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The attention of Schliemann and Stillman had been drawn to a hill called 'Kephala, overlooking the ancient site of Knossos, on which stood ruined walls consisting of great gypsum blocks engraved with curious characters; but attempts at exploration were defeated by the obstacles raised by the native proprietors.
The deposit left by Neolithic man on the hill of Kephala averages about 6 metres in thickness below the later deposit which marks the occupation of the site by the post-Neolithic culture. We are thus led to an almost fabulous antiquity for the first occupation of the site.
Nine weeks after the excavations on the hill of Kephala had begun, the season's work was closed, and, surely, never had a like period of time been more fruitful of fresh knowledge, more illuminative as to the conditions of ancient life, or more destructive of hoary prejudices.
In 1878 Minos Kalochærinos made some slight excavations, and found a few great jars or pithai, and some fragments of Mycenæan pottery; but up to the year 1895, when Dr. A. J. Evans secured a quarter of the Kephala site from one of the joint proprietors, nothing of any real moment had been accomplished. Dr.
Even accepting the lower figure, the antiquity of man's first settlements on the hill of Kephala becomes absolutely staggering to the mind. If the growth of deposit on the hill was at the rate of something like 3 feet in a millennium a reasonable supposition it follows that we must place the earliest habitations of Neolithic man at Knossos not later than 10000, perhaps as early as 12000 B.C.
Probably the power and grandeur of the Empire was never more imposing than during the hundred years before 1400 B.C. The House of Minos at Knossos had reached its full development, and stood in all its splendour, an imposing mass of building, crowning the hill of Kephala with its five storeys around the great Central. Court, its Theatral Area, and its outlying dependencies.
Evans was persuaded that Knossos was the spot where exploration was most likely to be rewarded, and his purchase of part of the site of Kephala in 1895 was the beginning of a series of campaigns which have had results not less romantic than those of Schliemann, and even more important in their additions to our knowledge of the prehistoric Ægean civilization.
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