet mid-Westerner, 446 00:34:41,678 --> 00:34:45,705 he evolved his own ideas about Evans' Minoan theory. 447 00:34:47,851 --> 00:34:49,318 Looking at the same evidence as Evans, 448 00:34:49,486 --> 00:34:52,080 Blegen saw something very different. 449 00:34:55,459 --> 00:34:59,361 Finds of pottery from mainland Greece all over the eastern Mediterranean 450 00:34:59,529 --> 00:35:01,121 suggested to him that 451 00:35:01,298 --> 00:35:02,959 the backwater of Mycenae 452 00:35:03,133 --> 00:35:07,467 had actually dominated the Aegean in the 14th and 13th centuries, 453 00:35:08,271 --> 00:35:10,330 Evans's "age of decadence". 454 00:35:12,442 --> 00:35:14,239 Blegen found a friend and an ally 455 00:35:14,411 --> 00:35:16,538 in an English scholar, Alan Wace. 456 00:35:17,647 --> 00:35:20,673 By 1930, the two had a system of Mycenaean pottery 457 00:35:20,851 --> 00:35:22,842 which could give accurate dates. 458 00:35:23,453 --> 00:35:27,253 They were sure now that Homer's picture of an imperial Mycenae 459 00:35:27,424 --> 00:35:29,153 was basically right. 460 00:35:30,627 --> 00:35:33,824 And that, of course, led them back to Troy itself. 461 00:35:34,598 --> 00:35:36,088 Was the story true? 462 00:35:36,566 --> 00:35:39,091 Was Hisarlik really Troy? 463 00:35:44,975 --> 00:35:47,705 "Athens, 9th July 1931. 464 00:35:48,211 --> 00:35:50,441 "Dear guv," Blegen wrote to Wace. 465 00:35:50,814 --> 00:35:52,941 "Troy is a splendid site and one could 466 00:35:53,116 --> 00:35:54,743 "still do a good bit of digging there. 467 00:35:54,985 --> 00:35:57,886 "I wish we could get up an expedition. 468 00:35:58,054 --> 00:36:02,047 "I could raise the money if there were any prospect of a permit. 469 00:36:02,359 --> 00:36:04,850 "But I don't think there's any chance of that." 470 00:36:11,768 --> 00:36:14,703 But in 1932, with Dorpfeld's help, 471 00:36:14,871 --> 00:36:16,304 Blegen's chance came - 472 00:36:16,540 --> 00:36:20,567 to dig areas left untouched by the Germans 40 years before. 473 00:36:21,678 --> 00:36:24,579 The searchers were again on Homer's trail. 474 00:36:32,756 --> 00:36:36,385 As Hitler was poised to come to power in Germany, 475 00:36:36,593 --> 00:36:39,323 the third exploration of Hisarlik began. 476 00:36:39,563 --> 00:36:40,928 Blegen filmed it, 477 00:36:41,164 --> 00:36:43,428 one of the first digs to be so recorded. 478 00:36:47,270 --> 00:36:49,738 He re-examined all nine levels of the hill, 479 00:36:50,040 --> 00:36:53,874 stretching long before and long after the time of the Trojan War. 480 00:36:54,110 --> 00:36:58,240 It was nothing less than a cross-section of human history. 481 00:37:00,417 --> 00:37:03,409 But Homer was never far from Blegen's thoughts. 482 00:37:04,120 --> 00:37:07,146 Had Dorpfeld's city of the fine angled walls 483 00:37:07,324 --> 00:37:09,884 really witnessed the events of the "lliad"? 484 00:37:16,933 --> 00:37:21,233 Now there came yet another twist to this already extraordinary story. 485 00:37:22,572 --> 00:37:25,666 Blegen decided that the heaped walls of Dorpfeld's city 486 00:37:25,842 --> 00:37:28,470 had not been toppled by Agamemnon's army 487 00:37:28,645 --> 00:37:31,637 but by a tremendous natural catastrophe. 488 00:37:33,483 --> 00:37:34,711 An earthquake. 489 00:37:44,761 --> 00:37:47,628 To understand where that left Homer's tale, 490 00:37:47,831 --> 00:37:48,627 we need to look at what 491 00:37:48,798 --> 00:37:50,789 he found above the earthquake - 492 00:37:50,967 --> 00:37:54,403 the city built on the debris of Dorpfeld's Troy. 493 00:37:57,307 --> 00:38:00,299 Blegen excavated in four main areas. 