IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 228

Knossos lies about five kilometres inland from the north coast of Crete, near the modern city of Heraklion. Four thousand years ago, in the Bronze Age, it was the centre of a civilisation that built paved roads, harbours and large stone buildings, and produced fine pottery, metalwork and jewellery. Archaeologists call this civilisation Minoan, a name invented in modern times; its people left no surviving account of what they called themselves. Knossos was the largest of their centres, and the building at its heart — known, though not certainly, as a palace — is the biggest Bronze Age structure yet found on the island.

The name Minoan comes from Minos, the legendary king of Crete in Greek myth, whose queen gave birth to the Minotaur, a creature half man and half bull, kept in a maze called the labyrinth. The stories were written down centuries after the period they describe, and historians treat them as legends rather than evidence. Yet they shaped how the site was understood from the moment it was excavated. Arthur Evans, the man responsible, took Minos's name for the whole civilisation he uncovered, and he was quick to identify a royal residence, a throne room and the traces of a bull cult in the stones and paintings he found.

The hill of Knossos had been noticed long before Evans arrived. In 1878 a Heraklion businessman and antiquarian, Minos Kalokairinos, dug into it and uncovered part of a storeroom containing large storage jars. The Ottoman authorities, who then ruled Crete, stopped the work, and a later attempt by Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy, to buy the land came to nothing: the owners asked a price he refused to pay, and he died in 1890. The site was still for sale when Evans, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, first visited Crete in 1894.

Evans began digging on 23 March 1900 with a team of local workmen, and the first season was astonishing. Within weeks his trenches had exposed walls several storeys high, a paved court, corridors, painted plaster and hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with an unknown script. Further seasons revealed a building of more than a thousand interconnecting rooms around a central courtyard, with light wells, a grand staircase, storerooms, workshops, bathrooms and an elaborate system of drains. In one small room stood a carved gypsum seat, which Evans at once named the throne.

Much of the upper storey had collapsed, and Evans did not merely clear the ruins; he rebuilt them. In the following decades his workmen poured reinforced concrete to restore walls, floors and staircases, and reconstructed the palace as he believed it had once looked. He employed two Swiss artists, Émile Gilliéron and his son, to paint images based on fragments of surviving plaster. Some of these, including the famous figure of a bull-leaper, have become defining images of Minoan Crete; others rest on such slight traces that later scholars have questioned how much of them is invention.

Evans's reconstruction remains controversial. His defenders argue that without it the site would be unintelligible to visitors, and that the concrete supported fragile walls that would otherwise have fallen. Critics reply that the concrete is decaying, that it holds moisture against the ancient stone, and that some restored features owe more to an Edwardian idea of a palace than to anything the Bronze Age builders intended. The word Evans used for such work, reconstitution, has stuck; so has the argument about where conservation ends and imagination begins.

The building had a long history. The first palace on the site was put up around 1900 BC and destroyed about two hundred years later, probably by an earthquake. A larger one replaced it — the building whose ruins survive — and it was itself destroyed around 1350 BC, perhaps by fire. That final disaster preserved the tablets: baked hard by the flames, the clay lasted where it would otherwise have dissolved in the Cretan rain. The end of the palace did not mean the end of the settlement, which was inhabited for centuries afterwards.

The tablets are the reason Knossos matters to linguists as well as archaeologists. Evans found two scripts, which he called Linear A and Linear B, and he was convinced that both recorded a Minoan language. He died in 1941, still certain of it. In 1952, however, the British architect Michael Ventris demonstrated that the Linear B tablets were written in an early form of Greek, a language quite unlike the one Evans had expected. Linear A, used for the earlier documents, has never been read, and the language it records remains unknown.

Evans published his account of the site in four volumes entitled The Palace of Minos, issued between 1921 and 1935, and paid for much of the excavation from his own fortune. He was knighted in 1911. His work made Knossos one of the best-known archaeological sites in Europe and helped to create the tourist industry of modern Crete, while the objects recovered from it filled a museum in Heraklion.

