Skip to content

Why would the Minoans

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.