Page 297 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

It is generally agreed that some historic truth lies behind the

story of Theseus, son of the king of Athens, who volunteered to
join the tribute of youths and maidens sent yearly to be sacri­
ficed to the Minotaur, half-man and half-bull, in the Labyrinth

at Knossos, and who was aided by Ariadne, daughter of the king
of Knossos, to slay the Minotaur and to escape, with Ariadne,
from Crete. It seems probable that the story mirrors in some way

the conquest, archaeologically attested, of Crete by the Achae-

REPRESENTATION OF A FLYING FISH FROM A MINOAN FRESCO AT
PHYLAKOPI ON THE AEGEAN ISLAND OF MELOS.

ans of Greece around the year 1400 b.c. There have been many
attempts to combine the archaeological evidence and the leg­

end into a plausible story, and this chapter cannot claim to be
more than another such attempt. The description of the course
of events in Greece and Crete must therefore be regarded as

archaeologically-based myth. For the course of events in Egypt,
Syria, and Mesopotamia, on the other hand, there is a great deal
of unimpeachable historical material, much of it contemporary.
The script used by the Greeks who conquered Knossos (re­

ferred to early in the chapter) was not the Greek script we know