We call them Minoans; they never used that name
Bronze Age Crete built palatial mazes, exported crafts and crops for scarce metals, and invented scripts we still cannot fully read. Arthur Evans popularized “Minoan” from mythical King Minos—a modern label for a people whose self-name is lost. Egyptians may have called them Keftiu.
Local Neolithic roots deepened into Minoan culture around 3100 BC, with complex urban settlements by about 2000 BC. After roughly 1450 BC, mainland Mycenaean Greeks exerted cultural and perhaps political dominance, yielding a hybrid that lasted until about 1100 BC. Crete exported farm produce and fine crafts in exchange for metals the island lacked, and its traders and artisans carried Minoan taste across the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean.
Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A remain undeciphered, so the language itself is unknown and thought unlikely to belong to Indo-European or Afroasiatic. After 1450 BC an adapted script, Linear B, recorded Mycenaean Greek as the island's administrative tongue; it was cracked in 1952. Whether Crete was ever one state is unclear. Worship took place at peak sanctuaries and sacred caves, and the huge maze-like complexes early diggers called palaces seem to have served religious and economic ends rather than housing kings.
Egyptian scribes wrote of the kftjw, pronounced Keftiu today, though nobody knows whether that was the islanders' own word. The Biblical Caphtor has sometimes been matched with Crete. Minoan art ranged from painted pottery and seals to figurines and bright frescoes.
Dating is its own puzzle. One scheme sorts pottery into Early, Middle and Late Minoan phases; Nikolaos Platon proposed another built around the palaces. Minoan goods from the LM IB phase turn up in Egypt's 18th Dynasty layers, but such links clash with radiocarbon results. The sharpest dispute concerns the Thera eruption near the end of LM IA: carbon dating puts it around 1600 BC, while Egyptian synchronisms would place it about a century later.
Source: Minoan civilization
