Life in Ancient Crete Part I: Minos

At the time when the Homeric poems received their final form, the Greeks still retained a tradition that Crete, under the sway of an heroic ruler called Minos, had once been a great sea-power, embracing in a single empire all the islands and the greater part of mainland Greece. This powerful organization, we now know, began to take shape about 2000 B.C. and increased in importance for about six hundred years. Then it came to so sudden and disastrous an end that it ceased to figure as an historical episode and passed into the realm of tradition and myth. Fifty-two years ago, Sir Arthur Evans, being greatly interested in material evidence of a bronze-age civilization in Crete, began his excavations of the Palace of Knossos and revealed to the astonished world of learning one great discovery after another; for here was “the most ancient centre of civilized life in Greece and with it, of our whole continent.” As excavation progressed, a chronological system had to be invented and used to describe the whole Bronze Age in Crete, and the pre-hellenic name “Minos” supplied an appropriate label.