Minoan art Minoan art Minoan art is the art produced by the Minoan civilization from about 2600 to 1100 BC. The largest collection of Minoan art is in the museum at Heraklion, near Knossos, on the northern coast of Crete. Minoan art and other remnants of material culture, especially the sequence of ceramic styles, have been used by archaeologists to define the three phases of Minoan culture (EM, MM, LM). Since wood and textiles have decomposed, the best-preserved (and most instructive) surviving examples of Minoan art are its pottery, palace architecture (with frescos which include landscapes), stone carvings and intricately-carved seal stones.
Minoan pottery Early Minoan pottery, concentrating on some of the better-known styles; it should not be regarded as comprehensive. A variety of forms are known. The period is generally characterized by a large number of local wares with frequent Cycladic parallels or imports, suggesting a population of checkerboard ethnicity deriving from various locations in the eastern Aegean or even wider. The evidence is certainly open to interpretation, and none is decisive. Early Minoan pottery, to some extent, continued, and possibly evolved from, the local Final Neolithic (FN) without a severe break. Many suggest that Minoan civilization evolved "in-situ" and was not imported