Restoring The Minoans

How do archaeologists and artists reimagine what life was like during the Greek Bronze Age? How do contemporary conditions influence the way we understand the ancient past? This innovative book considers two imaginative restorations of the ancient world that test the boundaries of interpretation and invention by bringing together the discovery of Minoan culture by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941) and the work of the Turner Prize–winning video artist Elizabeth Price (b. 1966). Featured essays examine Evans’s interpretation and restoration of the Knossos palace and present fresh photography of Minoan artifacts and archival photographs of the dig alongside beautiful, previously unpublished watercolors and drawings by the archaeological illustrators and restorers who worked on the site: Émile Gilliéron père(1850–1924), Émile Gilliéron fils (1885–1939), Piet de Jong (1887–1967), and others. An interview with Price explores how her attraction to the Sir Arthur Evans Archive became the basis for her commissioned video installation at the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and offers insight into her creative practice. Exhibition dates: October 5, 2017–January 7, 2018

Before Sir Arthur Evans, the principal object of Greek prehistoric archaeology was the reconstruction of history in relation to myth. European travellers to Greece viewed its picturesque ruins as the gateway to mythical times, while Heinrich Schliemann, at the end of the nineteenth century, allegedly uncovered at Troy and Mycenae the legendary cities of the Homeric epics. It was Evans who, in his controversial excavations at Knossos, steered Aegean archaeology away from Homer towards the broader Mediterranean world. Yet in so doing he is thought to have done his own inventing, recreating the Cretan Labyrinth via the Bronze Age myth of the Minotaur. Nanno Marinatos challenges the entrenched idea that Evans was nothing more than a flamboyant researcher who turned speculation into history. She argues that Evans was an excellent archaeologist, one who used scientific observation and classification. Evans's combination of anthropology, comparative religion and analysis of cultic artefacts enabled him to develop a bold new method which Sir James Frazer called 'mental anthropology'. It was this approach that led him to propose remarkable ideas about Minoan religion, theories that are now being vindicated as startling new evidence comes to light. Examining the frescoes from Akrotiri, on Santorini, that are gradually being restored, the author suggests that Evans's hypothesis of one unified goddess of nature is the best explanation of what they signify. Evans was in 1901 ahead of his time in viewing comparable Minoan scenes as a blend of ritual action and mythic imagination. Nanno Marinatos is a leading authority on Minoan religion. In this latest book she combines history, archaeology and myth to bold and original effect, offering a wholly new appraisal of Evans and the significance of his work. Sir Arthur Evans and Minoan Crete will be essential reading for all students of Minoan civilization, as well as an irresistible companion for travellers to Crete.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Minoans, then keep reading... The Minoans continue to be an intriguing subject for modern audiences because they are like a puzzle missing half of its pieces. Individuals have a rough idea of what it might look like, but there could be surprises no one even thinks of because all traces of the image are gone. For archaeologists, historians, tourists, scholars, fans of mythology, and students of the ancient world, the Minoans are this broken puzzle. The Minoans were an ancient civilization that built their settlements on islands in the Aegean Sea. They lived almost 5,000 years ago and left behind traces of their lives but not enough for people to create a complete picture. Ever since the early 20th century, the Minoans have been a subject of interest thanks to the discoveries and excavations by Sir Arthur Evans, a British archaeologist who found the first Minoan ruins and named them after the mythological King Minos and his Minotaur. Evans was able to gain almost sole access to the lands of the Cretan government for excavation by paying for it with funds generated by his supporters in 1900. He and his crew unearthed the massive palace complex of Knossos, one of the most famous archaeological excavation sites in history. From the work of Evans and others, the puzzle of the Minoans has slowly gained more pieces. Through the study of material culture, modern audiences now know quite a bit about artistic techniques, favorite subjects, fashion, daily life, gender roles, and who the Minoans traded with. An observer can tell that the Minoans were a seafaring mercantile civilization, that they built magnificent urban centers, and that they had a form of proto-writing. In Minoans: A Captivating Guide to an Essential Bronze Age Society in Ancient Greece Called the Minoan Civilization, you will discover topics such as Where and When Did the Minoans Live? Known History of the Minoans before the Mycenaeans Society, Culture, and Daily Life Trade and Shipbuilding on the Mediterranean Sea Language and Linear A The Potential Predecessors of Greek Religion Art Architecture Theories about the Collapse of Civilization And much, much more! So if you want to learn more about the Minoans, scroll up and click the "add to cart" button!

In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle. Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints an unforgettable portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.

The Minoans have for decades tantalized all those who have tried to understand this most enigmatic people of the ancient world. The Minoan allure lies in large part in the riddles to which their mysterious culture gives rise. What is contained in their earliest writing script, the still un-deciphered Linear A? Did their likely extinction by volcanic eruption shape the Atlantis legend? Why was their religion so thoroughly matriarchal, with its symbols of snake goddess, serpent and labrys (double-headed axe)? What was the purpose of their great palaces at Knossos, Phaestos and Malia? What is the meaning of the atmospheric bull dance fresco uncovered at the palace of Knossos? The archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans controversially 'rediscovered' and then restored the Minoan civilization in the early twentieth century, and tied it to King Minos, builder of the famous labyrinth and keeper of the legendary Minotaur. In this lucid and absorbing new history of Crete from the 9th millennium BCE to the end of the Bronze Age (c 1000 BCE), John Bennet expertly draws on the latest archaeological and textual discoveries to separate fact from imagination, history from myth.