Original subtitles

[Narrator] On the island of Crete,

archaeologists investigate the ruins of a

mysterious ancient palace.

-Oh my God it looks good!

[Narrator] They uncover the secrets of ancient Greece’s

first great civilization,

that inspired the myth of the Minotaur.

-It’s pretty amazing,

the cups are pretty well preserved, though.

[Narrator] And discover traces of an apocalyptic event

that shattered their world.

[♪ theme music playing]

[Narrator] The wonders of ancient Greece are among the

greatest ever known.

Greece was the birthplace of democracy and the cradle

of Western engineering and architecture.

From inspiring inventions to epic heroes and legends,

the legacy of ancient Greece still shapes the modern world.

More than 1,500 years before the Parthenon rose above Athens,

a people called the Minoans built

Greece's first civilization.

They lived on the island of Crete and inspired some

of the greatest stories ever told.

The ancient Greeks believed that Crete was the realm

of a tyrannical king called Minos.

And the lair of the half-man,

half-bull Minotaur that feasted on human flesh.

-People want to come here and find the labyrinth.

[Narrator] This season, international teams of

archaeologists dig through centuries of earth to

piece together the real world behind the myths.

-It's not so much about the treasures you find but about

the information you are gaining from these treasures.

[Narrator] Who were the Minoans,

and why did their world give rise to so many legends?

At Sissi on Crete's northern coast, it's 6:00 a.m.

Archaeologist Jan Driessen and his team start their day.

[Jan] I've known the hill of Sissi since the very early '90s,

but we started to dig here in 2007.

The entire land is beautiful.

Crete is a gift of the gods, as they say.

[Narrator] Jan and his team are uncovering the remains of a

Minoan settlement that dates back more than

three and a half thousand years.

The Minoan civilization emerged on Crete in the

3rd millennium BCE,

around 400 years before the Pyramids of Egypt,

and more than 1500 years before the Parthenon of Athens.

Archaeologists call many Minoan settlements palaces,

because they are centered around a large building.

But the true purpose of these structures remains unknown.

[Jan] This season,

we're trying to find the history of the building,

when was it built, when was it destroyed.

[Narrator] Jan wants to discover what went on inside

this building complex,

to understand more about who the Minoans really were.

The problem is that Sissi was occupied continuously

for 1,400 years,

which makes the archaeology difficult to untangle.

[Jan] As soon as we fall into archaeological layers,

we do it like very slowly, because archaeology is

basically destruction,

whatever he’s taking away now, we can never put back.

[Narrator] The palace-style building at Sissi isn't unique;

there are at least six large palatial sites on Crete.

Most are on the coast.

And the greatest lies at Knossos in the

center of the island.

The palace of Knossos is one of the most extraordinary

megastructures of ancient Greece.

The site stretches across almost five acres

and it lies at the heart of the island's most famous myth.

Ancient texts tell how Knossos was the capital of

a cruel king called Minos, who ruled Crete.

The gods sent him a snow-white bull

to be sacrificed,

but Minos was so enchanted by its beauty

that he refused to kill the animal.

As punishment,

the gods cast a spell on Minos's wife, Pasiphae,

filling her with unnatural desire for the beast.

From this cursed union,

Pasiphae gave birth to a mutant creature with

a human body and a bull's head, the Minotaur.

Horrified, King Minos locked his monstrous stepson away in a

vast underground labyrinth, supposedly at Knossos.

What might lie behind this terrifying tale?

Archaeologist Nicoletta Momigliano

investigates Knossos and its links with the ancient myths.

-Knossos is a really special place,

it's very, very old.

People settled here around 7000 BCE.

It's, in Europe, it's one of the oldest Neolithic sites,

and there are almost like romantic reasons why it is

important, and it is because this is the site that is so

intertwined with stories about King Minos, the Minotaur,

the labyrinth.

[Narrator] In 1900, a British archaeologist called

Arthur Evans began the first large-scale

excavation at Knossos.

He realized that the civilization that built it was

far older than those on mainland Greece.

Discoveries reveal that in the 2nd millennium BCE,

Knossos was the largest city in the Aegean,

home to up to 80,000 people during its peak.

At its centre stood a sprawling multi-story building

with more than 1300 rooms.

A maze of corridors twisted through storerooms, staircases,

and open courtyards.

Evans believed that this intricate architectural

masterpiece was itself the real-life inspiration for

the labyrinth of the Minotaur.

Why?

Nicoletta investigates clues hidden in the palace.

