The Lost Labyrinth

II

The pavilion was deliberately windowless, to enable lighting to be controlled during the talks. Only the back third was currently lit, two matronly women setting out coffee cups and jugs of water on trestle tables. Knox felt a twinge of alarm. He'd expected the AV guys to be on hand to show him how everything worked. They must have been caught up in the traffic. He poured himself and Franklin glasses of water. They took them over to the back row of folding wooden chairs, where they sat either side of the aisle. 'You were telling me how your crusade finished,' he prompted.

'Yes,' agreed Franklin. 'It was absurd, in its own way. One of my professors-my mentor, I suppose you'd call him-had finally had enough of me. He invited me to his home, an invariable sign of trouble. I was glad, though. I was fired up, eager to hurl my young career in his teeth. He was a stickler for punctuality, so I presented myself at his front door at seven p.m. sharp. But it wasn't he who answered. It was his daughter, Maria.'

'Ah!' smiled Knox.

'Quite,' agreed Franklin. 'A man gets to know himself in such moments. One look at Maria was all it took for me to reassess my priorities in life. In a way, I'm ashamed of that. In another, I couldn't be prouder.'

'Was it reciprocated?'

'She became my wife, if that's what you mean, though it took me several years to persuade her. And her first impressions of me were not good. She teases me with it still, the way I gawped. Her father had been delayed at the university, she told me. Some idiot had let off a fire alarm.' He shook his head at the perverse tricks of fate. 'Maria sat with me as I waited. By the time her father finally made it home, I was head over heels in love, I couldn't apologise fast enough. I pledged never to embarrass him or his university again. He asked me to cut myself off immediately and completely from Petitier, who he held more to blame than me. I agreed. He was kind enough to give me another chance.'

'How did Petitier take that?'

'I don't know. I never saw him again. I moved out of the house while he was at work, and he left Athens shortly afterwards.' He gave a short laugh. 'That was a story in itself. The British School put on a series of lectures to honour the memory of Sir Arthur Evans and his excavations at Knossos. Petitier apparently stood up during a Q amp;A and launched into a drunken rant. It was the last straw. The French School fired him for embarrassing them, and he left soon afterwards.'

'What was his rant about?'

'He accused Evans and his successors of doing with Minoan Crete exactly what other academics had done with the Doric Invasion; that is to say, rewriting history to boost the Greeks at the expense of Egypt and the Near East.' He glanced at Knox to see if further explanation was necessary, and evidently decided that it was. 'Crete only gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1898, you see. But independence wasn't what the new Cretan government wanted; they wanted unification with Greece instead. They were desperate, therefore, to play up any and all historical links with Greece, while downplaying those with Egypt and Turkey. And this was almost the exact moment Evans began excavating at Knossos. Not that he needed any encouragement to make Crete more Greek. His head was stuffed so full of Greek myths and legends that within a week of breaking ground he'd found Ariadne's bathroom. Not a bathroom or even a royal bathroom. No. Ariadne's. After that, it was Minos' throne room, and so on. It wasn't archaeology. It was myth-making.'

Knox laughed. 'And Petitier really said all that at a commemoration of his work?'

Franklin nodded. 'And there's a lot to what he said, to be fair. Had Knossos been excavated by an Egyptologist, for example, we'd almost certainly have a completely different view of Minoan Crete. We'd think of it as the westernmost part of the Eastern Mediterranean, not as the southernmost part of Greece. But once an idea gets into the popular consciousness, it's almost impossible to get it back out.' He gave a heartfelt sigh. 'People simply don't realise how much Egyptian material has been found in Minoan contexts. Pottery, jewellery, hippopotamus ivory, seals and scarabs. Musical instruments, weapons, lamps, everything you can think of. Minoan culture is widely celebrated as unique because of its bull-leaping and distinctive artistic style; yet we've found evidence of bull-leaping all across Egypt and Asia Minor, and identical styles of artwork in Tell el-Daba and elsewhere. And that's not to mention the tantalising hints offered by language, too. The word "Minoan" derives from Crete's legendary king Minos, for example. But Minos wasn't a person's name so much as a job title. And who was Egypt's first pharaoh?'

'Menes,' answered Knox.

'Credited with uniting Upper and Lower Egypt,' nodded Franklin. 'Yet modern scholarship suggests Menes was a job title too. Egyptian didn't have vowels, as you know, so that all we're really sure of is that it had the consonants MNS, exactly the same as Minos. Coincidence?'

'Probably,' said Knox. The lighting in the pavilion auditorium suddenly came on. He looked around to see that a first few delegates had gathered at the back, chatting and drinking coffee. But there was no still sign of Nico.

'The Egyptians aligned key buildings with the dawn,' continued Franklin, oblivious of Knox's distraction. 'So did the Minoans. Did you know that on certain key days of the year, the first rays of the rising sun would spear through double doorways at Knossos and bathe the throne room in light? And look at religion: Osiris and Isis are the central gods of Egyptian myth. They had a strange kind of immortality, giving birth to themselves. The same was true of the Minoan gods. Dionysus was worshipped as a young man and a bearded king. Demeter was worshipped as a maiden, a mother and a crone. A very Egyptian theology that was transformed in Crete to become the basis of Greek religion right here in Eleusis.'

'Speaking of which,' smiled Knox, getting to his feet. 'I should really read through my speech again before-'

'And that's another thing,' said Franklin, taking Knox by the sleeve to prevent him getting away before he was done. 'Eleusis was a grain cult, remember. It was all about farming.'

'Forgive me, but I really-'

'No. You'll like this. You see, Petitier was convinced that farming was the key to understanding how religion and culture had spread through the ancient world. He painted a word picture of a great golden plain of wheat and barley sweeping in from the east like sunrise, bringing socialisation, technology and enlightenment with it; and he was convinced that so beneficial a development would certainly have been memorialised in Greek legend. And because people like to credit their own, he speculated that the story would have been rewritten with Greeks as noble heroes wresting precious secrets from dastardly oriental villains, before bringing them back to Greece.'

'Don't tell me,' murmured Knox. 'Jason and the Argonauts.'

'Exactly,' smiled Franklin. 'And the crops they brought back with them, he called "the golden fleece".'