THE MINOTAUR’S ISLAND

What exactly are the million or so visitors who travel to the Bronze Age site at Knossos each year coming to see?

The first stop by the tour guides is the bust of Sir Arthur Evans, the bow-tied Englishman who excavated the site a little over a century ago. Here, visitors are told that they are entering a place where myth and prehistory meet: the palace of the legendary King Minos, powerful sea lord and ruler of Crete in the late Bronze Age. There follows the seductive cast list – Pasiphae, Minos’s bull-infatuated queen; Daedulus, master inventor; Theseus, hero from the Greek mainland; Ariadne, smart Minoan princess; and, finally, the Minotaur – that archetypal man-monster.

It’s all myth, of course, say the guides. Yet Arthur Evans, in a matter of a few weeks, turned up the first evidence