The Find of a Lifetime: Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of Knossos

The story of the dapper Victorian gentleman whose obsessions led to one of the most breathtaking discoveries in the history of archaeology: the Palace of Minos at Knossos. As the brilliant curator of the famed Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Sir Arthur Evans was already a famed prehistorian and archaeologist before, at the age of fifty, he assumed his most celebrated role: as the discoverer of the ancient civilization of Crete - a civilization that, until then, had only been dimly recalled in the myth of Theseus. Less than a month after the first spadeful of earth had been turned on the site at Knossos, Evans discovered a labyrinthine palace that was clearly the seat of a fabulously wealthy and powerful culture. Sylvia Horwitz's biography brings us both the legend and the truth of this extraordinary man as well as the story of one of archaeology's most momentous and thrilling discoveries.