Essay on The Palace of Knossos is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Essay on The Palace of Knossos at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

The unearthing of King Minos's labyrinth, the most dramatic discovery of 20th-century European archaeology, began to unfold along with the century in 1900 and was still offering major surprises decades later. Although Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941), the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, was not the first to appreciate the possibilities of the mound at Knossos, a few miles south of modern-day Iraklion, Crete, it was he who succeeded in buying the property at a propitious time, when the hold of the Ottoman Turks on the island had been loosed. From the very first day, the finds were spectacular.

Though the myth of Minos was considered a possible echo of a time when Crete was the dominant sea power in the eastern Mediterranean, the story of the labyrinth seemed pure fairy tale. Every nine years, according to the myth, the Athenians were forced to send a tribute of seven young men and seven maidens to King Minos, who would place them in the labyrinth to be devoured by the Minotaur. With the help of Minos's daughter Ariadne, who provided him with a sword and a ball of thread, the hero Theseus killed the monster and escaped with his companions from the island. Evans's crew dug up the ruins of a complex, multistoried building the size of a palace, with a throne room and wonderful frescoes that revealed, he thought, a joyous people, peaceable, fond of spectacle and dance. Among the frescoes was one that seemed to show two young women and one young man engaging in some form of bull vaulting. Many other bull artifacts were uncovered as well, along with a large number of double axes, the name for which in Luvian (or Carian) was labrys. Evans derived the name labyrinth from these implements and saw the origin of the myth of the Minotaur in the bull games. But the nasty edge of the legend he attributed to propaganda against their enemies by the early Greeks. It was clear from Homer that Mycenaean Greeks had ultimately conquered the island, but Evans argued for as late a date as possible. Increasingly, he felt that in Minoan civilization (for so he named it) were to be found the origins of much of Greek religion, art, and culture in general.

Evans even succeeded in finding the original object of his quest: early script. Excavations yielded clay tablets with three types of writing: hieroglyphic, Linear A, and Linear B. Evans never found the key to reading the tablets; by delaying publication of most of the material until after his death, he frustrated others from succeeding as well. But in 1939 Linear B tablets were discovered on mainland Greece, at Pylos. Evans's loyalists insisted that these constituted pirate booty and had not been created in mainland Greece. But with the aide of these tablets, English mathematician and amateur classicist Michael Ventris was able to "break the code" in 1952; to his surprise, and to the shock of most others, Linear B turned out to be an early form of Greek, making it clear that Mycenaeans had ruled at Knossos much earlier than Evans would have conceded.

Evans has also come under severe criticism for the speculative nature of his ambitious restorations at Knossos. Scholars have challenged even his most basic idea, that the building at Knossos was a palace. Hans Georg Wunderlich, for example, in The Secret of Crete (1974), proposes that the ruins are of a vast necropolis. Less idiosyncratically, Rodney Castleden, in The Knossos Labyrinth (1990), thinks they are the ruins of a temple. But a pair of excavations conducted separately on Crete in 1979, one near a village named Archanes, the other in the North House at Knossos, dealt still deadlier blows to Evans's vision of the Minoans. The former contained evidence of a human sacrifice, complete with a body lying on an altar, trussed like a sacrificial victim, a dagger among his bones. Even grimmer were the finds at the latter site. There 327 bones that belonged to at least four children were found with the fine knife marks characteristic of a butcher's removal of meat from the bone. Most likely, ritual cannibalism had been performed. The myth of the Minotaur, it turns out, may have had more precise historical roots than Evans ever imagined. Nonetheless, on balance, the excavation of Knossos remains a major achievement, and Evans's flair for the dramatic clearly advanced the study of Bronze Age Greece throughout Crete.

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.