A long, low, quiet episode, for the edge of sleep: the Minoans of Crete, the people of the first great palaces of the Mediterranean, and the sea they ruled by trade rather than by fleet.
We begin in the island before the palaces — the Neolithic villages, the obsidian of Melos, the long prehistory that the Bronze Age was built on — and we stand in the great palaces themselves: Knossos, Phaistos, Mallia, Zakros, and the open, unfortified courts that made them look, to the first archaeologists, like the palaces of a peaceful people. We test that idea, and the rest: the towns beyond the palace, the walled town of Gournia, the swords in the magazines, the cave skeletons with their fractures. We walk the court and the peak sanctuaries, the bull and the leaper, the Snake Goddess and the double axe, and the Phaistos Disc — the small clay spiral that no one can read.
Then the sea: Thucydides and the first thalassocrat, the stirrup jars that reached every harbour, the shipwrecks, the trade network from the Cyclades to Egypt, the Minoan peace and its critics. And the end: the eruption of Thera, the tsunami on the Cretan coast, the fall of the palaces, the Mycenaean takeover, the Linear B voice of the last palace age — and the myth that survived: the Minotaur, the Labyrinth, and the memory of a people whose own words have not come down to us.
A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About 66 minutes.
Sources (a selection): Nanno Marinatos, Minoan Religion: Ritual, Image, and Symbol (1993); Cynthia Shelmerdine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age (2011); Sir Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos (1921–36); Charlotte Pearson et al., Scientific Reports 13 (2023); H. J. Bruins & J. van der Plicht, PLOS ONE 20 (2025); K. Minoura et al., Geology 28 (2000); Natalie Abell, Brill's Companion to Warfare in the Bronze Age Aegean (2024); Thucydides I.4; Herodotus III.122; Heraklion Archaeological Museum.
