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(More customer reviews)Cotrell's book reads rather like a hagiography of the two great venerable figures of modern Greek archaeology, Arthur Evans and Heinrich Schliemann. While both deserve praise and gratitude, both have likewise earned a degree of criticism for their impatience, grandiosity, runaway imaginations, and lack of intellectual discipline that arguably led to as much harm as good. One reads with a sense of agony of Schliemann burrowing hastily through and destroying entire levels of Troy, now lost to us forever, out of his pressing desire to discover evidence that matched his vision of Homer's Troy. And who can read without sighing with exasperation, his declaration upon discovering a gold mask in a Mycenaean shaft grave, that he has looked upon the face of Agamemnon?
Cottrell can do so, apparently, enamored as he is with the romanticism of the daring archaeology of spade and shovel. Unfortunately, the archaeology of the adventurer leaves fragments behind that the archaeology of scholars must try to piece back together.
Even as a matter of enthusiastic biography Cottrell might have paused to consider how Evans got custody of the site of Knossos in the first place, when Greek archaeologists were also poised to dig at the spot. And Schliemann's discovery of Troy was surely as much dumb luck as deduction - his reasoning was as often wrong as right.
I write this review as an admirer of Schliemann and Evans, but no on is served by hero-worship, and Cottrell, I fear, is as drawn to their excesses as to their gifts. So, in this popular survey of their discoveries, he rhapsodizes in a matter I find old fashioned and unengaging, shot through with nostalgia and gloss.
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This is the story of two of the most heroic, and controversial, figures in archaeology: Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the remains of Troy, and Arthur Evans who unearthed the great city of King Minos. Ranking alongside Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, these discoveries at Troy and Knossos enabled a new understanding of Prehistoric Greece. They also proved that what until then had only been myths and daydreams of achaeologists and historians were historically real. The Cretans did indeed worship the cult of the bull. Achilles and Agamemnon really did live. Replete with drama and adventure, The Bull of Minos tells of the 3,000-year old civilizations that were revealed in their full glory, of the extraordinary men who toiled in their dusty ruins, and of the magic and mystery of life in an ancientworld of gods and warriors.
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