Foreword
In the year 1900 British anthropologist and archaeologist Arthur Evans began excavating a Bronze Age site near the city of Herakleion in Crete, and came upon a building with nearly twelve hundred rooms. No one had the slightest idea who had originally created this enormous structure. Evans associated it with the ancient Greek traditions of King Minos, who supposedly ruled the island capital of Knossos two generations before the Trojan War. According to the tales, Minos had constructed a mysterious labyrinth. Evans regarded the site as the remains of this ruler's former palace, and he coined the concept of a "Minoan" culture in Bronze Age Crete. Ever since, scholars have become accustomed to referring to the palace builders of early Crete as "the Minoans," although to this day no one knows what they called themselves, these odd people who in their frescos depicted their men with dense black hair and reddish skins, their women with black curls and white complexions. ...