Modern scholarship has modified his conclusions in many respects. The Minoans, whom Evans described as a peaceful and artistic people, are now thought to have been involved in warfare, and the relationship between Knossos and the rest of the island is disputed. Excavation has continued since his death, uncovering town houses, cemeteries and the remains of earlier settlements, and scientific dating has refined the chronology. Yet the palace he revealed remains at the centre of how the Bronze Age Aegean is understood, and every account of Minoan Crete still begins with it.

Heraldry — the system of personal and family symbols known as coats of arms — appeared in western Europe in the twelfth century, and its beginnings were practical. A knight in a closed helmet was unrecognisable, both in battle and in the tournaments that served as a rehearsal for it. Since his shield, his banner and the cloth coat worn over his armour all offered a flat surface, they were painted with a design that could be picked out at a distance. The word 'coat' in 'coat of arms' is a reminder of that garment, while the shield gave the design its familiar outline. Early arms were chosen freely by their bearers, and the same design might be used by unrelated men in different regions.

Because a picture cannot be sent in a letter, heralds developed a vocabulary for describing arms in words. This is called blazon, and its terms are mostly French: azure for blue, gules for red, sable for black, vert for green, or for gold and argent for silver. A blazon states the colour of the field, the shapes placed upon it and their positions, and does so in a fixed order. The vocabulary also carries rules. The most persistent is the rule of tincture, which forbids placing a colour on a colour or a metal on a metal, so that a design stays visible from a distance. A skilled herald reading a blazon aloud can reconstruct the arms exactly, even if he has never seen them.

The officers who gave the system its name were the heralds, who from the thirteenth century were employed by princes to arrange tournaments and to keep track of who was entitled to which arms. As arms became hereditary, disputes multiplied, and kings appointed senior officers, known as kings of arms, to settle them. In England the College of Arms was incorporated by Richard III in 1484 and still exists; Scotland has its own regulator, the Lord Lyon. These bodies grant new arms, record existing ones and hear complaints about their misuse, and their archives are among the most complete records of their kind in Europe.

From the thirteenth century arms were inherited rather than invented, and a whole machinery grew up around that fact. In principle only one person at a time could bear a particular coat, so younger sons were given small additions, known as marks of cadency, to distinguish them from the head of the family. When two families that both bore arms married, their designs were combined, at first by placing them side by side on one shield and later by dividing the shield into quarters, a practice called marshalling. Disputes over the right to arms were heard by the Court of Chivalry, an English court that has sat only rarely in modern times.

Heraldry was never confined to the nobility. Towns acquired civic arms, often showing a wall, a gate, a ship or a local saint; guilds and livery companies took designs that advertised their trade; bishops and cathedral chapters used them on buildings and seals. In Germany and the Low Countries prosperous merchants adopted arms of their own, sometimes with the approval of a herald and sometimes without it. By the nineteenth century, when an interest in ancestry had become fashionable, a great many families simply assumed arms to which they had no documented right.

For historians, the value of heraldry lies in what it can date. Shield shapes narrowed and then widened again; the crest, an emblem fixed above the helmet, became common only from the thirteenth century; supporters, the figures that hold up a shield, from the fifteenth; mottoes, which were often personal rather than inherited, later still. Because these fashions changed at roughly known dates, a carving on a church porch or a panel of stained glass can often be placed within a few decades. Impressions of seals, pressed into wax and attached to charters and deeds, are especially useful: the wax frequently survives when the document it accompanied has perished, and the seal carries the arms of the person who issued it.

Between 1530 and the end of the seventeenth century, English heralds were sent out on visitations, tours of the counties in which they were supposed to register the arms and pedigrees of local families. The volumes they produced are a treasure for genealogists, since they record names, marriages and descents that appear nowhere else. They are also a warning. The information was supplied by the families themselves, who had an interest in proving a long and respectable ancestry, and the heralds rarely verified the information they were given. Some pedigrees were quietly adjusted, and a few were invented outright.

Heraldry has not died out. The Canadian Heraldic Authority was created in 1988 and grants arms to individuals, schools, regiments and companies; the Scottish court continues to do the same; and the English college still receives applications every month. Modern grants are recorded, illustrated and published, which makes the twenty-first century unusually well documented by the standards of the subject. Yet the assumption of arms without any grant remains legal in most countries, with the result that a coat of arms on a bookplate or a shop sign is not by itself evidence of anything except that someone liked the design.

