This book makes a compelling case for a matriarchal Bronze Age Crete. It is acknowledged that the preeminent deity was a Female Divine, and that women played a major role in Cretan society, but there is a lively, ongoing debate regarding the centrality of women in Bronze Age Crete. a gap in the scholarly literature which this book seeks to fill.

Between about 3000 and 1400 BC one of the world's great civilizations flourished on the island of Crete. The distinctive characteristic of this civilization was that it was dominated by an elite of women.

Since their rediscovery in the early 1900s, Minoans have been defined by a series of cultural traits: elegance, gracefulness and sophistication, lovers of nature, in harmony with their neighbors. But how far does the later work of archaeologists support this view? Castleden uses the results of recent research to produce a comprehensive view of the peoples of Minoan Crete. Illustrations.

"The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age civilization that arose on the island of Crete and flourished from approximately the 27th century BCE to the 15th century BCE. It was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century through the work of British archaeologist Arthur Evans."--Wikipedia.

Early Minoan Crete is re-envisioned as a space of social innovation, in which change occurred through people and objects.

Costis Davaras is not the first scholar to compare the Bronze Age cultures of Crete and India. Prompted by an invitation to attend the World Archaeological Congress in New Delhi in 1994, he takes an eclectic look at parallels and affinities' between the two cultures, especially with regard to art and religion. With no physical or factual evidence that Cretans, or Cretan objects, ever reached this far into Asia, Davaras' suggestions are purely hypothetical and at best speculative, but they may achieve some heightened understanding of aspects of either culture. The fact that these are two cultures at the geographical extremes of the same Oriental cultural continuum' may not convince everyone that they remain worthy of comparison.

In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle. Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints an unforgettable portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.

Bronzeworking was an important industry in the late Bronze Age Aegean and this thesis draws on a large database of material related to Late Minoan bronze objects, raw materials, evidence for workshops and so on.

Shortlisted for the European Association of Archaeologies 2023 book prize In Search of the Labyrinth explores the enduring cultural legacy of Minoan Crete by offering an overview of Minoan archaeology and modern responses to it in literature, the visual and performing arts, and other cultural practices. The focus is on the twentieth century, and on responses that involve a clear engagement with the material culture of Minoan Crete, not just with mythological narratives in Classical sources, as illustrated by the works of novelists, poets, avant-garde artists, couturiers, musicians, philosophers, architects, film directors, and even psychoanalysts – from Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust to D.H. Lawrence, Cecil Day-Lewis, Oswald Spengler, Nikos Kazantzakis, Robert Graves, André Gide, Mary Renault, Christa Wolf, Don DeLillo, Rhea Galanaki, Léon Bakst, Marc Chagall, Mariano Fortuny, Robert Wise, Martin Heidegger, Karl Lagerfeld, and Harrison Birtwistle, among many others. The volume also explores the fascination with things Minoan in antiquity and in the present millennium: from Minoan-inspired motifs decorating pottery of the Greek Early Iron Age, to uses of the Minoans in twenty-first-century music, poetry, fashion, and other media.