Word: minoan
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Thirty years ago, my girlfriend and I took an overnight ferry from Piraeus, the port of Athens, to Iraklion, on the island of Crete. After mooching around the Minoan ruins at Knossos, we hitchhiked to the wildly beautiful lands in the west of the island. The girlfriend became my wife, and every year or two since-15 times in all-we've returned, to the same village, the same indescribable light, the same White Mountains plunging into the same wine-dark...
...dating has been recalibrated in recent decades to give archaeologists strong certainties about the ages of key artifacts for Europe's prehistory, from the drawings in France's Chauvet Cave (32,000 years old), to possibly Neanderthal milk teeth found in Cavallo, Italy (31,000 years old), to the Minoan civilization on Crete (3,700 years old). That means there is always the prospect of a physical discovery - an agricultural site that doesn't fit in time or space, say - that can blow existing theories out of the water...
...Sloppy research] Cleopatra's sister did not die in jail under Caesar's rule; the sphinx did not look brand-new in Cleopatra's time; the columns in Cleopatra's palace looked Minoan (an era 1,100 years earlier...
...those maxims sound obvious, contradictory, or both, well, the facts about earthquakes are too. Upheavals of the earth have stunned humans and ravaged their works since prehistoric times: some scholars believe the ancient Minoan civilization and the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were wiped out by quakes. Nonetheless, the tremors have never ceased to spring surprises on those who study them and try to cope with them...
...there it was...a big Minoan mason's mark all over the facade of the tomb. It was the first time we ever understood that Cretan architects were building Greek tombs for Greek princes," says Vermeule...