Our adventure beings with a trip to Crete. Gavin and his wife Marcella visit the ancient palace of Phaestos. The ruined palace complex was believed to have been one of the cities founded by the great king Minos, a mythological figure who reigned over Crete, generations before the Trojan War. Phaestos is vast: bigger than the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne’s royal palace at Aachen, and at least three times the size of London’s Buckingham Palace. Like Knossos, its perhaps more famous sister complex further to the north-east, the palace at Phaestos is ancient. It is older by far than the Parthenon in Athens, built c.450 BC when classical Greece was at its apogee. It seemed that the inhabitants of Crete, the Minoans, had lived in luxury and comfort more than a millennium before that. The palace is as venerable as the Old Kingdom of the Pharaohs of Egypt and as ancient as the great pyramids of Giza. The site had been inhabited, we discover, since 4000 BC.
We find out that the Minoans’ history was uncovered largely through the pioneering work of the archaeologist Arthur Evans, who began to reveal an entire ancient civilisation; an entrancing, sophisticated race with an advanced and exotic culture. A people who at their peak of in around 2160 to 1500 BC had commanded fabulous wealth and power. With this, he uncovered evidence of the long-standing maritime trade between Crete and Egypt from 1991 BC to 1450 BC, when this mighty Minoan civilisation was abruptly destroyed by a massive earthquake.
Further reading:
A history of Minoan Crete: http://www.ancient-greece.org/history/minoan.html
The Minoans – a beginner’s guide: http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/i-m/minoans.html
Stylianos Alexiou – Minoan civilisation link:
http://www.ekebi.gr/frontoffice/portal.asp?cpage=NODE&cnode=462&t=1284
The Odyssey, Homer, Book 19- Knossos is described as a fabulous city, lost in legend: http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.19.xix.html
M. H. Wiener, Thera and the Aegean World III, Vol. 1, Archaeology, Proceedings of the Third International Congress, Santorini, Greece, 3–9 September 1989, p. 128
For more information: http://www.malcolmwiener.net/Publications.htm
http://www.travel-to-santorini.com/article.php?article_id=89
Sir Arthur Evans links:
http://www.athenapub.com/11evans.htm
http://www.dilos.com/location/13407
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Evans
