Over its "Bronze Age", Crete consolidated her arithmetic and instituted a religious scriptorium, in the north-by-centre. Crete, like Cuba, is a long island longitudinally, with hills. Forests too in those hills; I don't know they had the goat. How was the island before Minos? What was Kreta before Minos?
On 7 April Sylviane Déderix, Aurore Schmitt, and Ilaria Caloi have floated some Suggestions.
Turns out - h/t hbdchick - this island looked much different in Middle Minoan I. And the difference, a surprise to me, isn't east-west so much as south-north in the centre. (Hardly anyone bothered with the rugged west. Which might not be even Minoan.) The central southern coast, on that spur, was something of a land of the dead. They were big on circular tombs. The north had tombs too but they were rectangular and not as common. They extend to the eastern third of the island.
However they handled them, all Cretans cared for their ancestors. The tombs were collective. As far as I know they enjoyed genetic continuity since their west-Anatolian with 10-15% Zagros origins. More Anatolian out east, as we'd expect. (That "Armenoi" sample in the west, fascinatingly, looks like Thessalonica, beyond Mycenae.) At least St. Charalamb in the east was endogamous, to the point of first-cousins. We are, then, dealing with clans.
Now for the timestamping. Following 2200 BC was an infamous breakdown of Near East society, which included Egypt and mainland Greece (we're not saying how, here). Middle Minoan starts with the Middle Bronze: they usually say 2050 BC, although Avellino blew up slightly over five decades later (and let's not discuss what "bronze" means here). From 1900 BC the architecture achieves "protopalatial" status. In Anatolia this should be about the time of the early Luwians, relatives to us IndoEuropeans and ancestors to the seafaring Lycians and Car(c)ians. They were not, yet, masters of this sea.
The Middle Minoan south, as a culture, was instead Egypt-facing. This is certainly how come they adopted a linear script: they could get papyrus. Maybe the Alasiotes could use Ugaritic clay; not southern Crete. The circular tomb-plan spread north, crowding the squares to the coast and the Anatolian-facing east. The old pictographic script would, then, have spread north too; also, I moot, Linear A its syllabic "demotic" form.
This week's archaeology is one of the squares, that north coastal site near Sissi. This is east of ancient Malia. In MM IIB, late 1700s BC, the locals dismantled the tomb; there, they depo'ed a mighty Pottery Deposit, of 13000+ shards. This looks like... quite the party. What human remains survive, come from tombs as had collapsed naturally beforehand. (The Med is quite the sea of tectonics.)
St. Charalamb looks like the ossuary where the previous tombs' occupants got re-interred, over a thousand of them. That reburial happened, concurrently, MM IIB; Déderix, Schmitt, and Caloi think that circular tombs also were emptied at this time. At St. Charalamb was held the grandest feast, for the occasion.
At the start of MM IIIA 1700 BC, I am told of destructions from Knossos to Malia - looks like earthquake. After that we get the Neopalatial Period, including a "court" at Sissi and the rebuilding of Malia. Now, however, Knossos was queen of the island.
I see a revolution, in the eastern two-thirds of Crete: both in the central plain including the southern spur, and the central northern coast plus east. Here is Minos' uniting of the two lands - by uniting their ancestors. The new Crete was no longer to tolerate cousin-bumping clans. It was, further, to face north, toward Thera and the Cyclades. And the western third? Just another Cythera.
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