[Nicoletta] What is interesting is that here at Knossos,

many blocks of the buildings are inside the mason's marks.

Here we have two mason's marks in the shape of a double axe.

According to Evans,

the double axe was called in ancient Greek labrys,

and the word labrys was connected to labyrinth.

And therefore labyrinth really meant

"The house of the double axe."

[Narrator] With this theory,

Evans convinced himself that the structure at Knossos

was the labyrinth from the legend.

Other discoveries inside the palace appear to provide

even stronger evidence.

Wall paintings depict young men with long hair

leaping over charging bulls

A dangerous sport that is still practiced alongside

other games with bulls,

in some parts of Europe today.

[Nicoletta] The bull represents, in some way,

you could say the power of Knossos.

But it's the symbol of nature or the symbol of force,

and that must have meant something to the Minoans.

[Narrator] At first, the connections appear convincing.

But the first mention of the Minotaur in the labyrinth only

appears 1000 years after the Minoans founded Knossos.

Nicoletta thinks Evans had another motive for

finding the labyrinth.

-Evans, of course, always tried in some way

to connect his archaeological discoveries

to ancient Greek myths that we know from

later classical sources,

because this stimulated people's interest.

[Narrator] Archaeologists have now discovered many

of Evan’s theories were wrong.

And while his reconstructions may bring Knossos to life,

they were often the product of Evans’s imagination and

incorporated modern building materials.

So to find out where these stories came from and

who the Minoans really were,

archaeologists have to go back to the start and

look beyond the myth.

What evidence is there for a ruler like Minos?

[Narrator] At Sissi in the north of Crete,

Jan and his team dig in the north-east wing of

the main building.

[Jan] We're trying to find out what is happening in this area.

There's a big difference between the

place where we're standing, which is the entranceway,

and the lower part, the north east wing.

[Narrator] Jan wants to find out what this building can

reveal about societies in ancient Greece.

According to legend, King Minos of Crete was the most powerful

ruler in ancient Greece who imprisoned the beast-like

Minotaur in a labyrinth under Knossos.

Ancient texts from mainland Greece say King Minos fed his

enemies to his monstrous stepson in the labyrinth.

He demanded that the city of Athens send a tribute to Crete

every ninth year.

Seven boys and seven girls, doomed to be devoured.

Could the figure of King Minos be based on truth?

Although ancient Minoan written texts have been found,

so far no one has been able to decode their language.

Meaning that any evidence for a king is reliant only on

archaeological finds.

Inside one of the rooms at Sissi,

the team uncovers what might be a clue.

[Jan] You can actually see that there's a lot of pottery,

coarsewares like pieces of, uh,

large storage jars with like rims and bases.

[Narrator] The team discovers a room filled with

sherds of pottery,

taken from all over the site and dumped here

by the Minoans.

-The Minoans produced so much pottery,

kilos and kilos of pottery are produced and also thrown

away rather rapidly.

[Narrator] Jan thinks this pottery heap is more

than just a rubbish tip,

it could be a clue to the design of the building.

-Dumps of pottery usually are a sign that they wanted to

lift the floor, they had to make the floor higher.

[Narrator] The discovery reveals that Sissi’s main

building was an impressive structure.

Like Knossos, it probably had more than one floor.

Who ruled in a house like this?

Jan investigates further.

The raised floor leads to a corridor that connects

to a central courtyard.

It can hold up to 300 people and can be accessed

from all sides.

-This court is the focal point of this building,

and this building is the focal point of the site.

This is where the people of Sissi gathered.

[Narrator] Archaeologists have discovered that all the major

palace sites in Crete, including Knossos,

have central courtyards like this.

They date back to the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE.

Jan thinks this feature could be critical to understanding

Minoan social structures.

-The central court is really the heart of Minoan society,

it is the same with Knossos,

the time that they were building the first pyramids in Egypt,

they were gathering in courts on Crete.

[Narrator] What did people do in these courts?

A clue could lie in the painted decorations at Knossos.

Minoan frescos capture a world that celebrates

youth and vitality,

often depicting young men and women in ceremonial scenes.

Archaeologists think these festivals and rituals may have

taken place it the vast,

open courtyards of Minoan palaces,

where the community came together.

Some archaeologists believe that a priest king or a queen

might have presided over these ceremonies.

But so far,

no archaeological evidence has been found to

confirm this hypothesis.

So Jan heads to the edge of the settlement,

where he thinks there might be a clue.

Here, Jan explores the site's cemetery,

around 30 tombs.

