History of the Cyclades have been found on Naxos. The operation of silver mines on Siphnos may also date to this period. At the end of the 19th century, the Greek archaeologist Christos Tsountas, having assembled various discoveries from numerous islands, suggested that the Cyclades were part of a cultural unit during the 3rd millennium BC: the Cycladic civilisation, dating back to the Bronze Age. It is famous for its marble idols, found as far as Portugal and the mouth of the Danube, which proves its dynamism. It is slightly older than the Minoan civilisation of Crete. The beginnings of the Minoan civilisation were
Cypro-Minoan syllabary decipherment. Currently, the total number of signs on formal Cypro-Minoan inscriptions (approx. 2,500) compares unfavorably with the number known from the undeciphered Linear A documents (over 7,000) and the number available in Linear B when it was deciphered (approx. 30,000). Furthermore, different languages may have been represented by the same Cypro-Minoan subsystem, and without the discovery of bilingual texts or many more texts in each subsystem, decipherment is extremely unlikely. According to Thomas G. Palaima, ""all" past and current schemes of decipherment of Cypro-Minoan are improbable". Silvia Ferrara also believes this to be the case, as she concluded in her