494 00:38:00,844 --> 00:38:03,438 Here, around the east gate. 495 00:38:04,648 --> 00:38:05,615 On the north 496 00:38:05,782 --> 00:38:08,774 where he uncovered part of the circuit wall demolished by Schliemann. 497 00:38:09,419 --> 00:38:10,351 On the west he found 498 00:38:10,520 --> 00:38:15,981 the footings of an immense bastion which went down 23 feet below ground level, 499 00:38:16,293 --> 00:38:21,026 forming a counterpoint to the bastion uncovered by Dorpfeld. 500 00:38:21,264 --> 00:38:22,629 Here by the south gate, 501 00:38:23,400 --> 00:38:27,837 Blegen found the foundations of a colonnaded house, 502 00:38:28,104 --> 00:38:31,232 which he called the pillar house, 30 yards long, 503 00:38:31,541 --> 00:38:34,305 with the remains of the main street going past it. 504 00:38:35,645 --> 00:38:39,172 This great city, however, Blegen decided, 505 00:38:39,416 --> 00:38:41,577 had been destroyed by an earthquake. 506 00:38:41,885 --> 00:38:44,911 End of the line for Homer's story? Well, not quite. 507 00:38:45,088 --> 00:38:46,851 Blegen's attention focused on 508 00:38:47,023 --> 00:38:49,821 the successor city, Troy Vlla, 509 00:38:50,627 --> 00:38:54,563 where a remarkable change had come over the character of the settlement. 510 00:38:54,864 --> 00:38:58,925 These grand houses with the wide spaces between them 511 00:38:59,469 --> 00:39:02,996 seem to have been superseded by a network of tenements, 512 00:39:03,273 --> 00:39:05,332 immediately obvious to the eye. 513 00:39:08,478 --> 00:39:09,740 What had happened? 514 00:39:27,697 --> 00:39:33,158 After the earthquake, the survivors had cleared the debris and rebuilt where they could. 515 00:39:33,403 --> 00:39:37,169 But all over the hill, Blegen detected signs that all was not well. 516 00:39:37,474 --> 00:39:42,844 When you walked up the main street, you saw the evidence immediately. 517 00:39:48,551 --> 00:39:53,818 In here, the Americans found three not particularly well-built rooms 518 00:39:53,990 --> 00:39:56,925 of which, this, the largest, was a bakery. 519 00:39:57,093 --> 00:40:01,359 They found grinders for pounding the grain into flour. 520 00:40:01,531 --> 00:40:05,297 They found fireplaces, improvised ovens for baking the bread. 521 00:40:05,468 --> 00:40:06,662 And in that corner, 522 00:40:06,836 --> 00:40:11,637 a series of bins made out of wood and brick for the storage of loaves, 523 00:40:11,808 --> 00:40:15,244 such as you can see in the Mediterranean today. 524 00:40:15,478 --> 00:40:20,108 Carl Blegen also thought that liquid was stored and dispensed here. 525 00:40:20,316 --> 00:40:26,118 He thought this was the slop tray with a drain out into the street. 526 00:40:26,322 --> 00:40:31,726 Being a bakery, you would expect surplus water would have to be got rid of. 527 00:40:32,028 --> 00:40:35,464 But Carl Blegen thought that it was wine 528 00:40:35,732 --> 00:40:38,257 and that wine was dispensed here. 529 00:40:38,535 --> 00:40:40,730 The interpretation he gave to the suite of buildings 530 00:40:40,904 --> 00:40:47,639 was that bread and wine were sold in that kiosk straight onto the street. 531 00:40:47,877 --> 00:40:50,277 Sold to thirsty and harassed heroes 532 00:40:50,447 --> 00:40:55,851 as they staggered back after a hard day's fighting in the Trojan plain. 533 00:40:56,453 --> 00:41:01,254 In considering that vivid image, remember it is the product of 534 00:41:01,424 --> 00:41:04,985 an archaeologist working in the middle years of this century. 