Three cultures around one sea
The Aegean is the arm of the Mediterranean between mainland Greece and Turkey, closed to the south by Crete. In the Bronze Age, that is, the centuries when tools and weapons were made of bronze (an alloy of copper and tin), three cultures grew on its islands and shores. The Cycladic culture lived on the small islands in the middle, which the Greeks later called kyklades because they seemed to form a circle (kyklos) around the sacred island of Delos. The Minoan culture grew on Crete, and the Mycenaean on the mainland, named after its richest citadel.
“Aegean art” is a modern label for everything these peoples made, and the three cultures overlap only in part. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Early Cycladic culture flourished from about 3200 to 2300 BCE, the great palaces of Crete went up from about 1900 BCE, and the Mycenaean period runs from about 1600 to 1100 BCE. The builders of the Lion Gate at Mycenae lived some twelve centuries after the sculptors of the finest Cycladic marbles.
The Cyclades: marble for the graves
The islands had little farmland but a great deal of stone and metal. The Met lists iron and copper ores, lead, silver, emery, obsidian and marble, with the marbles of Paros and Naxos among the finest anywhere. Their people turned that marble into bowls and into the figures that made Cycladic art famous: standing women with the arms folded, a long nose and no other feature on the face. Most were placed in graves, so the cemeteries are known far better than the villages.
Today the figures look white and bare. They were painted: scientific analysis has found blue made from azurite and red from iron ores or cinnabar, used for eyes, hair and patterns. The rare male figures are mostly musicians, like the seated harp player in New York, 29 cm high with his instrument.
Crete: palaces without walls
Around 1900 BCE the Minoans began to build what archaeologists call palaces at Knossos, Malia, Phaistos and Zakros. Each was a block of rooms around a paved central court, where farm produce was probably stored and redistributed, rituals took place and craftsmen worked. As a rule they had no defensive walls, although a network of watchtowers guarded the island’s roads. The name Minoan is modern: the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos from 1900, took it from Minos, the legendary king of Crete.
Crete exported timber, food, cloth and probably olive oil, and imported tin, copper, gold, silver, ivory and fine stones. The palaces kept records in two scripts, a hieroglyphic one and the so-called Linear A, and neither can be read. What survives best is the painting: walls covered with lilies, dolphins, processions and young people leaping over bulls, in flat, bright colours. The Minoan civilisation also left faience goddesses, carved stone vases and tiny engraved seal stones.
Mycenae: gold, walls and the first written Greek
On the mainland the tone changes. The Mycenaeans built strongholds on hills at Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes and Athens, and a palace at Pylos, with walls of huge rough blocks that later Greeks believed only the giant Cyclopes could have lifted; hence the name Cyclopean masonry. At Tiryns, according to UNESCO, the walls are up to 8 m thick and 13 m high. The richest early burials, the shaft graves of Mycenae (about 1550 BCE), were opened by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 and gave the gold death masks now in Athens.
The first Cyclopean walls of Mycenae went up around 1350 BCE. About a century later a new circuit was built with the Lion Gate, two lions carved in the triangular stone over the door. Inside the palace stood the megaron, a hall in three parts: a porch with columns, a vestibule and the main room with the throne. The palace scribes wrote on clay in a script called Linear B, and on 1 July 1952, in a BBC radio talk, the architect Michael Ventris announced that its language was Greek. That made the Mycenaeans the earliest Greek speakers whose writing we can read.
How much did they borrow from each other?
A great deal, and in both directions. The Met calls contact with Minoan Crete decisive for Mycenaean art. From about 1500 BCE the current ran the other way: after widespread destruction on Crete around 1450 BCE, the records of Knossos were kept in Linear B, that is, in Greek. One island shows the whole sequence. At Phylakopi, on Melos, a town lived for almost two thousand years; according to the Greek Ministry of Culture, its third building phase shows strong Minoan influence and its fourth a Mycenaean one.
Were they different peoples? Less than once thought. A study of ancient DNA published in Nature in 2017 found Minoans and Mycenaeans genetically similar, with at least three quarters of their ancestry from the first farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean; the Mycenaeans also carried ancestry from a source related to the Eurasian steppe or Armenia. Bronze Age Greece had many centres, which traded, competed and copied each other for some two thousand years.
What survived into Greek art?
In the late thirteenth century BCE a wave of destruction hit the mainland palaces, and Mycenae was finally abandoned around 1100 BCE. The ruins stayed visible, and so did the stories. The Homeric poems placed Agamemnon at Mycenae, and UNESCO credits Mycenae and Tiryns with a strong effect on later Greek architecture and town planning. The Athenian historian Thucydides still named Minos as the first ruler known to have had a navy, and the palaces of Crete lived on in myth as the Labyrinth of the Minotaur.
Where to see it
Athens has the two great collections of Cycladic art, the National Archaeological Museum, which also holds the gold from the shaft graves of Mycenae, and the Museum of Cycladic Art. Minoan art is in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete. Six Minoan palatial sites (Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, Zominthos and Kydonia) became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2025, and Mycenae and Tiryns have been on the list since 1999. On Santorini you can visit Akrotiri, a Bronze Age town buried by the eruption of Thera. Check opening times with each museum and site before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: “Early Cycladic Art and Culture” (2004), “Minoan Crete” (2002), “Mycenaean Civilization” (2003); collection record 47.100.1.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Odysseus portal: “Mycenae”, “Phylakopi”.
- Heraklion Archaeological Museum, “Bull-Leaping Fresco (Taureador Fresco)”, Τ14.
- National Archaeological Museum, Athens, “Mycenaean Antiquities”.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns” (941) and “Minoan Palatial Centres” (1733).
- University of Cambridge, Faculty of Classics, “Michael Ventris, 1922-1956: Architect and Decipherer of Linear B”; Cambridge University Press, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Writing in Bronze Age Crete: “Minoan” Linear A (both scripts still undeciphered).
- I. Lazaridis et al., “Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans”, Nature (2017).
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.4.
