Minoan civilization is seen in Minoan handicrafts on the Greek mainland. The shaft graves of Mycenae had several Cretan imports (such as a bull's-head rhyton), which suggests a prominent role for Minoan symbolism. Connections between Egypt and Crete are prominent; Minoan ceramics are found in Egyptian cities, and the Minoans imported items (particularly papyrus) and architectural and artistic ideas from Egypt. Egyptian hieroglyphs might even have been models for Minoan pictographic writing, from which the Linear A and Linear B writing systems developed. Archaeologist Hermann Bengtson has also found a Minoan influence in Canaanite artifacts. Minoan palace sites were occupied by the
Minoan pottery not so clear as to make correlation with discovered artifacts easy. Using a drawing of the "Contents of the Tomb of the Tripod Hearth" at Zafer Papoura from Evans' "Palace of Minos", which depicts LM II bronze vessels, many in the forms of ceramic ones, Ventris and Chadwick were able to make a few new correlations. Minoan pottery Minoan pottery has been used as a tool for dating the mute Minoan civilization. Its restless sequence of quickly maturing artistic styles reveals something of Minoan patrons' pleasure in novelty while they assist archaeologists in assigning relative dates to the strata of