535 00:41:06,196 --> 00:41:08,664 The model is the soup kitchens of 536 00:41:08,832 --> 00:41:11,733 the cities of Europe in the Second World War. 537 00:41:11,935 --> 00:41:13,425 A suitably contemporary image for 538 00:41:13,603 --> 00:41:16,401 this 20th-century version of the tale of Troy. 539 00:41:20,977 --> 00:41:26,415 Blegen thought he had found a Troy which had suffered two catastrophes - 540 00:41:26,583 --> 00:41:31,247 the first by an earthquake, the second soon after by the hand of man. 541 00:41:33,957 --> 00:41:35,515 Everything seemed to fit. 542 00:41:37,026 --> 00:41:39,358 At its height, before the earthquake, 543 00:41:39,596 --> 00:41:43,054 the city had two dozen fine houses widely spaced. 544 00:41:43,600 --> 00:41:47,661 Now those spaces were blocked with shanties, gloomy bungalows, 545 00:41:47,937 --> 00:41:51,600 one-roomed and partitioned pre-fabs squashed together. 546 00:42:03,119 --> 00:42:04,381 The underfloors of the houses were 547 00:42:04,554 --> 00:42:06,715 honeycombed with sunken storage jars, 548 00:42:07,023 --> 00:42:08,115 covered with flagstones, 549 00:42:08,291 --> 00:42:10,782 to keep grain, beans, smoked meat. 550 00:42:19,602 --> 00:42:21,900 The normally taciturn Blegen was prepared to 551 00:42:22,071 --> 00:42:24,801 talk of a war economy, rations. 552 00:42:25,074 --> 00:42:26,769 Dare we say it? Well, he did. 553 00:42:27,010 --> 00:42:28,773 "A siege mentality." 554 00:42:47,730 --> 00:42:52,133 "It was as if those last carefree summers before the second war, 555 00:42:52,602 --> 00:42:57,039 "the sharpness of the light, the gaiety, the gentle horseplay, 556 00:42:57,273 --> 00:42:59,673 "had found an unconscious response in the tale 557 00:43:00,310 --> 00:43:03,040 "in the last calm before Troy was attacked. 558 00:43:03,613 --> 00:43:06,673 "'A dream of calm', the poet Aeschylus said, 559 00:43:06,983 --> 00:43:10,419 "which came to Troy with the delicate adornment of riches, 560 00:43:10,653 --> 00:43:12,917 "desire that stings the heart." 561 00:43:21,230 --> 00:43:24,666 "Smoke marks even now the conquered city. 562 00:43:25,134 --> 00:43:27,898 "Whirlwinds of doom are still alive. 563 00:43:28,304 --> 00:43:33,537 "The embers dying with the city send forth rich gusts of wealth. 564 00:43:36,346 --> 00:43:38,405 "I hear the cries of the vanquished, 565 00:43:38,748 --> 00:43:41,615 "people thrown on the bodies of husbands and brothers, 566 00:43:41,784 --> 00:43:44,719 "children lying in their aged parents' arms, 567 00:43:44,921 --> 00:43:49,881 "voices no longer free bewailing the deaths of their loved ones. 568 00:43:57,834 --> 00:44:01,270 "We executed payment for their presumptuous robbery. 569 00:44:01,738 --> 00:44:03,535 "They raped our queen. 570 00:44:03,773 --> 00:44:05,502 "We raped their city. 571 00:44:05,975 --> 00:44:07,203 "And we were right." 572 00:44:24,560 --> 00:44:26,994 The city was destroyed by fire 573 00:44:27,163 --> 00:44:31,031 possibly within even a generation of being rebuilt. 574 00:44:31,734 --> 00:44:36,603 In the street, the debris was as much as five feet thick of charred wood, 575 00:44:36,773 --> 00:44:38,673 bricks, rubble and ashes. 576 00:44:39,308 --> 00:44:42,471 In the entrance to the snack bar were fragments of a human skull, 577 00:44:42,679 --> 00:44:44,442 perhaps the proprietor. 578 00:44:44,681 --> 00:44:47,149 Nearby, the remains of two skeletons, 579 00:44:47,383 --> 00:44:50,648 covered by rubble which had showered down on them 580 00:44:50,820 --> 00:44:53,345 from the houses lining the street. 581 00:44:53,790 --> 00:44:58,250 In this western alley, near part of a human jaw bone, 582 00:44:58,528 --> 00:45:00,325 was found this arrow head 583 00:45:00,697 --> 00:45:05,293 which Carl Blegen identified as being of a Mediterranean type. 584 00:45:05,568 --> 00:45:08,867 He thought it had been fired by one of the Greek attackers. 