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PREHISTORIC GREECE AND CRETE
Out on the wine-dark sea there is a rich and lovely island called Crete, washed by the waves on every side, densely populated with ninety cities...one of the ninety cities is a great town called Knossos, and there for nine years King Minos ruled and enjoyed the friendship of almighty Zeus.
— The Odyssey 19.172-7.
The island of Crete, about 160 miles long, is the putative birthplace of the Greek god Zeus, and the home of the legendary King Minos and his Minotaur — we call the earliest known people of Crete the Minoans. Most scholars believe the Minoans were of Mediterranean stock and were a great trading and seafaring people. They were also great builders and erected many palaces during the so-called Old Palace Period (2000-1600 BC). What we know of them is based almost entirely on the archaeology of these sites.
Various social groups seem to have lived together in harmony and, some time between 1900 and 1700 BC, they developed a form of written language called Linear A. It is found on stone or clay tablets which, until recently, had not been deciphered. Manos Tsikritsis, a mathematician from Crete, now claims he has been able to read more than half of the existing texts by using Greek. He hypothesizes they may be in a written form of a language which included elements from ancient forms of Greek and other Mediterranean languages which later developed in different directions. Minoan civilization was at its height (c.1600 BC), when disaster struck all the palaces and towns except Knossos. We do not know what caused such a catastrophe, but it might have been a tremendous earthquake. Some have suggested that it was caused by the eruption of the volcano on the island of Thera (Santorini), but others discount this.
 Soon after this time, an Indo-European people, the Greeks, started to arrive from the mainland and gradually replaced or mixed with the Minoans. These Greeks are referred to as Mycenaeans, after the city of Mycenae, which was one of the most important on the mainland and was excavated by Heinrich Schliemann. These were the people described in the works of Homer. He called them Achaeans, Argives, or Danaans; they called themselves Hellenes. We call them Greeks from Graeci, the name given them by Romans. This rich civilization flourished between approximately 1600 and 1200 BC, the New Palace Period. Since none of the Cretan palaces were fortified, there seems to have been no threat of internal or external war during this period. Mycenae was the capital city of Mycenae, and Schliemann identified it as the home of King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces during the Trojan War. (Homer refers to Agamemnon’s home as Argos. There was a nearby city, Argos, but ancient Greek writers such as Thucydides [460-395 BC] agreed his capital must have been at Mycenae. Actually, Argos destroyed Mycenae in 468 BC). Schliemann ascribed much of what was found there to Agamemnon’s period, but he was off by 400 years; most of the finds, including the so-called “mask of Agamemnon”, predate the time of the Trojan War. However, the boars’ tusk helmets and shields he found were like those described by Homer. The written language of these people is called Linear B. The tablets on which it is found date to about 1400 BC, and the language has been proven to be a form of Greek, an adaptation of Minoan Linear A for use with a new language. Unfortunately these tablets do not tell us much. They contain only lists dealing with utilitarian and business affairs, not literature or history.
Meanwhile, to the east, somewhere on the mainland of Asia Minor, there was a city called Troy (or Ilium). Most agree that it was the site at Hisarlik which Schliemann identified and excavated. There he found layer after layer of civilization. The oldest dates from about 3000 BC and two layers bore signs of violent destruction. One layer yielded evidence showing that the town was subjected to siege, capture, and destruction by hostile forces at a date in the general period assigned by Greek tradition to the Trojan War. A crude attempt at restoration was followed by an abrupt cultural break.
After the time of the Trojan War, all Greece experienced overwhelming trouble, overrun by a new group, the Dorians, of which we know very little. The Mycenaean palaces were destroyed and there was widespread desolation in their surrounding territories. On Crete some places were destroyed, others abandoned, and the center probably moved from Knossos to Chania (ancient Cydonia or Kydonia) on the northwest shore. The libretto of Idomeneo sets its action in Cydonia, sometimes called Sidon.)
A Dark Age followed, during which the art of writing was lost. The Greeks probably remained illiterate until the Phoenician alphabet was adopted in the eighth century. It is likely that only a few scribes, those who kept the official records on the Linear B tablets, ever were literate. The beginning of the Greek Renaissance is traditionally set at 776 BC, the year of the first Olympic Games.EAO
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