ABSTRACT
For Homer, Crete was traditionally an island with ninety or a hundred cities. Archaeological investigation increasingly confirms this tradition of urbanization; and the student of the institutions of historical Crete already has at his disposal epigraphical material from about sixty cities from the mid-seventh century B.C. onward. The extent to which these institutions survived in modified forms from the Bronze Age can only be partially assessed until we have more information of various kinds. Modern historians, especially those who have accepted the proposed decipherment of the Linear B script, are sometimes prone to oversimplify the contrast between Minoan and Hellenic. On the one hand they depict a late Bronze Age bureaucracy centred upon Knossos, fantastic in its proportions, in the degree of its detailed control of the economic and social life of the period; on the other, a slow resumption of civilized life in quite new forms after a ‘dark age’. The supremacy of Knossos in the later Bronze Age is a reasonable inference from the archaeological and the later literary evidence. We cannot, however, define the supremacy because we do not know the area which Knossos directly or indirectly controlled. Archaeology can tell us much about Minoan palaces and towns, but little so far about villages and hamlets, about the way of life of the majority of the population. The evidence is partial and should be treated accordingly.
