Word: minoan
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...with a special microwave hookup. Culture-conscious Jackie was charting her own Odyssey, over to Lesbos for a look at the island where the poet Sappho was supposed to have thrown herself into the sea. Then on to Crete for a session with Sister Lee Radziwill, clambering around labyrinthian Minoan ruins. The last stop was at Delphi, where, intent on the guide's words, she stumbled into a pothole. The First Lady quickly scrambled up and went on for a look at the site of the omniscient Oracle of Apollo, but demurely declined to pose a question...
...late Bronze Age that Homer wrote about. Bits of planking preserved under the cargo show that the ship was probably built of Syrian wood and in Syria. She must have touched at Cyprus, the ancient copper center, to pick up a ton of copper ingots, stamped with Cypro-Minoan signs. She also carried ingots of tin, probably from Syria, that have long since turned to white oxide. Packed in wicker baskets, are fragments of broken bronze tools, weapons and household utensils. Apparently the ship was a floating factory, turning copper, tin and bronze scrap into equipment for warriors, farmers...
Ethnologically speaking, it's a wise child indeed who knows his own father. Were the Greeks really the founders of Western civilization? The Greeks themselves looked to Crete, whose earlier Minoan civilization is newly being appreciated with the deciphering of the script called Linear B. As scholars, but few laymen, know, Crete, not Greece, was the land of the myths-of Zeus and the Titans, Prometheus, Hyperion, Orpheus and Hercules. It was on Crete that Daedalus built the labyrinth and Icarus took off for history's first air crash. The vast Palace of Minos, whose foundations were laid...
Eleven dollars will buy a one-way air ticket from Athens to Crete, and still another unseen aspect of the Greek way: Candia's fragrant food bazaar, the Minoan ruins near Knossos, and the high Lasethi plateau, crammed with hundreds of white-sailed windmills. In any of the little plateau villages, a traveler can buy his lunch merely by hailing, say, the butcher, who will put a table outside and provide wine, bread and cheese, while curious, good-natured Greeks in baggy trousers, sashes, boots, brocaded vests and fierce mustaches gather round and ask the stranger's name...
...total of 50 undergraduate offerings, seems hardly a fair ratio considering the importance of this period. Avid Egyptophiles can learn about the art of Karnak and Tutankamon's tomb next year in Fine Arts 131, but they cannot discover the history of the various dynasties. Students of Minoan or Cretan developments have only Professor Hanfmann's course in Aegean archaeology--next year--without a corresponding History course...