History of the Cyclades read certain authors who say that the islands’ population is, of all the regions of Greece, the only original one, and has not been subjected to external admixtures. However, the Cyclades have very often known different destinies. Their natural resources and their potential role as trade-route stopovers has allowed them to be peopled since the Neolithic. Thanks to these assets, they experienced a brilliant cultural flowering in the 3rd millennium BC: the Cycladic civilisation. The proto-historical powers, the Minoans and then the Mycenaeans, made their influence known there. The Cyclades had a new zenith in the Archaic period (8th –
History of the Cyclades owed to him. It was in the Bay of Drios, to the southeast of Paros, that he would drop anchor. At the same time, the Divan only very rarely sent officers and governors to direct the Cyclades in its own name. There were attempts to install kadis and beys on each large island, but Christian pirates kidnapped them in such great numbers to sell them to Malta that the Porte had to abandon such plans. Afterward, the islands were only ruled from afar. Local magistrates, often called "epitropes", governed locally; their principal role was tax collection. In 1580, the Porte,