ABSTRACT
Although I will be addressing aspects of the appropriation of reconstructed and projected features of Bronze Age Cretan buildings and designs beginning in the fi rst decade of the 20th century by modern and contemporary artists, designers, architects, and archaeologists, my chief concern here is with the deeper assumptions that have underlain and continue to frame the very subject of ‘Cretomania’, not to speak of Minoan archaeology itself. Historically, the term itself is, of course, an analogue of the older, more familiar, and very well investigated ‘Egyptomania’ that swept Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in connection with Napoleonic and subsequent European interventions in early modern Egypt.
