He bought a set of clothes of a wealthy Turkish man, complete with red fez, baggy trousers, and an embroidered short-sleeved tunic.

[17] During the Christmas holidays of 1873, Evans catalogued a coin collection being bequeathed to Harrow by John Gardner Wilkinson, the father of British Egyptology, who was too ill to work on it himself.

Despite his extensive knowledge of ancient history, classics, archaeology, and what would be termed today cultural anthropology, he apparently had not even read enough in his nominal subject to pass the required examination.

Despite subsequent events, there is no evidence that the young Evans might have had ulterior motives at this time, despite the fact that Butler had helped to educate half the government of the United Kingdom.

During the struggle in Bobovo on 15 August 1875 during the Herzegovina uprising (1875–1877) they were expelled from Province of Pljevlja by the Ottoman authorities and went to board a ship in the city of Dubrovnik via Pljevlja, a city with a large settlement from the Roman period, which Evans named as the Municipium S.[citation needed] They knew that the region, a part of the Ottoman Empire, was under martial law and that the Christians were in a state of insurrection against the Muslim beys placed over them.

[citation needed] The two brothers experienced little difficulty with either the Serbs or the Ottomans but they did provoke the neighbouring Austro-Hungarian Empire and spent a night in "a wretched cell".

Politely invited by two other officers to join the police chief and produce passports, Evans replied, "Tell him that we are Englishmen and are not accustomed to being treated in this way".

Evans's continued stance in favour of native government led to a condition of unacceptability to the local regime within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He wrote: "The people are treated not as a liberated but as a conquered and inferior race...."[25] The Evans's sentiments were followed by acts of personal charity: they took in an orphan, invited a blind woman to dinner every night.

This view was refuted by Evans, who stated that Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija were facing terror from the hand of local Albanian population, with murders being a daily occurrence.

His efforts to negotiate with the art collector Charles Drury Edward Fortnum,[30] over housing his extensive collection, were being undercut by university administrators.

Fortnum in fact was becoming dissatisfied with rivals for his collection, the South Kensington Museum, because of their "lack of a properly informed and competent person as keeper."

Evans's conclusion that the site belonged to a culture closely related to the continental Belgae, remains the modern view, though the dating has been refined to the period after about 75 BC.

His analysis of the site was still regarded as "an outstanding contribution to Iron Age studies" with "a masterly consideration of the metalwork" by Sir Barry Cunliffe in 2012.

Always of precarious health herself – she is said to have had tuberculosis – she was too weak to prepare her father's papers for publication, so she delegated the task to a family friend, Reverend William Stephens.

On 11 March 1893, after experiencing painful spasms for two hours,[37] she died with Evans holding her hand, of an unknown disease, perhaps tuberculosis, although the symptoms fit a heart attack also.

Her epitaph says,[38] in part, "Her bright, energetic spirit, undaunted by suffering to the last, and ever working for the welfare of those around her, made a short life long."

[39] He went ahead with the mansion he had planned to build for Margaret on Boars Hill in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), against the advice of his father, who regarded it as wasteful and useless.

After Margaret's death Evans wandered aimlessly around Liguria ostensibly looking at Terramare Culture sites and for Neolithic remains in Ligurian caves.

Another old friend, Federico Halbherr, the Italian archaeologist and future excavator of Phaistos, was keeping him posted on developments at Knossos by mail.

Archaeologists from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the United States were in attendance at the site watching the progress, so to speak, of the "sick man of Europe", a metaphor of the dying Ottoman Empire.

[41] In 1894, Evans became intrigued by the idea that the script engraved on the seal stones he had purchased before Margaret's death might be Cretan, and steamed off to Heraklion to join the circle of watchers.

During his year of tending to the details of Youlbury, administering the Ashmolean, and writing some minor papers, he had also discovered the script on some other jewellery that came to the museum from Myres in Crete.

The building itself is a solid structure, but the door of the small walled enclosure ... was finally blown in, and the defenders laid down their arms, understanding, it would appear, that their lives were to be spared.

The term "palace" may be misleading; Knossos was an intricate collection of over 1,000 interlocking rooms, some of which served as artisans' workrooms and food processing centres (e.g., wine presses).

On the basis of the ceramic evidence and stratigraphy, Evans concluded that there was another civilisation on Crete that had existed before those brought to light by the adventurer-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae and Tiryns.

The small ruin of Knossos spanned 5 acres (2.0 ha) and the palace had a maze-like quality that reminded Evans of the labyrinth described in Greek mythology.

While Evans based the recreations on archaeological evidence, some of the best-known frescoes from the throne room were almost complete inventions of the Gilliérons, according to his critics.

In 1911, Evans was knighted by King George V for his services to archaeology[56] and is commemorated both at Knossos and at the Ashmolean Museum, which holds the largest collection of Minoan artefacts outside Greece.

He had Jarn Mound and its surrounding wild garden built during the Great Depression to make work for local out-of-work labourers.