Arthur Evans and his notes on Illyria; the snake people and cultural identity in Albania and Kosovo

For the past few years, I’ve been visiting Kosovo and Albania and have been working on a number of academic projects. One such project was to transcribe anew the Notes on Illyria from the rough handwriting of Oxford educated British archaeologist Arthur Evans. Evans was based in Croatia during the early 1880s, though he was arrested as a spy by the Austro-Hungarians in 1882 and returned back to England. He then went on to visit Greece. In 1884, Evans was appointed Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and in the same year, he gave the Ilchester Lectures on the Slavic conquest of Illyricum, though these remain unpublished. Evans’s Notes remain interesting as they convey his ideas of the Balkans in a late nineteenth century context, Evans using his knowledge of Classical sources. It is from this, that his discussion of Cadmus emerges, and this became an idea for a paper, especially catching my interest in regards to the snake symbolism that I had seen at various locations on my visits to Kosovo and Albania. The paper that can be accessed in this post was published by Academia Letters and was an ‘orphaned’ incomplete work that was attached to the original project of the transcribing of Evans’s Notes on Illyria, which became unfinished due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns. I had transcribed a good number of pages from Notes on Illyria, and one day in the near future I will post the transcription on Academia.

The paper can be accessed via this link and is free to download as a pdf:  (99+) Arthur Evans and his notes on Illyria; the snake people and cultural identity in Albania and Kosovo | Dr David Harrison – Academia.edu