Long before Athens or Sparta, the Aegean was home to some of Europe’s first great civilisations. Around 3000 BC the islands of the Cyclades produced elegant marble figurines that still look strikingly modern today, and by about 1900 BC the Minoans of Crete were building vast palace complexes at Knossos, Phaistos and Malia.
The Minoans of Crete
Named by the archaeologist Arthur Evans after the legendary King Minos, the Minoans were seafarers and traders whose ships reached Egypt and the Levant. Their palaces had light wells, drains and storerooms full of oil and wine, and their walls were painted with lively frescoes of dolphins, lilies and young people leaping over bulls. They wrote in a script known as Linear A, which has still not been deciphered.
The Mycenaeans
From around 1600 BC power shifted to the mainland. The Mycenaeans, named after their great citadel at Mycenae, were warrior aristocrats who buried their dead with gold masks and bronze weapons. They built fortresses with walls so massive that later Greeks believed they were the work of the one-eyed Cyclopes. Their script, Linear B, was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris and turned out to be an early form of Greek, recording palace inventories of chariots, sheep and offerings to gods such as Zeus, Hera and Poseidon.
Collapse
Around 1200 BC the palace world fell apart. Mycenae, Pylos and many other centres were destroyed or abandoned, part of a wider crisis that swept across the eastern Mediterranean. Historians still debate the causes, which may have included drought, earthquakes, revolts, broken trade routes and raiding peoples. Whatever the reasons, the age of palaces was over, but its memory lived on in the stories of heroes and the Trojan War.
