ABSTRACT
The earliest inhabitants of the island, which straddles the southern Aegean, possibly crossed from Asia Minor in the Ice Age, when the Mediterranean was low, but similarities between early Cretan and Anatolian Neolithic culture suggest that an important contingent, at least, may have come much later – at about the time of Catal Huyuk. About the beginning of the 2nd millennium, the appearance of great extroverted palaces on the edges of the hive-like urban organisms marked the advent of a new civilization, specifically Cretan if not uninfluenced by Mesopotamia. Native Minoan civilization failed to recover, though the palaces were rebuilt in part and occupied for another century by intruders from Greece. The newcomers were Aryans too, but armed with iron rather than bronze and destructive of the elements of civilization that had enriched the Aegean region for so long.
