The Golden Step Read Online Free PDF Page B

early 20th century, looking for signs and wonders. Grand complexes of buildings were unearthed at Phaistos on the Mesara Plain near Gortyn, and at Malia on the north coast some 30 miles east of Iraklion. But the far east of Crete seemed fruitless ground.
    Stylianos Giamalakis, an Irakliot doctor, was an avid collector of antiquities. It was a call to the sickbed of a farmer at Ano Zakros that brought Giamalakis to the eastern end of the island shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, and he had his reward when the grateful patient offered him, as in a fairy story, three gifts of gold – a bowl, a bull’s-head pendant, and a diadem depicting a goddess-goatherd. They came, the farmer said, from that flat place down by the sea where an Englishman had found some antique houses forty years before. Dr Giamalakis knew of an archaeological dig carried out on the coastal plain below the Valley of the Dead in 1901 by the British antiquarian David Hogarth, and he could see with his own eyes the exquisite workmanship of the three jewels. He gave the farmer everything he had in his pockets, and added his gold watch. The ‘finds’ were priceless treasures of the Bronze Age, at least as fine as anything that Evans had dug up at Knossos, and they pointed clearly to the strong possibility of another wonderful palace lying hidden under the olive groves and terraces of Kato Zakros.
    With the war came German occupation of Crete, and archaeological activity shut down for the duration. Afterwards it was slow to get going again, but in 1962 the Greek archaeologist Nikolaos Platon began to excavate only a few feet away from Hogarth’s old site. Immediately he struck a set of ruins which, as the dig widened out, revealed themselves as belonging to a palace of around the same date as Knossos and the other unearthed Minoan palaces, roughly 1900–1700 BC . Here were state apartments, bedrooms fit for a king and queen, treasury rooms, bathing halls, kitchens, workshops, cisterns, paved roadways. But there was one crucial difference. Zakros was far more complete, far richer in artefacts, than its sister sites. Unlike the other Minoan complexes, the ruins of the magnificent palace at the eastern end of Crete, it appeared, had lain undiscovered, undisturbed and unplundered ever since the Great Disaster of 1450 BC .
    No-one yet knows exactly what caused the destruction of all the big town-like palaces at that late Bronze Age stage. Everyone is agreed that they had all been felled simultaneously some 250 years previously in a catastrophic earthquake. The archaeological evidence is quite clear about their destruction around 1700 BC , and their subsequent rebuilding in even more magnificent style – the hallmark of a vigorous and confident society. But what epic disaster could it have been that struck Crete in 1450 BC , levelling every palace in the island? The one common theme is fire, which scorched the stones and tiles at every site. An earthquake such as the one in 1700 BC would have trapped people in large numbers in the ruins, but there is no sign of that having happened. A tidal wave, perhaps? There was a huge explosion around this era on the volcanic island of Santorini, less than 80 miles to the north. A massive tsunami might have overwhelmed the north coast palace of Malia and the one at Knossos just inland. Zakros in its coastal position in the east could have been vulnerable, too. But Phaistos, ten miles inland in the sheltered south of the island? Most unlikely. And wouldn’t a tidal wave have swamped and extinguished all fires when it hit? The eruption of Santorini, anyway, almost certainly happened many decades before Crete’s disaster.
    The finger seems to point to some man-made catastrophe, probably an uprising in the island which saw the palaces and other main buildings burned by rioters. Perhaps the insurgents were Myceneans from mainland Greece – they were well established in Crete by then,