History, it is often said, is written by the victors. The remark is usually attributed to Winston Churchill, although no one has found it in his books or speeches, and something very like it was in circulation before he was born. Its popularity is easy to understand. It offers a compact explanation of why the past so often looks the way it does: the kings, empires and parties that came out on top wrote the documents, paid the sculptors and trained the historians, while those they defeated left little behind except the insults of their enemies. The saying has a further attraction for anyone who has tried to research a family or a village, because the people who leave no trace are exactly those whose lives are hardest to reconstruct. Like most proverbs, however, it is both illuminating and misleading, and the interesting question is not whether it is true but how much of the record it actually explains.

The case for the saying is strong, and the ancient world supplies the clearest examples. Carthage, Rome's rival for control of the western Mediterranean, was destroyed in 146 BC, and virtually nothing written by Carthaginians survives; what we know of their city, their constitution and their religion comes largely from Roman and Greek authors, some of whom had every reason to portray a defeated enemy as treacherous. Roman writers also accused the Carthaginians of sacrificing children, a charge that historians still argue about and that no Carthaginian text survives to answer. The Persian Wars are known chiefly through Greek writers, above all Herodotus, who wrote for a Greek audience, while the Persian court, which recorded its kings' achievements in stone, left no surviving narrative of the wars at all. Something similar happened in the Americas, where the conquest of the Aztec empire was recorded by the Spaniards and by the missionaries who followed them, and where most indigenous books were destroyed.

Yet the defeated do write, and often they write at length. Exile is a literary condition, and the losers of political struggles from the Roman civil wars to the twentieth century have produced memoirs, pamphlets and histories, some of which have shaped opinion far more durably than the official record. Oral traditions, songs and annual commemorations have kept the memory of defeat alive in communities that produced no books at all; Irish poets and scribes, for instance, preserved the memory of dispossession long after the conquests of the seventeenth century. The most striking case is perhaps the American South, where the losing side in the Civil War spent decades raising monuments, writing school textbooks and promoting a romantic version of its cause that dominated popular memory well into the twentieth century. In that instance the descendants of the defeated came close to controlling the story.

If the saying is true at all, it is true for reasons that have little to do with victory itself. What decides whether a version of events survives is not who won a battle but who could write, who had the materials and the leisure to do so, and whose documents were copied, stored and looked after. Bureaucracies win this contest, not generals. A defeated state whose clerks kept careful records may be far better known to historians than a victorious one that kept none, and states that taxed land and trade wrote themselves into the record whether they intended to or not. Chance matters as well: papyrus survives only in dry places, paper only if it is stored away from damp and insects, and stone inscriptions outlast both. Later generations then make their own selection, printing some chronicles and ignoring others, and each century's historians ask questions that send them back to different parts of the archive.

This is not to say that the record can be corrected at will. Archaeology, coins, inscriptions, tax registers and court records can reveal a great deal that the victors never intended to disclose, and in recent decades historians have made deliberate efforts to recover the experience of the colonised, the enslaved and the illiterate. Some of that work has transformed whole fields of study. It has limits of its own, however: the voices recorded in a colonial court case are filtered through the questions the court chose to ask, and much of what we know about enslaved people comes from the ledgers of their owners. Some losses are permanent. Languages, songs and stories disappeared with the people who spoke them, and no amount of research will recover the Carthaginian account of the Punic Wars or the arguments of the Gaulish leaders who resisted Rome.

The proverb, then, is best understood as a warning rather than a law. It reminds us that surviving documents were produced by people with power, interests and something to hide, and that a history based only on them will be one-sided. But it exaggerates the completeness of victory and underestimates both the persistence of the defeated and the ingenuity of later researchers. The past is not written once by the winners and then fixed for ever; it is argued over, revised and partly recovered by every generation that takes the trouble to look. What finally matters is not who won but who is still being read, and that is settled by schools, publishers and archives as much as by armies.