585 00:45:09,739 --> 00:45:11,969 Outside, below the wall, 586 00:45:12,141 --> 00:45:16,942 lay, unburied, a skeleton, perhaps of one of those Greeks, 587 00:45:17,146 --> 00:45:19,512 whose head had been crushed by a terrible blow. 588 00:45:19,816 --> 00:45:23,445 For the city had this time not been destroyed by earthquake 589 00:45:23,753 --> 00:45:24,947 but by an invading army 590 00:45:25,121 --> 00:45:28,784 which had sacked and burned it before departing. 591 00:45:29,225 --> 00:45:33,059 The circumstances fitted Homer's story perfectly. 592 00:45:33,296 --> 00:45:34,524 The date, Blegen thought, 593 00:45:34,697 --> 00:45:37,689 was smack on - about 1240 BC. 594 00:45:38,000 --> 00:45:40,594 So for him there was no longer any doubt. 595 00:45:40,970 --> 00:45:42,870 The siege of Troy was a fact. 596 00:45:50,713 --> 00:45:55,446 Imagination is a very important quality for an archaeologist to possess. 597 00:45:56,252 --> 00:45:58,379 But did one arrow head make a war? 598 00:45:59,155 --> 00:46:03,057 Did sunken storage jars and a soup kitchen prove a siege? 599 00:46:04,360 --> 00:46:09,024 Could this huddle of shanties really have been Homer's city? 600 00:46:23,713 --> 00:46:25,874 Still looking for answers, I turned to a man who 601 00:46:26,048 --> 00:46:28,608 had actually dug with Blegen at Troy. 602 00:46:29,719 --> 00:46:32,950 In Athens I voiced my doubts to Jerome Sperling. 603 00:46:34,023 --> 00:46:36,116 Can any archaeologist dig at Hisarlik 604 00:46:36,292 --> 00:46:38,157 with a mind free of Homer? 605 00:46:38,761 --> 00:46:41,525 Had Blegen, like Schliemann and Dorpfeld, 606 00:46:41,697 --> 00:46:44,564 gone there to find what he wanted to find? 607 00:46:45,001 --> 00:46:47,629 Jerome's reply was strangely ambiguous. 608 00:46:48,604 --> 00:46:51,471 To me it doesn't have any great significance, this criticism. 609 00:46:51,841 --> 00:46:56,972 Everybody's Troy is different from everybody else's Troy. 610 00:46:57,346 --> 00:47:00,873 It depends upon what you make of the poetry you've read 611 00:47:00,983 --> 00:47:06,148 or how much you know of the archaeology and care about it. 612 00:47:06,489 --> 00:47:08,650 And how you use your own imagination. 613 00:47:09,392 --> 00:47:13,658 The placing of those great storage jars under the floors of Vlla, 614 00:47:13,830 --> 00:47:18,096 and that passage that was newly filled with these buildings, 615 00:47:18,935 --> 00:47:23,702 that doesn't mean that the Trojans knew 616 00:47:23,940 --> 00:47:26,238 there was gonna be an expedition against them 617 00:47:26,409 --> 00:47:30,505 or that they foresaw Agamemnon's coming with such an expedition. 618 00:47:31,147 --> 00:47:36,107 But it means, in very simple terms, 619 00:47:36,485 --> 00:47:40,615 that they didn't want to have their country places raided 620 00:47:40,790 --> 00:47:43,520 so that they would lose their annual crops. 621 00:47:44,026 --> 00:47:45,994 It's as simple as that. 622 00:47:46,162 --> 00:47:50,826 Didn't you ever stand on that dig and look at the skeleton you found 623 00:47:51,000 --> 00:47:54,197 and the snack bar behind the gate, 624 00:47:54,370 --> 00:47:59,433 didn't you ever think it was the Greeks that did this, as Homer said? 625 00:47:59,742 --> 00:48:00,766 I wouldn't say yes or no. 626 00:48:00,943 --> 00:48:03,935 I don't see a need to identify Agamemnon 627 00:48:04,113 --> 00:48:08,049 as being the person there at the end of Troy Vlla. 628 00:48:08,851 --> 00:48:11,012 I mean, I'm thrilled by... 629 00:48:11,187 --> 00:48:13,815 I'm overpowered by Homeric poetry. 630 00:48:13,990 --> 00:48:16,925 I think everyone is who reads it carefully. 631 00:48:17,093 --> 00:48:19,288 It's an overpowering experience. 632 00:48:19,729 --> 00:48:22,664 But that doesn't have to make it historical. 