Word: crete
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When Nikos Kazantzakis was buried in Crete three years ago, a tall, unknown peasant stepped suddenly from the crowd, seized the coffin and lowered it single-handed into the grave. It was a giant's gesture which the dead man himself might have planned. For the author who wrote a brilliant modern sequel to The Odyssey and stirred the world with Zorba the Greek believed that man's destiny is determined by his own acts in the face of life, death...
...most fascinating chapters of ancient history tells about the fabled island of Crete, whose rulers were thalassocrats (lords of the sea) and whose beautiful, bare-breasted priestesses romped in arenas with sacred bulls. Most history books state that the Cretan sea-kingdom, whose capital was Knossos, brought Egyptian and Asian civilization to the then-savage shores of Greece. This theory was largely the work of Oxford Professor Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos in 1900-05. Sir Arthur died in 1941 at the age of 90, a revered figure in archaeology, but last week he was the center...
Play-by-Play. Sir Arthur's accuser was Professor Leonard R. Palmer, 54, an Oxford philologist whose passion is "digging about and taking a language to pieces." While trying to take to pieces the undeciphered written language of ancient Crete, he became suspicious of Sir Arthur's belief that Knossos was "the most ancient center of civilized life in Greece and with it, of our whole continent." Palmer found what he considered evidence that the stream of culture ran from mainland Greece to Crete-not the other way around...
...years Palmer mulled over these matters, reading all available documents and even visiting Greece and Crete for first-hand looks. Early this year he went to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, of which Sir Arthur had been director, and asked to see his notes. The librarian took him to a basement cupboard where most of the Evans papers were stored. Digging deep, he came upon a ten-volume, richly illustrated daybook giving a meticulous play-by-play account of Sir Arthur's excavation of Knossos. It was written by Duncan Mackenzie, a redhaired Scotsman whom Sir Arthur had hired...
...insists that the evidence of Duncan Mackenzie's daybook is plain for all to see. It shows, he says, that the Cretans of 1400 B.C. must have got their culture from the Greek mainland. That culture did not die, as Sir Arthur claimed, when the mainlanders came to Crete...