James Frazer was not the only prominent British scholar of his day who studied the two trees. Another equally distinguished classicist and author on this subject was Arthur John Evans (1851-1941). Famous for his archaeological work on the Cretan Bronze Age and for his discovery of Knossos, an ardent traveller, and a life-long collector of ancient sealstones, Arthur Evans was an almost exact coeval of the more sedentary Frazer (1854-1941). Evans published his important work on trees in 1901, a decade after the first edition of The Golden Bough had appeared. A more modest work than Frazer’s, Evans’ treatment of the trees took the form of a long article entitled “Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult and Its Mediterranean Relations.”43
Trees were conspicuous elements in the pictorial art of the eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Despite a pause in artistic production possibly coupled with some change in the ethnic composition of the region during the early Iron Age, arboreal motifs were once again as prominent in the art of the classical Greek world as they had been earlier. This continuity, and certain architectural associations of the trees in Bronze-Age portrayals, made Evans think that a cult of trees had been a major part of religion in Bronze-Age Crete, and he used the images on the ancient gems and gold finger-rings which he knew so well as the main data for an attempt to reconstruct that cult. Thus, like James Frazer before him and Victor Turner later, Arthur Evans also first approached the trees as elements in cult.
It must be said in fairness to Evans that he enjoyed much less choice about whether to study the trees in cult or in narrative than did Frazer or Turner. Frazer did not know the difference, while Turner, who surely knew the difference, elected to ignore narrative. But Arthur Evans’ information from the Aegean Bronze Age was incomparably more rarified than either Frazer’s or Turner’s information about Latin or Ndembu tree-cults. No tales survive in writing from either Mycenaeans or Minoans; all that is now or was in Evans’ time known about their story-telling comes indirectly from reflections in later written sources, or from just such incised, modelled, or painted artistic representations of narrative motifs as Evans studied for evidence of a tree-cult in prehistoric Crete. So Evans had no such immediate analogues in story to fall back upon as did Frazer and Turner.
His scantier evidence of an Aegean tree-cult in the Bronze Age did not even permit Evans to surmise what rites might have been customary in that cult; there were no verbal records of Bronze-Age ritual to help him interpret what he saw depicted in Mycenaean and Minoan pictorial art. It was as if some later archaeologist of a dead Christian culture were to unearth icons and crucifix in the ruins of churches, and then try without Bible, prayerbook, or liturgy to reconstruct the beliefs and practices of Christians. Without direct records of either story or ritual from the Aegean Bronze Age, it would have been achievement enough for Evans just to prove the probable existence of a particular cult by demonstrating the regularity and frequency of certain pictorial motifs on objects of Bronze-Age manufacture. But in the event he was able to do more than that.
Whether they were intaglios on sealstones and gold signets, or figures modelled on plaques or in statuary, or paintings on walls and pottery, the prehistoric images which Evans set out to explain were much poorer in detail and much more cryptic than Frazer’s legends about the vale of Nemi. But Arthur Evans had a more discriminating mind than Frazer’s, and although he entertained no doctrinaire prejudice against comparing his information from Mycenaean Greece and Minoan Crete with like data from other cultures in later times, he was more circumstantial than Frazer in his treatment of facts whatever their origin. For that reason he recognized distinctions within his very restricted body of data that had escaped Frazer in the great sea of information which he had tried to compass. By careful discrimination of types in Bronze-Age portrayals of trees, Arthur Evans showed that the same system of two trees that is so familiar in oral narrative was embedded also in Mycenaean and Minoan cult.
Evans’ first reason for ascribing the trees in Mycenaean and Minoan decorative art to cult was architectural. He thought the remains of a curious oblong building among the Bronze-Age ruins at Goulas on Crete had once been a kind of roofless temple or shrine of the same type as he had found portrayed on the fragment of a soapstone vase which he had dug up near Knossos (Figure 7), or again on such signets of stone or gold as those reproduced here in Figures 8 and 9.
