Here is a summary from an article from a BBC web page. This is quite interesting to consider how civilisation began to develop in Europe initially.
‘In 3000 BC, Europe could only be described as uncivilised. The indigenous people were hunter-gatherers, living off the land by hunting and collecting food. Over the next few hundred years, a civilisation arose on the Greek island of Crete. Crete is the southernmost island in Europe, right on the edge of the continental plate. Very quickly, communities grew up around the coast on the eastern and southern parts of the island. People suddenly learnt advanced practices such as agriculture, pot-making, metalwork and so on. It is assumed that these people migrated to Crete from somewhere on the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, but we have no idea from where exactly.
At that time, there were no Greeks in Greece. The Cretans were not Greek and did not speak any form of the Greek language, as far as we can tell. We don’t know what these people called themselves, as we know nothing of the language they spoke. Later Greek legends spoke of a King Minos living in Crete, so (Sir Arthurr) Evans (an archeologist who discovered the civilization) coined the fanciful term ‘Minoan’ – meaning literally, ‘the people of Minos.’
By about 1900 BC, the Minoan civilisation had progressed to a remarkably sophisticated extent. They undertook the building of enormous palaces (including Knossos palace) with hundreds of rooms. These palaces were presumably inhabited by the rulers of the island, but had space for kitchens, metal workshops and all sorts of trade people as well, so they were more like small towns than big houses.
The Minoan palaces are remarkable in that they are completely devoid of fortifications and no weapons were ever found in them. This suggests either that the Minoans were a peace-loving people, or more likely, that they had total control of the seas around Crete and that no marauders were allowed close to the island.
At about the same time as the building of the palaces, the first Greeks arrived in Greece. These people set up a stronghold in the town of Mycenae on Mainland Greece, so they have been called the Mycenaeans. These are the Greeks described in Homer‘s Iliad and Odyssey… Such a warlike people would be expected to invade Crete, but this did not happen at this time, so it seems likely that Crete was well defended by a naval force. It also appears that the Mycenaeans learned a lot from the Cretans. They quickly developed an advanced culture of their own, with many Cretan fashions mixed in.
The Minoans seem to have worshipped a Mother Goddess, as was common with many religions of the time. Priestesses wearing flounced skirts and with bare breasts are shown in many of the frescoes.
Some time in this period, the Minoans developed a form of writing, the first in Europe. This system is known by the inglorious name of Linear A, because the symbols consist of lines rather than pictures. There seem to be about 90 different characters used in the system, suggesting that each symbol represents a syllable, as in the Japanese hiragana system – but since we don’t know the language that the Minoans spoke, all attempts to decipher the Linear A texts have failed.
In 1450 BC, all the palaces were… destroyed. All of them, except the palace at Knossos, were also burnt, as were many large Minoan villas. It is not known what caused the destruction this time, but the two leading theories are that the Minoan civilisation fell victim to either civil unrest or invaders.
After (this destruction), Knossos was occupied by Mycenaeans. These may have arrived in the wake of the destruction or they may have been the cause of it.
A new writing system emerged after the destruction. Similar to the original system, it is now called Linear B. This was deciphered in the 20th Century by Ventris and Chadwick based on work by Kober. It is an early form of Greek, the language of the Mycenaeans. It appears that they adapted the Linear A alphabet to allow them to write down their own language, and that the language spoken in Crete at least by the rulers and their officials after 1450 BC was Greek, lending further credence to the theory that the island was conquered by the Mycenaeans.
The Minoan people seem to have lived along with the Mycenaeans for another few hundred years. No doubt the Minoan language continued to be spoken by the working classes. However, the civilisation never really recovered from the disaster and went into a steady decline. In about 800 BC, a new group of people arrived on the scene – the Dorians. These were another war-like Greek-speaking people, who arrived on the mainland and soon afterwards in Crete. They seem to have driven the local people up into the hills because the later Minoan towns are in more and more inaccessible places, the last one being at Karfi, high in the Dikti Mountains. From that time onward, there are no traces of the Minoans’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A765146).
Reference:
BBC h2g2 (2002), The Menoan Civilisation of Crete (accessed 03/04/2010)
my individual research 