ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS

QUESTION

Was King Minos a real person? KiNg MiNos is thought to have been a historical figure whose story is overlaid by years of myth. the Minoan civilisation, the earliest in Europe, is based on his name.

it was centred on Crete, the largest of the greek islands, from about 3000BC to 1100BC, reaching its zenith by the beginning of the late Bronze Age, extending over the islands of the south Aegean.

its wares were exported to Cyprus, syria and Egypt before its power was greatly diminished after the devastating volcanic eruption on the island of santorini 100 miles away.

Writing in the fifth-century BC, Athenian historian thucydides described King Minos as the Cretan king who built the first navy and dominated the world.

He was, he said, the son of the greek god Zeus, and a mortal named Europa. Young Minos was raised by the king of Crete and became ruler when his stepfather died, going on to have many children with his wife and mistresses.

thucydides also wrote that Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, was tricked by the sea god Poseidon into falling in love with a bull, and the result of this unnatural union was the minotaur, a half-man/half-bull creature that Minos ordered to be hidden at the centre of a maze beneath his palace at Knossos, known as the Labyrinth.

the story of King Minos was dismissed as legend by scholars for millennia, but in the 19th century travellers, led by amateur archaeologist Minos Kalokairinos and working from classical descriptions, identified ruins in a landform called Kephala Hill as the ancient site of Knossos.

Various painted walls and pottery were uncovered in 1878 before digging was stopped by the local authorities.

Kalokairinos showed his findings to British archaeologist Arthur Evans, and they revisited the site in 1894. Evans was