Bronze female figure Cretan Late Minoan 1600-1450 BCE

January 20, 2020

Bronze female figure Cretan Late Minoan 1600-1450 BCE

"Interest in locating ‘Homeric’ sites of the pre-Classical Greek world was stimulated in 1870, when the pioneering archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, claimed to have identified the city of Troy.

His later excavations at Mycenae, in the Argolid region of mainland Greece, soon revealed further spectacular evidence of an ‘age of heroes’, including the so-called ‘gold mask of Agamemnon’. By 1876, Schliemann was convinced that the epic poems of Homer were, in fact, reliable historical documents; and when he turned his attention towards Crete, more sensational revelations were expected, this time of the lost civilization of King Minos. Schliemann, however, was unable to obtain permission to excavate; and it was not until 1899 that the site of Knossos was explored, under the direction of Sir Arthur Evans.

Like his predecessor, Evans was aware of the mythology of Crete and the ancient travel accounts of Pausanias; but he was primarily drawn to the island by his ambition to establish the origins of the Greek language. His excavations produced the curious Linear B tablets, which defied decipherment until 1952, when the outstanding researches of Michael Ventris and John Chadwick proved that the ancient Cretan script was the forerunner of Archaic Greek."

-taken from historytoday link below