Word: crete
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...island was inhabited by an exceedingly sophisticated race of men. To make their buildings somewhat elastic and therefore earthquake resistant, they set wooden pins in the corner joints of the stones. They cultivated the olive. They produced pottery similar to the products found in Knossos, the Minoan city on Crete 75 miles to the south. But by far the most amazing creations of the ancient islanders were their frescoes...
...molten hail produced by Santorini's deafening eruption must have rendered all lands within a 100-mile radius (including central Crete) uninhabitable. Then came the incursion of the sea into the immense lava boil that had been Santorini-probably causing water to recede temporarily from shores around the Mediterranean. As the immense volume of water that had converged on Santorini rushed outward again in a giant wave, it smashed harbors and flooded large districts around the Mediterranean basin. The great sea empire of Minoan Crete simply vanished in the wake of Santorini's destruction...
...gradual diffusion of culture from the advanced Near East to barbarian Europe. There were a few puzzling exceptions: Stone Age tombs in Brittany, for example, were found to date back to at least 3000 B.C. Yet the oldest comparable tombs in the eastern Mediterranean-built by the Minoans on Crete -were known indirectly from actual historical records to date from only 2500 B.C. But except for a few iconoclastic prehistorians like Britain's Colin Renfrew of Sheffield University, most archaeologists remained thoroughly convinced "diffusionists." If a few prehistoric European monuments or artifacts happened to show unusual antiquity, they contended...
...screws of some 2,000 merchantmen on any day distort sound. The watch is most intense at six main "choke points," or "ticket gates," as Admiral Kidd calls them, through which maneuvering submarines must pass. These are Gibraltar, the sea south of Sardinia and Sicily, and the areas between Crete and Greece, Crete and North Africa, and Crete and Turkey. Both sides keep watch on the choke points. At the same time, surface ships frequently shadow one another. Cruising aboard the Roosevelt recently, TIME Correspondent John Shaw was startled to come on deck one morning to find that during...
...archaeological fingerprinting, Aström and a friend, Sven Eriksson, chief of the Swedish police's fingerprint department, collected some 200 impressions from ancient pottery found in Greece and Cyprus. The Mycenaean fingerprints had a distribution of 20% arches, 65% loops, 15% whorls, while those from Minoan Crete, a civilization some 1,000 years older, show a contrasting distribution of 4%, 42%, 54%. Their sampling was admittedly too small to suggest any major answer to perennial disputes. "My purpose," Aström explained, "is to maintain that fingerprints can be used in defining a population or a race...