The excavations of the British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans and his colleagues from several nations alongside the Greeks and Cretans brought to light a culture the existence of which was to then only known from Homeric epic and Greek myth (especially the Minotaur cycle). Evans at the start of the 20th century revealed the ruins of the great Palace at Knossos – the foremost city in Crete from Neolithic times down through the Bronze Age