Minoan civilization 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. Frescoes were the primary art form of Minoan culture. They include many depictions of people, with sexes distinguished by color; the men's skin is reddish-brown, and the women's white. Several frescoes at Knossos and Santorini survive. In contrast to Egyptian frescoes, Crete had true frescoes. Probably
Cypro-Minoan syllabary polis itself. Since then, the number of Greek artifacts gradually increases in the Cypriot context, and around 950 BC the Cypro-Minoan script suddenly disappears, being soon substituted by the new Cypriot syllabary, whose inscriptions represent mainly the Greek language, with just a few short texts in Eteocypriot. As long as the script remains undeciphered (with only about 15-20 signs having clear parallels in cognate scripts), it can only be speculated whether the language was the same as Minoan or Eteocypriot, and whether these two were identical. However, Silvia Ferrara and A. Bernard Knapp noted that the name "Cypro-Minoan" (based on