The pharaohs of ancient Egypt,

who lived at the same time as the Minoans,

decorated their tombs with their names and exploits.

But these are not royal burials.

The tombs contain between 150 and 200 individuals,

all buried together.

[Jan] You cannot indicate a person who could

have been a ruler in one of these communities,

there's no royal burials.

[Narrator] Archaeologists have found no definitive evidence

for a king anywhere on Crete.

Jan thinks sites like Sissi were not palaces ruled by a

king or a queen,

but the center of a community governed by a large,

extended families.

-There must have been competition between

these families,

but they must have come together in places like this

central court to discuss their problems.

So these courts also were a kind of

mechanism of integration,

of cohesion, social cohesion,

that kept the society together.

[Narrator] There's no evidence for a Minos-like

monarch on Crete.

Instead, it's possible that powerful families took charge

of political matters.

How did they wield their power over the island?

And if there was no Minos,

why did the myth of an all-powerful ruler who fed

children to the Minotaur emerge?

[Narrator] For decades, archaeologists believed the

Minoan civilization was restricted to the so-called

palaces on Crete's coastline.

But now a new generation is uncovering the secrets of the

Minoan world in unexpected places.

At Lavrakia in the south of the island,

archaeologists Yiannis Papadatos and

Tina Kalanzopoulou are on their way to a dig site high up

in Crete's mountainous interior.

-It is remote, we're up 1,000 meters above

main sea level,

and it's about 40 minutes driving from

the nearest village.

And very far from any center of habitation in the Minoan period.

[Narrator] Yiannis and Tina are among the first to excavate

these remote areas.

They started their dig here at Lavrakia in 2012,

their mission is to investigate ancient

Crete's hidden population.

[Yiannis] We’re interested more about ordinary people,

we’re interested about the everyday life of people living

in the mountains.

[Narrator] Tina and Yiannis want to find out who these

people were, and what role they played in Minoan society,

living far away from the coastal centers.

But distinguishing between ordinary mountain rock and

Minoan masonry is challenging.

Hidden in the landscape under collapsed rubble,

the team discovers the remains of 12 farmhouses.

They uncover the floor of one of the structures.

[Tina] So we have cooking and drinking vessels,

and we have some storage vessels.

[Narrator] The shape of the vessels reveals this settlement

dates to the same time as the coastal palaces.

Archaeologists initially believed these sites

were used seasonally.

But among the rubble,

Tina makes an exciting discovery.

[Tina] We have an actual potter’s wheel,

which is something that we did not expect to find.

Most of the pottery we had in the area was imported

from the lowlands.

[Narrator] The potter's wheel is covered

with strange markings.

[Tina] There are cravings,

but the carvings are not symbols, they merely,

they are there so that the clay,

the wet clay, stucks on it properly,

so when it turns, it doesn't slide.

[Narrator] The marks reveal the wheel's heavy use,

they prove that people were living here permanently.

The question is why?

At another section of the farmhouse,

Yiannis searches for a clue.

[Yiannis] This is the lower jaw of an animal,

probably a sheep or a goat.

[Narrator] Yiannis thinks that sheep and goats were highly

prized in Minoan society,

as they provided meat and wool for textiles.

A hint to the importance of wool for the ancient Greeks

can be found in the stories of the Minotaur.

According to the myth,

no one could escape the labyrinth and the jaws

of the Minotaur.

One year, the Prince of Athens,

Theseus, joined the group of sacrificial tributes,

determined to kill the beast.

The king's daughter Ariadne fell for him,

she gave him a sword and a ball of red woolen thread

to find his way out of the maze.

The story suggests that wool was key to livelihoods.

[Yiannis] It is very important that we find animal bones in

this excavation because our main aim is to construct the,

a relationship between the humans and animals

that were here.

So by studying, um, animal bones,

we will be able to reconstruct aspects of their economy.

[Narrator] It’s a rare find.

[Yiannis] In this particular trench,

it’s the first bone we need to go around it and

then cover it to protect it,

and then we’re going to remove it when we go deeper.

It’s too fragile to be removed right now.

[Narrator] The discoveries reveal that Lavrakia

was a thriving, rural community.

Its inhabitants mastered living in the

harsh mountain terrain,

rearing sheep and goats for wool and meat.

-The success of this civilization was exactly because

of their ability to exploit every tiny corner

of this island.

[Narrator] Yiannis suspects this settlement was probably

one of many that dominated Crete's interior.

It hints at a highly organized society that extended far

beyond the coastal settlements,

more sophisticated than any other Greek

civilization at the time.

