MGRN+Art,+Literature+and+Music

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- The most important Minoan art is in their ceramics - They are also known for their frescos, landscapes, and stone carvings - Remains of material culture, especially the sequence of ceramic styles, has allowed archaeologists to define the three phases of Minoan culture - In the early minoan period Minoan ceramics were characterised by linear patterns of spirals, triangles, curved lines, crosses, and fishbone motives - In the middle minoan period naturalistic designs such fish, squids, birds and lillies were common - In the late minoan period, flowers and animals were still the most characteristic, but the variability had increased - The 'palace style' of the region around Knossos is characterised by strong geometric simplification of naturalistic shapes and monochromatic painting. - Since wood and textiles have vanished through decomposition, the most important surviving examples of Minoan art are Minoan pottery - The palace architecture with its frescos that include landscapes, stone carvings, and intricately carved seal stones. - The Minoans restless sequence of rapidly-maturing artistic styles reveal something of Minoan patrons' pleasure in novelty while they assist archaeologists assign relative dates to the strata of their sites - Pots that contained oils and ointments, exported from 18th century BC Crete, have been found at sites through the Aegean islands and mainland Greece, on Cyprus, along the coastal Syria and in Egypt, showing the wide trading contacts of the Minoans - The extremely fine palace pottery called Kamares ware, and the Late Minoan all-over patterned "Marine style" are the high points of the Minoan pottery tradition.

- In general the period is characterized by a large number of local wares with frequent Cycladic parallels or imports, suggesting a population of checkerboard ethnicity deriving from various locations in the eastern Aegean or even wider.
 * Early Minoan**

- The rise of the palace culture, of the "old palaces" of Knossos and Phaistos and their new type of urbanized, centralized society with redistribution centers required more storage vessels and ones more specifically suited to a range of functions - In palace workshops, standardization suggests more supervised operations and the rise of elite wares, emphasizing refinements and novelty, so that palace and provincial pottery become differentiated.
 * Middle Minoan**

- LMI marks the highwater of Minoan influence throughout the southern Aegean (Peloponnese, Cyclades, Dodecanese, southwestern Anatolia). Late Minoan pottery was being widely exported; it has turned up in Cyprus, the Cylades, Egypt and Mycenae.
 * Late Minoan**

Kristiansen, Kristian and Larsson, Thomas B."The Rise of Bronze Age Society" //Cambridge University Press// 2005 18 April 2009 [] **Back to Notes**
 * Minoan Crete** 24 April 2009 []