633 00:48:22,965 --> 00:48:26,093 Poetic truth comes in the people he talks about - 634 00:48:26,269 --> 00:48:30,933 their hopes and despair and problems and conflict. 635 00:48:31,340 --> 00:48:33,240 That's where the truth of it is. 636 00:48:34,043 --> 00:48:38,480 But in archaeology truth depends on interpretation. 637 00:48:49,792 --> 00:48:51,885 Blegen, however, never had any doubts 638 00:48:52,161 --> 00:48:56,825 that the plundered and ravaged Hisarlik had finally given up its secrets. 639 00:49:06,609 --> 00:49:08,440 If the events of the "lliad" were true, 640 00:49:08,678 --> 00:49:13,706 it confirmed the idea that Mycenae was at its height in the 13th century BC, 641 00:49:13,950 --> 00:49:16,942 contrary to Evans's whole view of the late Bronze Age. 642 00:49:20,589 --> 00:49:22,284 The solution to the impasse, Blegen knew, 643 00:49:22,458 --> 00:49:24,688 must lie in the Linear B tablets. 644 00:49:31,701 --> 00:49:33,532 To Evans's great disappointment, 645 00:49:33,736 --> 00:49:38,196 decipherment of his "Minoan language" had proved impossible. 646 00:49:39,442 --> 00:49:42,411 Scholars were fascinated by the problem 647 00:49:42,578 --> 00:49:44,876 but Evans had published too small a sample 648 00:49:45,047 --> 00:49:47,379 to give them a real chance of solving it. 649 00:49:50,052 --> 00:49:53,044 Blegen decided to look for a mainland archive, 650 00:49:53,289 --> 00:49:55,018 an unexcavated palace. 651 00:49:55,458 --> 00:50:00,020 He headed for the Western peloponnese, for sandy pylos. 652 00:50:02,231 --> 00:50:05,291 Somewhere on that lovely coast, Homer says, 653 00:50:05,568 --> 00:50:08,765 was the palace of Agamemnon's ally, King Nestor. 654 00:50:10,606 --> 00:50:13,769 Locals led Blegen to a hill called Ano Englianos, 655 00:50:13,943 --> 00:50:15,376 high above the sea. 656 00:50:16,812 --> 00:50:18,643 There, on the very first morning, 657 00:50:19,048 --> 00:50:20,811 he found his archive. 658 00:50:23,519 --> 00:50:25,612 Clay tablets, hundreds of them, 659 00:50:25,788 --> 00:50:30,316 in the same Linear B script as Evans had found at Knossos. 660 00:50:35,865 --> 00:50:36,593 The palace Blegen 661 00:50:36,766 --> 00:50:40,167 uncovered had been untouched since 1200 BC. 662 00:50:40,636 --> 00:50:42,627 Again, we have his record on film. 663 00:50:47,843 --> 00:50:51,074 In the royal hall, the central circular hearth was intact, 664 00:50:51,347 --> 00:50:55,340 where a king had feasted at the time of the Trojan War. 665 00:50:57,987 --> 00:51:02,287 The store rooms were packed with the shattered wealth of the heroic age. 666 00:51:14,236 --> 00:51:16,431 The palace was evidently of the same culture 667 00:51:16,605 --> 00:51:18,664 as Evans's palace at Knossos. 668 00:51:18,874 --> 00:51:20,637 The tablets proved it was. 669 00:51:21,043 --> 00:51:23,238 But in what language were they written? 670 00:51:25,781 --> 00:51:29,046 The mystery of the Mycenaeans was nearing its solution. 671 00:51:36,525 --> 00:51:40,757 It was now possible, at last, to publish a mass of Linear B texts. 672 00:51:41,697 --> 00:51:43,824 This paved the way for the decipherment. 673 00:51:44,366 --> 00:51:45,958 In summer 1952, 674 00:51:46,135 --> 00:51:52,597 a radio broadcast announced what would soon be billed as "the Everest of archaeology". 675 00:51:53,576 --> 00:51:56,010 It was made by a gifted English amateur, 676 00:51:56,178 --> 00:51:59,204 33-year-old architect Michael Ventris. 677 00:52:01,117 --> 00:52:03,142 This is the BBC Home Service. 678 00:52:03,719 --> 00:52:04,981 During the last few weeks, 679 00:52:05,154 --> 00:52:08,920 I've concluded that the Knossos and pylos tablets 680 00:52:09,091 --> 00:52:12,117 must, after all, be written in Greek. 