Books in Brief

Archaeological Giants

The Bull of Minos: The Discoveries of Schliemann and Evans

Leonard Cottrell, with a new introduction by Peter Levi (New York and Bicester, England: Facts on File Publications, 1984) 224 pp., 16 color plates, numerous black-and-white illustrations, $19.95

Schliemann and Evans. The two names are inseparable from any account of Greek Bronze Age archaeology; they were its founding fathers. Heinrich Schliemann first established the historical reality of Mycenaean civilization that lies behind the epic Homeric world of Agamemnon and Menelaus, who, eight centuries before Pericles, launched a thousand Greek ships to besiege and conquer Troy. Arthur Evans revealed the Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete, the predecessor and begetter of so much in Mycenaean culture, and itself remembered in the no-less-colorful legends of Minos, king of Knossos, of the labyrinth and the Minotaur.