Could this be the root of the stories of King Minos's power?

[Narrator] The legends say King Minos ruled a great

empire from the island of Crete.

His power supposedly rested on naval supremacy.

While there may be no evidence for a real ruler like Minos,

a clue to this maritime myth could lie in Egypt, near Luxor,

at the Valley of the Nobles on the west bank

of ancient Thebes.

Here, Arto Belekdanian investigates the tomb

of an Egyptian official called Rekhmire.

The tomb dates to the reign of King Thutmose III,

in the 1400s BCE,

around 100 years

before Tutankhamun took the throne,

and when the palace of Knossos reached its height.

The paintings on the wall reveal Rekhmire was second only

to the king.

They also contain an insight into the world

beyond Egypt's shores.

-The ancient Egyptians loved recording their accomplishments

in life in their tombs.

This was a way to show off to all posterity the station

that they held in life.

On this wall here,

we see people from all over the known world bringing gifts

to the pharaoh Thutmose III,

and this is all overseen by Rekhmire.

[Narrator] Arto investigates who these people were,

details in their dress provide evidence.

-They are sporting long hair and these beautiful, patterned,

richly colorful kilts.

[Narrator] These people look distinctly similar to those

depicted at Knossos.

Like the young men with long hair leaping over bulls.

One offering shown in the tomb of Rekhmire appears to be a

vessel in the shape of a bull's head,

it too provides a link to Crete.

The Minoans are known to have carved ceremonial vessels

shaped like bull's heads called rhyta,

it's possible they were designed to catch the blood of

sacrificed animals.

A sarcophagus at an archaeological site in

southern Crete shows a bull pinned down,

sacrificed as part of a ritual.

-These men are unmistakably Cretan.

These people are called the Keftiu,

that's the term that the ancient Egyptians used to refer

to the people in and around the island of Crete

in the Mediterranean.

[Narrator] The wall paintings suggest the Egyptians saw the

Keftiu as inferior subjects bringing tributes.

But Arto thinks it's more likely they had a partnership.

Vessels like rhyta were highly prized by the ancient Egyptians

due to their exquisite craftsmanship and religious

purposes, and so were gifted diplomatically by the Minoans.

[Arto] The ancient Egyptians and the Minoans

were trading partners.

So the Minoans would export to the ancient Egyptians,

fine, highly prized pottery, richly decorated metalwork,

fragrant oils, and textiles.

And in return, the ancient Egyptians would export one of

the things that they were most famous for, gold,

and of course, papyrus and grain as well.

[Narrator] Archaeologists have found other signs of contact

between Minoan Crete and Egypt.

Artists painted scenes of bull leaping on the palace

walls at Avaris in Egypt, echoing the Minoan frescos.

An ancient Egyptian papyrus mentions Cretan ships at

Peru-nefer, a harbor in the Nile Delta,

perhaps there to dock or undergo repairs.

Harbors linked Crete to Egypt,

ships arrived with foreign goods,

and local bronze weapons were sent in return.

Archaeologists have discovered Minoan artifacts all over the

ancient world, from across the sea in Syria, Anatolia,

Mesopotamia, Cyprus,

and as far away as the Iberian Peninsula.

It reveals that the Minoans were successful seafarers,

and hints at a shadow of truth behind the tale

of King Minos' naval empire.

But if there was no actual royal ruler like Minos,

who controlled this booming trade in Crete?

At Lavrakia in the southern mountains,

Tina and Yiannis now want to investigate the relationship

between the palace cities and the rural settlements,

but the remote landscape is challenging.

[Tina] It's not very easy

to figure out the connection

of rural sites to the palatial centers.

[Narrator] A clue to the links between palace and countryside

could lie with pottery.

Tina and the team uncover the layers of rubble

at one of the houses,

they make an exciting discovery.

-The base is narrower than expected,

but it must have been quite a large jar.

[Narrator] The size and shape of this jar indicate it was

made during the height of the Minoan civilization,

when the palaces at Sissi and Knossos reached

their greatest extent.

[Tina] It's a container, it must have been a closed vessel,

so it's a bit smaller to be storage and a bit fancier,

so I guess it's either transportation or pouring from

one vessel to another.

[Narrator] Vessels like this were often used to transport

goods across Crete.

-We’re wondering if these sites are providing the palaces

with animals for feasts, wool for textiles,

with wood for their building projects.

[Narrator] This evidence suggests that the people in the

mountains were sending raw materials down to the palaces.

Most palaces were strategically positioned on the coast,

processing and producing the goods that flowed

in and out of the island.

