5.3 Europe: 3000 to 1500 b.c.

Southern europe

Back to Europe: 5000 to 3000 B.C.

Eastern mediterranean islands

The British Museum has displays indicating the original civilization in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean should be called the "Cycladian", existing from 3,000 to 2,000 B.C. and to be considered separate from the Cretan or Minoan Civilization which followed

There are some who believe that the Egyptian and Anatolian influences stimulated the development, but most now feel that this was a purely local progress over a thousand year period. For the first 600 years or so of this Bronze Age, civilization was rather low key, and it appears that there may have been folks of several different origins on the island. Homer was probably truthful when he described three peoples - the Eteocretans, the Kydonians and the Pelasgians. The first of these may be considered the initial truly Cretan people, perhaps of Luvian origin and speaking the as yet undeciphered Linear A language. The Bulgarian linguist, Vladimer Georgiev, claiming decipherment of the Phaestos Disc found on Crete in 1910, believes that that represented a Luvian language which was dominant on the island around 1,700 B.C. and that the Eteocretans and Pelasgians had similar languages. The Kydonians lived in western Crete, language unknown, but they were definitely not Greek in origin. The Pelasgians were an Aegean people who originally may have inhabited all of the Aegean, Thrace and the Greek mainland. Their language was mid-way between Thracian and Hittite-Luvian. Obviously Minoa was a multi-lingual civilization.

The first palaces and cities of Crete appeared about 2,000 B.C., including Knossus, Phaistos, Mallia and Zakros. The first had about 80,000 people

The five hundred years following 2,000 B.C. saw the ships of the Minoans roaming unchallenged on the Aegean Sea. The Cretan navy apparently cleared the seas of pirates and protected the homeland from invasion so that there was no necessity for any kind of fortification on the island. The commercial fleet was involved in extensive commerce with surrounding islands, the Near East and Egypt. The latter supplied scarab seals, carved ivories, copper and tin