Summary of Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Evans came to Crete in the late 1880s to excavate the ruins of an ancient civilization that Heinrich Schliemann had excavated a quarter century earlier. He proved that the poems of Homer, which described a war between the Greeks and Trojans, were indeed historical.
#2 Despite the great refinement of the Mycenaean kingdom, there was no evidence of writing anywhere in the kingdom. This surprised Evans, who believed that such a sophisticated civilization would have been literate in some form.
#3 Evans was a tireless archaeologist who was able to spend long periods of time in the Balkans, where he was a passionate advocate of the Slavic nationalist cause. He was also a wealthy man.
#4 Arthur Evans was a scholar who studied the Balkans. He was a staunch public champion of the Slavs’ struggle for self-determination, and he wrote a series of dispatches to the Manchester Guardian chronicling the heroism of the Slav resistance fighters.

Sujets

• Greece
• History
• Ancient
• Ancient history
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9798822505070
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Evans came to Crete in the late 1880s to excavate the ruins of an ancient civilization that Heinrich Schliemann had excavated a quarter century earlier. He proved that the poems of Homer, which described a war between the Greeks and Trojans, were indeed historical.

#2

Despite the great refinement of the Mycenaean kingdom, there was no evidence of writing anywhere in the kingdom. This surprised Evans, who believed that such a sophisticated civilization would have been literate in some form.

#3

Evans was a tireless archaeologist who was able to spend long periods of time in the Balkans, where he was a passionate advocate of the Slavic nationalist cause. He was also a wealthy man.

#4

Arthur Evans was a scholar who studied the Balkans. He was a staunch public champion of the Slavs’ struggle for self-determination, and he wrote a series of dispatches to the Manchester Guardian chronicling the heroism of the Slav resistance fighters.

#5

Arthur Evans was a myope man who had been desperately nearsighted since childhood. He was extremely nearsighted, and could see things with near-microscopic precision at extremely close range. He was able to see the fine details of objects that other experts missed.

#6

The widely accepted view of Greek history was that it had begun in 776 B. C. with the first Olympics. The Classical Era, with its spectacular achievements in arts, letters, and science, would follow soon afterward.

#7

Evans was able to turn the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford into a world-class museum of art, archaeology, and antiquities. He was also able to build his house, Youlbury, and move in alone.

#8

Evans believed that the carvings on the seal-stones he found in Crete were not just decorations, but rather a means of marking ownership. They were too stylized for that, and too systematic.

#9

By the end of 1893, Evans had felt sure enough of the markings on his Athenian seal-stones to announce his discovery in public, declaring that he possessed a clue to the existence of a system of picture-writing in the Greek lands.

#10

Evans was determined to excavate the Palace of Minos, and in 1900 he landed on Crete to do so. He bought the property rights to the site, and began excavating it.

#11

The Palace of Minos was discovered in 1900 by Sir Arthur Evans, and it was larger than Buckingham Palace. It was destroyed in a final catastrophe in the fourteenth century B. C. , and was rebuilt and partly reoccupied. But it would never again be a seat of power.

#12

The discovery of writing at Knossos was a huge surprise to Evans. The tablets were made of clay and were wedge-shaped, between two and seven inches long and a half inch to three inches high. They were designed to fit comfortably in a scribe’s hand.

#13

The Knossos tablets were written in a hieroglyphic script, which was used from about 2000 to 1650 B. C. The tablets featured a new system of linear writing, which had evolved from the hieroglyphic script in the eighteenth century B.

#14

The Knossos tablets were written in Linear B, and it was this script that had the greatest chance of being deciphered. The more text a decipherer has to work with, the greater the likelihood of solution.

#15

Writing systems are maps that take the sounds of a language and map them onto designated graphic symbols. They are a linguistic luxury, and only about 15 percent of the world’s roughly six thousand languages have written forms.