Why would the Minoans fire the
clay tablets which they recorded their
everyday transactions on? They
wouldn’t and didn’t, so when the
rotted thatched roof of the rented
house of Arthur Evans fell in during a
prodigious downpour, all the unfired
gray clay tablets unreadable as yet and ever
“cut out by me in one piece with their
earthly matrix,” wrote the discoverer,
“had already been reduced to a pulpy mass.”
To even get started, Evans had to
buy some of Knossos. To deal with
language barriers, he spoke Latin
with priests. Klutzy, Evans said the only
sport he was good at was
jumping to conclusions,
although right out of Oxford, he and
his brother Lewis hiked and hiked in the Balkans
“armed with Bologna sandwiches and Turkish delight.”
Older than Oxford by a long chalk,
Bologna is the first continuous
university: 1188 CE. How
terrific that Bologna sandwiches fed
and feed millions of students! Did the
the eponymous Earl of Sandwich go
to Oxford? Trinity Cambridge.
Bologna is home to Luigi
Galvani, inventor of
galvanism. Lokum is
the real name for Turkish delight.
No confection is more beautiful.