A painted clay larnax, a chest-shaped coffin from Minoan Crete
Terracotta larnax (chest-shaped coffin), mid-13th century BCE
Marked Knossos

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Minoans of Crete

On Crete, people built great palace complexes, painted lively frescoes and traded across the Aegean. Their script, Linear A, has never been read. We do not know what they called themselves.

Place
Knossos · Phaistos · Akrotiri, TheraEurope
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IThe palace at Knossos
  2. IIBull-leaping
  3. IIILinear A, still unread
  4. IVThe eruption of Thera
  5. VHow much did Arthur Evans rebuild?

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Arthur Evans
  • Minos (in legend)

Objects

  • The bull-leaping fresco
  • The Phaistos disc
  • Snake goddess figures

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

3100 BC to 1100 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?