Free Republic

It argues that the "palaces" could more likely be "temples" rather than residential buildings. For sure, archaeologists are quick to point out that certain parts of the palaces definitely had a religious function. But some go further. Archaeologist Oswald Spengler stated in the 1930s that these "palaces" were temples for the dead. His opinion was not taken seriously, as it went against the accepted belief. Wunderlich continued where Spengler had stopped. Both noted that the state of the palaces was particularly bizarre. Thousands of people are believed to have roamed the corridors of the Palace of Knossos, but the staircases...

Jerome Eisenberg, a specialist in faked ancient art, is claiming that the disc and its indecipherable text is not a relic dating from 1,700BC, but a forgery that has duped scholars since Luigi Pernier, an Italian archaeologist, "discovered" it in 1908 in the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete. Pernier was desperate to impress his colleagues with a find of his own, according to Dr Eisenberg, and needed to unearth something that could outdo the discoveries made by Sir Arthur Evans, the renowned English archaeologist, and Federico Halbherr, a fellow Italian... Dr Eisenberg, who has conducted appraisals for the US...

Ancient Rhizon was also a political centre for the illyrians and it was here that Teuta, Queen of the Ardiaei tribe, established her capital. After negotiations broke down between Teuta and the Romans (who requested her to put an end to piracy in the Adriatic), the First illyrian War broke out in 229 BC. However, the illyrians could not withstand the might of Rome and the war was a short lived affair. Not much else is known about Rhizon's place in history as hardly any documentary accounts exist which refer to it by name. Most of the archaeological evidence has...

Arthur Evans, the eccentric Englishman who led the excavations, was, if anything, even more creative in his reconstruction of the Bronze Age than Schliemann had earlier been. The fabulously ancient palace of Knossos enjoys, as Gere points out in her arresting first sentence, "the dubious distinction of being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the island". The complex of buildings gawped at by thousands upon thousands of tourists every year owes less to the masons of the Minoan age than it does to the example of modernist architecture. On Crete, the archaic and the contemporary, both...