he turned up no clay tablets, no inscriptions cut in stone – no evidence whatsoever that this sophisticated mainland society had been literate.” The anomalous lack of written records inspired an English archaeologist to search farther.Īrthur Evans, later knighted for services to archaeology, conditioned by his father’s interest in prehistory, did not accept the prevailing dismissal of “Homer’s accounts of Bronze Age life as pure poetic fantasy”, Fox writes. “Though Schliemann excavated on a typically grand scale. Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman and ardent classicist, found remnants of the ancient city of Mycenae dating from the Aegean Bronze Age (about 1600 to l200 BC), and signs of well-administered prosperity, but no vestige of writing. It is hard to imagine a more humiliating case of cuckoldry.Īrchaeological exploration was a rich man’s hobby late in the 19th century. Beside his palace at Knossos he is said to have had the labyrinth built to imprison the Minotaur, half man and half bull, which he had reason to resent, as the hybrid was the offspring of the affair that his wife, Pasiphaë, had with a bull. The legend of King Minos of Crete is scandalous. Fox is a senior obituarist on the New York Times, with degrees in linguistics, and proves well able to present the difficult subject of her book with stylish clarity.

Even so, Knossos remains an archaeological site of great historic importance, as Margalit Fox explains in this account of how the earliest local history was revealed by an archaeologist and two dedicated cryptographers.

The excavated ancient ruins at Knossos have been imaginatively and gaudily furbished – Disneyfied – to attract day trippers off the cruise ships and other visitors to Crete.

The riddle of the labyrinth