Today, Simon and Schuster released Colm Toibin's latest novel, House of Names, about Clytemnestra and the murder of Agamemnon.  Anybody who knows me knows I've had this on pre-order since I heard about it months ago.  Because I live on the West Coast, I received my copy at midnight Eastern Daylight Time, and managed to finish it around 3 a.m ( Read more... )

Where is that third and final installment of Minoan Pottery, you ask? I'm working on it, slowly.  It's just that I've been busy ( Read more... )

Here comes another installment of Minoan pottery types.  Now, I mentioned earlier that I did a lot of research for Knossos.  Among the generous replies from archaeologists like Dr. Colin Macdonald from the Athens School and Dr. Alexander MacGillivray, I sometimes managed to get information from graduate students (henceforth referred to as GS) in ( Read more... )

One item I left off the list from my initial "Writing A Historical Knossos" post of two weeks ago is pottery.  That's because pottery is such a hugely important and complicated subject that it needs its own post--indeed, it's so complex that I will have to give the subject three separate posts ( Read more... )

In 1915, archaeologists began digging at a site 45 km east of Heraklion and Knossos.  What they uncovered was the palace site of Malia, the third-largest in Crete after Knossos and Phaistos ( Read more... )

Among the most famous of Minoan artifacts is a steatite vase, a ritual libation vessel known as a rhyton, called the Harvester Vase.  It was discovered in the royal villa at Hagia Triada, near Phaistos, in the south of Crete, and dates to 1500-1450 B.C.  Yet only two pieces of the original have been preserved: the neck and the upper body; the lower ( Read more... )

Knossos is both a mythical and a real place.  You can do anything you like with the fantasy Labyrinth and its mythological denizens without apprehension; no one will call you out for inaccuracy.

Knossos the real site, however, is more complicated.  Want to write a historical novel with attention to the utmost accuracy?  Here comes the bullet list.

1. ( Read more... )

The famous La Parisienne fresco fragment is part of the larger Campstool Fresco series found in the western part of the Knossos complex, in what might have been an area for common dining or ritual feasting.

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Crete in the southern Aegean generally isn't a place you'd associate with ice or snow, except in the highest places such as Mounts Dikte and Ida, but lo and behold, just last week I came across this recent photo from lowland Knossos:


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I've posted about the Ladies In Blue fresco before, back when I did a watercolor reproduction of the trio.

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