Word: minoans
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What ever happened to the Minoan civilization? Centered on the island of Crete 15 centuries before Christ, the seagoing Minoans once dominated the commerce and influenced the culture of the eastern Mediterranean. Suddenly, their advanced civilization came to a catastrophic end. Great temples and lavish palaces fell into ruin. Traffic halted on a complex system of paved roads; elaborate viaducts crumbled, and most of the residents of Crete died or mysteriously disappeared...
...many years, archaeologists believed that a sudden earthquake had devastated the island, or that it had been systematically conquered and destroyed by invaders from Greece. In 1939, Greek Archaeologist Spyridon Marinates suggested that the Minoan civilization had actually been destroyed around 1500 B.C. by falling ash and poisonous fumes from a volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (now called Santorin), 75 miles to the north. But the volcanic theory did not quite square with all the available facts; some of the pottery found on Crete, for example, had apparently been fashioned as late as 1450 B.C., 50 years after...
...believes that the latest geological findings explain the apparent discrepancy in his 1939 theory. In a paper recently presented at an archaeological conference in Canea, Crete, he explains that the first eruption destroyed all life on Thera around 1520 B.C., but had little effect on Crete, where the Minoan culture continued to flourish...
David G. Mitten has been promoted to Francis Jones Assistant Professor of Classical Art. An authority on Lydian, Minoan, and Greek art, he has taught at Harvard since 1962 and is assistant director of the Harvard-Cornell Sardis (Turkey) Excavation. He holds the B.A. (1957) from Oberlin and the Ph.D. (1962) from Harvard...
...recent decipherment of the Minoan Linear A script has made it possible to translate the 797-line inscription carved on a marble slab that has been in the possession of my family for almost 3000 years. The first lines read as follows...