It's not clear if these rural areas were ruled by the palaces.

Yiannis thinks they had a partnership.

-We cannot imagine people living permanently up

here without having a well-organized,

palatial system down in the lowlands to support them.

But on the other hand,

I cannot imagine also the palatial system working and

functioning properly without the materials and the

goods produced in the mountains.

[Narrator] The Minoans had to work together to forge

a strong and reliable trade network.

[Yiannis] We see the palaces as good managers

rather than powerful, political institutions that

were exerting controls through physical presence

of the mountains.

[Narrator] Tina and Yiannis's dig is painting a new picture

of the real Minoans behind the myths.

The Minoans built an advanced civilization with

an impressive global trading network,

that stretched from the mountains of Lavrakia to

the halls of the pharaohs in Egypt.

It required a mastery of the sea that would be

remembered for centuries.

But around 1450 BCE, Minoan society collapsed.

Why did their world come to an end,

and how might the fall of the Minoans explain

the later myths?

[Narrator] In the late Bronze Age,

the once thriving palaces at the heart of

Minoan society fell into major decline.

Clues to the Minoan downfall can be found in these palaces.

At Sissi, on Crete's northern coast,

the team works hard to investigate why the Minoans

abandoned the site.

Jan is called over to a trench at the south edge of the court.

[Jan] Now what’s happening, Lena?

Oh my God, it looks good!

Yeah, but you can really tell that er,

it’s tumbled down with all the architecture and so on.

[Narrator] Here, Lena finds ceramic vessels strewn

haphazardly in the layers of earth.

[Jan] So one, two, three, or four, five,

six vases maybe here already.

Lena’s been clearing this deposit, I mean,

she’s the first one to see this deposit in

like 4,000 years, and that is quite exciting.

[Narrator] The pottery matches broken ceramics

Jan found in the same room last year.

Unlike pottery found elsewhere,

which was deposited to raise floor levels,

their positioning suggests something different

happened here.

[Jan] In this case,

it looks like an earthquake destruction.

[Narrator] It seems like Sissi experienced

a devastating earthquake.

The shape of the vessels allows Jan to date the layer.

[Jan] You see the typical cups in different areas.

It’s middle Bronze Age,

so er, it’s an earlier phase of the, the court building.

[Narrator] It's an exciting find,

but almost 300 years too early to have caused the

fall of the Minoans.

[Jan] It's another piece in the puzzle, it's a,

almost a freeze frames and brings us back in this case

to about 1750 BC.

[Narrator] The Minoans rebuilt on top of this layer.

And as Jan and the team continue to sift through the

earth for evidence,

they make another discovery.

-Here you actually have this like, um,

the top of the wall and you see that just like a,

a layer of about ten centimeters,

12 centimeters of like brown earth,

and it’s sitting on top of like a, a very bright grey,

white layer.

The way it sticks to your fingers, you see,

is a good indication that have to deal with ash.

[Narrator] The ash is an intriguing find.

How did it get here?

Buried within the ruins of Sissi is an anomaly.

Within the ash deposits, experts have found small

pockets of tiny stone fragments.

This stone isn't found naturally on the island.

Chemical analysis reveals that it's pumice,

a type of rock formed during a volcanic eruption.

Traces of this fallout are scattered across the site.

The ash layer would have suffocated everything

in its path.

Could a volcano have ended the Minoan civilization?

The ash fall is impossible to date by itself,

but there is only one candidate for the volcanic eruption.

Over 3,500 years ago,

the nearby volcanic island of Santorini erupted

with devastating force.

Ash and pumice from the eruption spread

across the Aegean,

raining down as far south as Crete.

The eruption also triggered a series of tsunami waves

that slammed into Crete's north coast,

sinking ships and disrupting trade routes.

The discovery of one of the victims of this tsunami

in western Turkey

revealed that this eruption happened around 1500 BCE.

It would have been devastating for the Minoans.

[Jan] Ash is really bad for your health, bad for animals,

and bad for your vegetation.

[Narrator] Some archaeologists believe the eruption

triggered a chain of events that culminated in

the downfall of the Minoans.

[Jan] Around the time of the Santorini eruption,

the period of trouble starts.

[Narrator] Many Minoan palaces like the one at Sissi,

were abandoned, and the central courts fell out of use.

-If you lose this instrument of social cohesion,

then you know that something is going wrong,

so the society is disintegrating.

[Narrator] Why were the Minoans not able to rebuild as

they did after the earthquakes?

