Sunday 19 March 2023

๐™‚๐˜๐˜ฒ (10. 622)

Finally returning to the excavations and adventures of his academic years after serving as a reporter and secret agent in the Balkans for the Manchester Guardian and a long stint as the keeper of the curiosities for the Ashmolean of Oxford, organising the collection into a museum with many restrictions for conducting archeological digs imposed by the Ottoman Empire removed with the establishment of the Cretan Republic, Arthur John Evans (see previously) and crew began exploring a flower-covered hill in the central part of the island on this day in 1900. Over the course of three years, albeit with some creative liberties (see above), Evans discovered the Minoan civilisation, so named for the maze-like quality of the Palace of Knossos—which was a series of a thousand cells for artisanal work, storage and food processing—that invoked the myth of King Minos and the captive Minotaur.