A Handbook to the Palace of Minos at Knossos
A Handbook to the Palace of Minos at Knossos

Author: J. D. S. Pendlebury

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 93

ISBN-13: 1108074316

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This short 1933 handbook on an archaeological wonder in Crete provides an architectural history and illustrated guide to the site.

The Origins of Greek Thought
The Origins of Greek Thought

Author: Jean-Pierre Vernant

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9780801492938

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Jean-Pierre Vernant's concise, brilliant essay on the origins of Greek thought relates the cultural achievement of the ancient Greeks to their physical and social environment and shows that what they believed in was inseparable from the way they lived. The emergence of rational thought, Vernant claims, is closely linked to the advent of the open-air politics that characterized life in the Greek polis. Vernant points out that when the focus of Mycenaean society gave way to the agora, the change had profound social and cultural implications. "Social experience could become the object of pragmatic thought for the Greeks," he writes, "because in the city-state it lent itself to public debate. The decline of myth dates from the day the first sages brought human order under discussion and sought to define it.... Thus evolved a strictly political thought, separate from religion, with its own vocabulary, concepts, principles, and theoretical aims."

The Knossos Labyrinth
The Knossos Labyrinth

Author: Rodney Castleden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-12

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1134967853

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Knossos, like the Acropolis or Stonehenge, is a symbol for an entire culture. The Knossos Labyrinth was first built in the reign of a Middle Kingdom Egyptian pharaoh, and was from the start the focus of a glittering and exotic culture. Homer left elusive clues about the Knossian court and when the lost site of Knossos gradually re-emerged from obscurity in the nineteenth century, the first excavators - Minos Kalokairinos, Heinrich Schliemann, and Arthur Evans - were predisposed to see the site through the eyes of the classical authors. Rodney Castleden argues that this line of thought was a false trail and gives an alternative insight into the labyrinth which is every bit as exciting as the traditional explanations, and one which he believes is much closer to the truth. Rejecting Evans' view of Knossos as a bronze age royal palace, Castleden puts forward alternative interpretations - that the building was a necropolis or a temple - and argues that the temple interpretation is the most satisfactory in the light of modern archaeological knowledge about Minoan Crete.