Majestic Minoan Knossos: Palace Or Funeral Parlor
Before 1900, the general knowledge about an ancient civilization on Crete was limited to the Greek mythology of King Minos and the heroic Theseus, prince of Athens, who slayed the minotaur in the labyrinth and won the heart of the princess Ariadne, and of Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth who designed wings for himself and his son Icarus to escape the island. That changed in 1900 when Sir Arthur Evans excavated what he called the ‘Palace of Knossos’, seat of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization. However, there are some anomalies in the theory of a palace. Was the magnificent construction perhaps inhabited by the deceased, and not the living Minoan elite?
Portrait of Sir Arthur Evans by William Richmond, 1907 (Ashmolean Museum)
Sir Arthur Evans Enthusiastic Archaeologist
Arthur Evans was born in 1851 in Hertfordshire, as the son of an affluent archaeologist. He followed his father’s footsteps and was appointed as the curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and he was a professor in prehistoric archaeology at Oxford University. As curator of the Ashmolean Museum he developed a marked interest in the career and excavations of Heinrich Schlemann in 1876 at Mycenae, the historic stronghold and palace of Agamemnon, mythical High King who led the Achaeans to Troy in Homer’s Iliad. Evans had a particular interest in the seals that Schlemann had found. The seals were produced from stone and ivory and to Evans they hinted at an as-yet undiscovered lost civilization somewhere in the Mediterranean. Evans managed to buy similar seals in the markets in Athens and were informed of their Cretan origin.
