What happened to the Minoan civilization?

Between roughly 2000 and 1500 B.C., the Minoan civilization flourished on Crete and nearby islands, building palaces decorated with frescoes, engaging in athletic activities such as bull leaping, and creating written scripts that experts have never been able to decipher. One of the most important cities they constructed was at Knossos, on the northern coast of Crete, and it contained a palace the size of two football fields.

Around 1500 B.C. their written scripts stopped being used and Minoan palaces show evidence of decline and destruction. So how did this civilization end?

Scholars have proposed a wide variety of explanations, including a volcanic eruption, earthquakes, climate change, the disruption of trade routes, and conflict with the Mycenaeans, a group from the Greek mainland. However, the civilization may have had a less-dramatic ending, experts told Live Science.

What was the Minoan civilization?

The Minoan civilization got its name from the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated the remains of Knossos in the early 20th century. Evans named the civilization after King Minos who, according to ancient legends, ruled Crete and constructed a labyrinth where a minotaur was kept. The Minoans flourished during the "Bronze Age" (3300 to 1200 B.C.), and they are known for their palaces decorated with marine motifs such as dolphins.

To figure out what happened to the Minoans, scholars need to define exactly what Minoan civilization was and determine how different it was from the Mycenaean civilization that thrived on Crete after 1500 B.C. The Mycenaeans were based on the Greek mainland, and they boasted a warrior-elite society that inspired Homeric epics as well as a religion with deities similar to the later Olympic gods. The Mycenaeans are sometimes considered to be the earliest Greeks.

"[What] do we mean by Minoan or Mycenaean civilization, and what do we mean by 'end'?" said Guy Middleton, a visiting fellow at Newcastle University who specializes in the archaeology of Late Bronze Age Greece, the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean.

"What archaeologists mean by Minoan and [Mycenaean] is sets of material culture — archaeological cultures — not a people, and not ethnic groups," Middleton told Live Science in an email. "Any person could adopt a particular material culture, and would then look like a Minoan or Mycenaean person."

For instance, the lavish burial of a high-ranking warrior at the site of Pylos on mainland Greece dates to around 1500 B.C. and has artifacts with Minoan designs. But the warrior was buried on the Greek mainland, which is thought to be where the Mycenaeans originated. "Was he a Mycenaean or a Minoan? These are modern distinctions. Who knows how he thought of himself," Middleton said.

A time of change

One thing that changed after 1500 B.C. was language. Whereas the Minoans used two undeciphered scripts, known as Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphs, the Mycenaeans used a text called Linear B, which encoded the Greek language, said Philip Betancourt, a professor emeritus of prehistoric Aegean art history and archaeology at Temple University in Philadelphia.

"If the gradual disappearance of the Minoan language is used as the sign for the culture, it was gradually lost after an invasion by Greek-speakers gradually changed the complexion of the culture," Betancourt told Live Science in an email. This linguistic change, which "did not affect all of the island at the same time, happened around the middle of the second millennium [B.C.]," Betancourt said.

Although Middleton thinks a takeover by the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans is plausible, he proposed another possibility. The change in culture "can also be seen as an internal Cretan [development] — since not all Cretans were identical," he said. "Just as Mycenaeans adopted elements of Minoan culture into their own, for their own reasons, so Minoans may have adopted elements of Mainland culture."

However, Nanno Marinatos, a professor emerita of classics and Mediterranean studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, said there was no invasion. "Minoans had all the technology to avoid threats," she told Live Science in an email, noting that they had a navy that could stop any invaders.

Marinatos thinks that a major climatic event could have contributed to the Minoans' decline. The eruption of Thera, a volcano on an island in the Aegean Sea 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of Crete, around 1500 B.C. may have caused considerable damage to the Minoans by destroying ships and disrupting trade networks. This catastrophe may have played a significant role in the decline of their civilization.

Did the Minoan civilization ever end?

Another possibility is that the Minoan civilization never had a formal end.

The "simple reply is that like most ancient complex societies, it simply evolved into one with a later modern definition," Betancourt said. "Genetic studies show that the Minoan genes are still around. The descendants still live in Crete and elsewhere."

Middleton agreed that there was "no sudden end to Minoan Crete, just a series of changes over a long period of time." He noted that Minoan deities continued to be worshipped for centuries after 1500 B.C.

"To some extent, the way we divide up history, geographically and chronologically, makes us think in terms of 'ends," Middleton said. "But what we really have is constant and normal interaction and change."