Anna Mae Gardner, age 15, of Gulfport, Miss., for her question:
WHERE DID MINOAN CULTURE ORIGINATE?
Minoan culture developed in the area of the Aegean Sea prior to the coming of the Greeks. It was centered on the island of Crete and reached its height in the second millenium B.C.
The term "Minoan" is applied to this culture because the Greeks of the period associated the early supremacy of Crete with Minos, the name of several legendary rulers of Crete.
Little was known about Minoan civilization until 1894 when the British archaelogist Sir Arthur Evans began a series of excavations in Crete, culminating in his discovery in 1900 of a great palace at Knossos, located near the modern city of Iraklion. The palace was probably damaged by an earthquake about 1700 B.C., a date that marked the end of one phase of the early history of Crete.
A new dynasty developed an even more brilliant culture.
The palace at Knossos was rebuilt on a more elaborate scale. It rose to four stories and contained many extensive rooms and passages and a luxuriously decorated throne room. Conspicuous among the many paintings were scenes of bull leaping, a sport that may have given rise to the later Greek myth of the Minotaur.
The Minotaur, according to the Greeks, was a mythical monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man.
Sanctuaries within the palace provided a place for the worship of a mother goddess, probably the one called Rhea by the Greeks.
The kings of Knossos attained their greatest power about 1600 B.C. when they controlled the entire Aegean area and traded extensively with Egypt.
The destruction of Knossos and the collapse of Minoan culture coincided with the beginning of the most advanced period of Mycenaean civilization in Greece. This coincidence suggests that the warlike Mycenaeans attacked and destroyed the Minoan civilization.
Excavations on Crete after 1900 revealed hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with two principal unidentifiable scripts, called at first Linear A and Linear B. More tablets bearing Linear B were found in subsequent excavations at Pylos and Mycenae on the Greek mainland.
In 1952 the British architect and cryptographer Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B. He identified the language it transcribes as an ancestor of the Arcado Cyprian dialect of Greek. The inscriptions are dated between 1500 and 1150 B.C.
The theory concerning Linear A, proposed in 1957 by the American Semitics scholar Cyrus Gordon, presents the argument that this script might transcribe a form of Akkadian, a Semitic language of Babylonia and Assyria. It has not yet been deciphered.
Gordon dated the script as being in use between 1700 and 1500 B.C.