Minoan Crete

Around two thousand years before the common era, great palace complexes appear on Crete — Knossos, Phaistos, Malia. They are not fortresses: instead of walls they are surrounded by storerooms with enormous jars, workshops, and halls with frescoes of processions, dolphins, and youths vaulting over a bull. The palaces gather the harvest and craft of their districts and send Cretan wares across the eastern Mediterranean, keeping accounts in scripts that are only partly deciphered. The Greeks would later remember this age as the kingdom of Minos with its labyrinth, and the Tanakh calls the island Caphtor, whence came the Philistines.