Sir Arthur John Evans

Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos, did not excavate in Cyprus; his place in the island's story comes from his years as Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, which Ulbrich dates to 1886-1908¹. The Ashmolean had subscribed to the Cyprus Exploration Fund in 1887 and received more than a thousand provenanced finds from it between 1888 and 1898¹.

He gave to the museum himself. A small black-gloss Hellenistic vase (AN1888.1383) is credited "Presented by Sir Arthur Evans, 1888"¹⁰. In 1927 he donated some twenty copper weapons and tools without recorded findspots from the collection of his father, the prehistorian John Evans, among them axe heads (AN1927.1280)^1,11. In 1905 he sent Vienna 25 of the duplicates from John Myres's 1894 Kamelarga votive deposit, which reached the Kunsthistorisches Museum at the end of July². In 1911 the Ashmolean received 29 mostly Archaic antiquities from the Cesnola Collection in the Metropolitan Museum in exchange for Minoan material from Knossos that Evans had excavated¹.

On 12 February 1886 Max Ohnefalsch-Richter wrote to him from Nicosia, asking his help in getting reports on the Nicosia prehistoric necropolis published in England and saying he was glad that Evans and other connoisseurs were satisfied with "the jar I have procured you"³. The letter names no price.

In print Evans took part in the argument over Cypriot chronology. His 1900 paper on the British Museum excavations praised them as the first clear view of Mycenaean Cyprus but criticised the dating proposed by Alexander Stuart Murray⁴. His work at Knossos from 1900 undermined Murray's low dating¹⁴.