A name taken from a myth
Nobody knows what the Minoans called themselves. The British archaeologist Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos from 1900, named their culture after Minos, the king of Crete in Greek legend. From the layers he dug he also built a timeline of nine periods (Early, Middle and Late Minoan, each split in three), modelled, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art points out, on the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of Egypt.
UNESCO dates the civilisation from about 2800 to 1100 BCE. Crete’s position explains much of it: an island between Greece, Egypt and the Levant, which UNESCO calls a bridge between Europe, Africa and Asia.
Palaces at the centre of everything
Around 1900 BCE the Minoans built the first of their great palaces: at Knossos and Malia in the north, at Phaistos in the south and at Zakros in the east. Each was arranged around a paved central court and built in fine masonry. According to the Met they concentrated political and economic power, and probably collected and redistributed the island’s farm produce. In general they had no defensive walls, although watchtowers guarded the main roads. Inside there were sanitary facilities, careful provision for light and air, and painted walls and floors.
The palaces were also places of ritual, but much of Minoan religion happened outside them, in caves, springs and peak sanctuaries across the island.
A script nobody can read
With the palaces came writing, probably to keep track of goods. The Minoans used two scripts: a hieroglyphic one, perhaps inspired by Egypt, and Linear A, perhaps inspired by the cuneiform of the eastern Mediterranean. They wrote them on clay tablets, mostly accounts, and on ritual objects such as stone libation tables and miniature double axes. Both scripts are still undeciphered, so the language of the Minoans is unknown.
The most famous puzzle comes from Phaistos. On 3 July 1908 the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier found a clay disc about 16 cm across, stamped on both sides, before firing, with 241 signs arranged in a spiral and grouped into 61 “words”. The Heraklion Archaeological Museum dates it to about 1700-1650 BCE; some groups of signs repeat like a refrain, which suggests a hymn or a spell, but nobody has read it.
Did Minos rule the sea?
The Athenian historian Thucydides wrote that Minos was the first ruler known to have built a navy, that he controlled the Aegean, ruled the Cyclades and tried to put down piracy. Is there anything behind the legend? Partly. Crete exported timber, food, cloth and probably olive oil, and imported tin, copper, gold, silver, emery, ivory and fine stones. On Melos, the town of Phylakopi went through a phase of strong Minoan influence, and on Thera the port of Akrotiri was in contact with Crete.
Egypt saw the Cretans too. Tombs of high officials at Thebes show delegations from Crete bringing precious gifts, and in the reign of Thutmose III two palaces at Tell el-Dab’a, in the Nile Delta, were decorated with Minoan wall paintings, according to the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which excavates the site. Similar paintings turned up in palaces at Alalakh, Qatna and Kabri, in the Levant. So there was influence and wide trade; whether it added up to a sea empire, the evidence does not say.
Who were they, genetically?
A study of ancient DNA published in Nature in 2017 compared Minoans with Mycenaeans from the mainland. The two were genetically similar, with at least three quarters of their ancestry from the first farmers of western Anatolia and the Aegean; most of the rest came from populations related to those of the Caucasus and Iran. The Minoans, then, descended largely from the farmers who had settled the Aegean in the Neolithic.
Thera, 1450 and the Mycenaeans
In the last quarter of the seventeenth century BCE, earthquakes drove the people of Akrotiri out of their town, and then the volcano of Thera buried it under ash. Crete carried on. From about 1500 BCE, the Met notes, Mycenaean influence from the mainland grew, and around 1450 BCE a wave of destruction hit the island. If the Mycenaeans did not cause it, they used it: the records of Knossos from then on were kept in Linear B, an early form of Greek, and on those tablets the city appears as ko-no-so. Minoan culture faded slowly and was in decline by the beginning of the eleventh century BCE.
Its palaces never quite disappeared from memory. They became the setting of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, and in 2025 six of them (Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, Zominthos and Kydonia) were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Where to see it
The Heraklion Archaeological Museum holds most Minoan art, from the frescoes of Knossos to the Phaistos Disc and the faience “snake goddesses”. Of the palaces, Knossos and Malia are in the north of the island, Phaistos in the south and Zakros, on a sheltered bay, in the east. Akrotiri, on Santorini, shows a Bronze Age town in contact with Crete. Check opening times with the museum and the sites before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Minoan Crete”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2002).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Minoan Palatial Centres” (1733), inscribed 2025.
- Heraklion Archaeological Museum: “The Phaistos Disc” (Π-Ν1358), “Snake Goddess figurines” (Υ63, Υ65), “Stone bull’s-head rhyton” (Λ1368).
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Odysseus portal: “Knossos”, “Akrotiri of Thera”, “Phylakopi”.
- Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austrian Archaeological Institute, “Tell el-Dab’a: Late Minoan wall paintings”.
- Cambridge University Press, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Writing in Bronze Age Crete: “Minoan” Linear A.
- I. Lazaridis et al., “Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans”, Nature (2017).
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.4.