And why did later generations remember them

as cruel tyrants?

[Narrator] According to myth,

Prince Theseus of Athens was determined to

break the hold of King Minos over his city.

Armed with a sword and a ball of woolen thread,

he hunted down and killed the Minotaur in the maze,

ending the tradition of cruel human sacrifice.

Ancient writers say Minos later met his own gruesome

death and was doomed to become a judge of the underworld.

Why did the real Minoans also fall?

At Luxor in Egypt,

Arto investigates another piece in the puzzle of

the downfall of the Minoans.

He's come to the temple of Pharaoh Amenhotep III.

It dates to around 1350 BCE,

roughly 150 years after the Santorini eruption.

And it's home to two colossal statues.

-They represent King Amenhotep III,

a very successful king who ruled over a very prosperous

Egypt in the 1300s BC.

And while these statues might look very desolate

and lonely now,

they actually fronted a massive temple once upon a time.

[Narrator] Hundreds of statues of King Amenhotep III

have been unearthed across the site,

most little more than fragments.

On one, archaeologists found a rare inscription

written in hieroglyphs.

-Sadly, this statue base is destroyed now,

but there are images of it.

[Narrator] The inscription refers to a number of people

and places in ancient Greece,

it's called the Aegean List,

and is the only one of its kind ever found.

[Arto] This one here actually reads Keftiu.

[Narrator] Keftiu was the name the ancient Egyptians used

for the Minoans.

-And then on the side of the statue,

more very famous place names appear, including Knossos.

[Narrator] The inscription reveals that the Minoans were

still known to the ancient Egyptians.

But alongside Knossos lies the name of another Greek city

mentioned for the first time in Egyptian records.

-And the other famous one is none other than Mycenae.

[Narrator] Mycenae was the most powerful city in

mainland Greece at this time.

Its presence on the Aegean list suggests a dramatic rise

in status to rank alongside Knossos in Egyptian eyes.

At Knossos, Nicoletta thinks the rise of the Mycenaeans led

to the loss of power for the Minoans.

Archaeologists have found evidence of deliberate

destruction across Crete,

at the same time as the appearance of

Mycenaean evidence here.

-I do think that at some point,

people from mainland Greece took over and became

the rulers of this island.

[Narrator] Knossos was the last of the palaces to fall.

Nicoletta thinks the Mycenaean arrival might also

have led to the legends.

[Nicoletta] If some of the arrival is also linked

to violent takeover, what happens afterwards is,

if you like, history written by whoever wins.

And over a number of generations, yes,

I think Mycenaeans and their descendants in particular were

instrumental in creating this myth.

[Narrator] The mainland Greeks perhaps created the stories of

Minos and his monstrous stepson,

a myth reflected in the killing of the Minotaur by Theseus.

-There is a reality,

the reality is this incredible archaeological site.

But it's not that here there was a Minotaur,

it's not that here there was a labyrinth,

these are stories that are elaborated as a response to

memory of what happened here,

and as transmitted orally over the century,

things got distorted, changed, embellished.

[Narrator] The fascination with Minos,

the labyrinth, and the Minotaur is generations old.

Later Greek and Roman coins have been found decorated with

symbols of the Minotaur and the labyrinth.

[Nicoletta] In a sense, Greek mythology,

these wonderful stories, because they are wonderful,

amazing stories, are almost like the bible

of the Western world, and people want to find

something that gives some kernel of truth behind them.

[Narrator] At Sissi,

Jan thinks the cultural memory of the Minoans

shaped the island's history for centuries.

-The funny thing is, once the palace of Knossos was

abandoned in the late Bronze Age,

they never built upon it,

so it was kept almost as a taboo,

so if they knew that there was something there.

[Narrator] The Minoans were the first great

Greek civilization, the oldest in Europe.

From the bustling city centers on the coast to remote,

rugged mountains inland, evidence suggests they were

ruled not by a monarch, but by powerful clans...

...with international allies and cultural achievements

that still resonate today.

-It’s the first major European civilization that

we have that has amazing architecture,

several stories high with a very modern feeling to it,

like light and air and color,

the integration of the landscape,

the frescos that are almost like an elegy of nature.

The attention

to human beings that you see in the frescos,

it makes it a very human society too,

which is probably one of the main attractions

of this society.

[Narrator] The later Greeks remembered and revered the

Minoans long after their disappearance.

The myths of Minos and the Minotaur endured,

and the lure of Bronze Age Crete continues.

The Minoans are still mysterious,

but thanks to new discoveries,

their world is coming to light.