Sir Arthur Evans: Gifts to the Ashmolean Museum

Abstract

SIR ARTHUR EVANS has presented to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, of which he was keeper for a period of twenty-five years ending in 1908, his unique collection of Minoan sealstones and gems, gold rings and jewels, as an accession to the recently rearranged ‘Minoan Room’. The collection, as is recalled by the Oxford correspondent of The Times of February 2, is “far-famed and unrivalled”, embracing every period and class of the Minoan gem-cutter's art—prisms, button-seals, cylinders and ring bezels in steatite, cornelian, ivory and other materials, engraved with pictographs, scenes of ritual, bullfighting and other sports. Among the rings is the famous great gold ring of Nestor, the group of gold beads known as the Treasure of Thisbe, all engraved with scenes of ritual, combat and ancient legend. Since Sir Arthur began his archaeological explorations in Crete in the early nineties of the last century, both while he was keeper of the Museum and after, he has been liberal in contributing to its collections examples of the objects discovered by him in his excavations. With this latest gift, the Ashmolean collection of Minoan antiquities becomes the most important and the most complete outside Crete itself. Recent alterations of the Museum, in which the largest archaeological gallery has been divided into three sections, have made it possible for Sir Arthur, with the assistance of Miss Mercy Money-Coutts, to make a new installation of Cretan antiquities, in which the older collections have been supplemented by groups of casts, numerous photographs, diagrams and water-colour drawings, with figurines, smaller antiquities and pottery which he has transferred to the Museum from his private cabinets. His benefactions have not, however, been confined to the donation of antiquities from Crete. They include classical antiquities, large series of Greek, Roman and Anglo-Saxon coins, and other objects, as well as the great collections of stone and bronze implements, Anglo-Saxon jewellery and other material which belonged to his father, the late Sir John Evans.