Minoan pottery is more than a useful tool for dating the mute Minoan civilization. Its restless sequence of rapidly maturing artistic styles reveal something of Minoan patrons' pleasure in novelty while they assist archaeologists to assign relative dates to the strata of their sites. Pots that contained oils and ointments, exported from 18th century BC Crete, have been found at sites through the Aegean islands and mainland Greece, on Cyprus, along the coastal Syria and in Egypt, showing the wide trading contacts of the Minoans. The extremely fine palace pottery called Kamares ware, and the Late Minoan all-over patterned "Marine style" are the high points of the Minoan pottery tradition.
Read more about Minoan Pottery: Traditional Chronology, Origin, Early Minoan, Middle Minoan, Late Minoan, Minoan-Mycenaean
Famous quotes containing the words minoan and/or pottery:
“The Minoan Snake Goddess is flanked by a Chardin still-life, somber
and tranquil, and by Mohammedan angels
brilliantly clothed and with multicolored wings....”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“There is on the earth no institution which Friendship has established; it is not taught by any religion; no scripture contains its maxims. It has no temple, nor even a solitary column. There goes a rumor that the earth is inhabited, but the shipwrecked mariner has not seen a footprint on the shore. The hunter has found only fragments of pottery and the monuments of inhabitants.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)