681 00:52:12,528 --> 00:52:14,689 A difficult and archaic Greek, 682 00:52:14,897 --> 00:52:17,422 seeing that it's 500 years older than Homer 683 00:52:17,867 --> 00:52:21,894 and written in an abbreviated form, but Greek nevertheless. 684 00:52:24,206 --> 00:52:26,766 For Blegen, the decipherment of Linear B 685 00:52:26,942 --> 00:52:29,536 must have been the crowning moment of his career. 686 00:52:29,979 --> 00:52:33,346 For Evans it would have been a traumatic revelation, 687 00:52:33,649 --> 00:52:37,642 but the old man had died in 1941, 90 years old, 688 00:52:37,853 --> 00:52:41,050 and never learned the truth about his palace of Minos. 689 00:52:44,827 --> 00:52:47,819 James Candy remembers those last days. 690 00:52:48,831 --> 00:52:51,891 I was married and up to my eyes in work. 691 00:52:52,067 --> 00:52:54,661 But at times I'd come up here on my own 692 00:52:54,837 --> 00:52:57,397 and I'd look into the big drawing room. 693 00:52:57,606 --> 00:53:01,042 There he was, sitting in his chair with a rug over him 694 00:53:01,210 --> 00:53:03,610 and the black cat beside him. 695 00:53:03,946 --> 00:53:06,471 - On his own? - Entirely on his own. 696 00:53:06,782 --> 00:53:09,580 Do you think Knossos not broke him, but... 697 00:53:09,752 --> 00:53:14,917 It must have been a fantastic expenditure both in money and energy. 698 00:53:15,090 --> 00:53:19,117 - Did it exhaust him? - It did. And financially. 699 00:53:19,528 --> 00:53:22,395 - Really? - Oh, yes. Yes. 700 00:53:22,565 --> 00:53:27,434 So by the end he couldn't really afford to keep up this wonderful... 701 00:53:27,636 --> 00:53:30,298 As he said to me that one evening, 702 00:53:30,506 --> 00:53:33,202 "I ought not to be living here, Jimmy." 703 00:53:33,409 --> 00:53:34,933 I said, "Why not, Sir Arthur?" 704 00:53:35,110 --> 00:53:36,737 He said, "You know, 705 00:53:37,846 --> 00:53:43,250 "I've spent all my money on Knossos." 706 00:53:43,452 --> 00:53:44,476 And so he had. 707 00:53:56,565 --> 00:53:59,591 So Evans's ancient Minoan civilisation, 708 00:53:59,768 --> 00:54:02,794 which had so enriched the culture of early Greece, 709 00:54:03,005 --> 00:54:06,566 had indeed been conquered by the mainland Mycenaeans. 710 00:54:13,082 --> 00:54:17,143 Knossos had been ruled by the bronze-clad Greeks. 711 00:54:17,519 --> 00:54:19,680 Homer had been vindicated. 712 00:55:01,430 --> 00:55:05,662 We began this stage of our search with the quest for writing. 713 00:55:06,135 --> 00:55:10,037 Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans found it impossible to believe 714 00:55:10,205 --> 00:55:13,368 that the heroic world that they had uncovered was illiterate. 715 00:55:14,109 --> 00:55:16,441 Evans found the writing but died 716 00:55:16,612 --> 00:55:18,580 before it was revealed it was Greek 717 00:55:18,747 --> 00:55:20,681 and that a Greek king had sat here 718 00:55:20,849 --> 00:55:23,215 on the throne of Minos at Knossos. 719 00:55:23,385 --> 00:55:25,353 Had Schliemann known that, 720 00:55:25,521 --> 00:55:30,117 he would have seen it as the final vindication of his faith in Homer's version 721 00:55:30,292 --> 00:55:33,022 of the Bronze Age and the Trojan War. 722 00:55:33,262 --> 00:55:38,859 The decipherment of Linear B has led to many new questions about Homer 723 00:55:39,034 --> 00:55:41,969 and those are the questions we cannot put off. 724 00:55:42,137 --> 00:55:43,536 Who was Homer? 725 00:55:43,706 --> 00:55:46,072 Does his story go back to real events? 726 00:55:46,241 --> 00:55:49,142 And is it possible it was transmitted orally 727 00:55:49,311 --> 00:55:53,975 over 500 years after the destruction of these great palaces? 728 00:55:54,183 --> 00:55:57,050 Those are the questions we'll turn to next week.