The Minoans: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Were the ancient Minoans a bunch of Bronze Age flower power hippies? You might take that view if you study some of their surviving artwork. However, according to Ellen Adams of King College London and the author of a new book called The Minoans, this civilization was much more complicated than that. In this Everything You Wanted to Know episode, Ellen answers all of the big questions about these ancient people, including, of course, what we should know about the mythical legend of the Minotaur.

David Musgrove put the questions to Ellen and began by asking where and when exactly the Minoan civilization was. Okay, so in a nutshell, we're talking about Bronze Age Crete. So we're talking about the southernmost Greek island, which is actually in the stepping stones between Europe. the Near East and Africa. So it's European now, but it's a brilliant strategic location.

We're talking about the Bronze Age, so roughly 3,000 to 1200 BC, the second millennium, especially for the really prosperous part of the Minoan period. Okay. And when and where does the term Minoan come from? So this is a modern term. We don't know what they called themselves originally, but it almost certainly wasn't the Minoans.

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