Minoan pottery 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 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 coastal Syria and in Egypt, showing the wide trading contacts of the Minoans. The pottery consists of vessels of various shapes, which as with other types of
Cypro-Minoan syllabary the earliest archaeological context is indeed distinct from these three. It is noteworthy that the Cypro-Minoan script was absent in some Bronze Age cities of Cyprus, yet abundant in others. Unlike many other neighboring states, the Late Bronze Age collapse had only a slight impact on Cyprus; in fact, the period immediately following the dramatic events of the collapse was the flourishing of the island culture, with visible increase of use of the script in such centers as Enkomi. On the other hand, as a direct result of this collapse, the script ceased to exist in Ugarit, together with the