On Crete, three thousand years before the Parthenon, palace-dwellers leapt over bulls, wrote in an undeciphered script, and ruled the Aegean waves.
The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age culture centered on the island of Crete, flourishing from about 2700 to 1100 BCE with its great palace at Knossos. Named by the archaeologist Arthur Evans after the legendary King Minos, it was the Aegean’s first advanced civilization — maritime, artistic, and literate in Linear A, a script that remains undeciphered.
