Knossos is an inspiring place for the artist and engineer #crete
Loved visiting Crete, great food, great beaches and the place where civilisation was born (maybe?)
If you put ‘art’ into a chronology, then without a doubt the skills
and realistic / mythical design and output of the Cretians is far more
advanced than any other civilization that was about at the time. Their
representation of the real world was fluid and not as primitive as other civilizations at the time.
Knossos - an inspiring place for the artist and engineer.
The site was discovered in 1878 by Minos
Kalokairinos. The excavations in Knossos began in AD 1900 by the
English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941) and his team, and
they continued for 35 years. The palace was excavated and partially
restored under the direction of Arthur Evans in the earliest years of
the 20th century. Its size far exceeded his original expectations, as
did the discovery of two ancient scripts, which he termed Linear A and
Linear B, to distinguish their writing from the pictographs also
present. From the layering of the palace Evans developed de novo an
archaeological concept of the civilization that used it, which he called
Minoan, following the pre-existing custom of labelling all objects from
the location Minoan.
The palace of Knossos was undoubtedly
the ceremonial and political centre of the Minoan civilization and
culture. It appears as a maze of workrooms, living spaces, and
storerooms close to a central square. An approximate graphic view of
some aspects of Cretan life in the Bronze Age is provided by
restorations of the palace’s indoor and outdoor murals, as it is also by
the decorative motifs of the pottery and the insignia on the seals and
sealings.
The palace was abandoned at some unknown
time at the end of the Late Bronze Age, c. 1380–1100 BC. The occasion
is not known for certain, but one of the many disasters that befell the
palace is generally put forward. The abandoning population were probably
Mycenaean Greeks, who had earlier occupied the city-state, and were
using Linear B as its administrative script, as opposed to Linear A, the
previous administrative script. The hill was never again a settlement
or civic site, although squatters may have used it for a time.
Knossos. (2015, October 8). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 05:36, October 14, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Knossos&oldid=684670078
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