Europe's first farmers set out from the shores of the Aegean
Before 5000 BC, Neolithic farmers from Greece were carrying agriculture westward across Europe, one branch up the Danube and another along the Mediterranean to Iberia and eventually Britain. Their Bronze Age successors on Crete, the Cyclades and the mainland built palaces, traded across the sea and left a world that later Greeks half remembered as myth.
Aegean civilization is an umbrella for three linked regions: Crete, home of the Minoans; the Cycladic islands; and the Greek mainland. The Cyclades merged culturally with the mainland in the Early Helladic period and with Crete in the Middle Minoan. From about 1450 BC mainland Mycenaean culture spread to Crete, probably through conquest.
Trade began very early. Obsidian from the island of Melos turns up all around the Aegean, and after 1600 BC Aegean goods reached Egypt and every coast of the Mediterranean. No coins have been found, only standard weights, pictures of ingots and some axe heads too small to use. The best ship images survive in a fresco at Akrotiri on Thera, preserved under volcanic ash, and wrecks at Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya off Turkey have added a wealth of detail.
The material world was rich but oddly lacking in some things. Excavators find palaces, villas, drains, paved roads and bridges, frescoes and huge storage jars, yet no distinct temples and very little large free-standing sculpture. Writing survives only on clay tablets and discs from Crete. Knossos offers the longest continuous sequence, running from the Neolithic to the end of the classical era.
For centuries the walls of Mycenae, its Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus were seen as crude forerunners of classical Greece. Aegean pots had sat in museums at Sèvres and Neuchâtel since around 1840 without anyone grasping their meaning. Heinrich Schliemann changed that. The Burnt City at Hissarlik, now called Troy II, exposed in 1873 with a hoard of precious metal, stirred curiosity, and his Mycenae excavations made interest explode as scholars saw an entirely unknown style and wondered at echoes of Homer.
Source: Aegean civilization
