NAME: ______PERIOD: ______DATE: ______
The story of European civilization really begins on the island of Crete with a civilization that probably thought of itself as Asian (in fact, Crete is closer to Asia than it is to Europe). Around 1700 BC, a highly sophisticated culture grew up around palace centers on Crete: it is called the Minoans after a legendary Cretan king, Minos. What they thought, what stories they told, how they narrated their history, are all lost to us until we adequately translate their Linear A alphabet. All we have left are their palaces, their incredibly developed visual culture, and their records. For the Minoans produced a singular civilization in antiquity: one oriented around trade and bureaucracy with little or no evidence of a military state. They built perhaps the single most efficient bureaucracy in antiquity. This unique culture, of course, lasted only a few centuries, and European civilization shifts to Europe itself with the foundation of the military city-states on the mainland of Greece some centuries after the Minoans arose on Crete. These were a war-like people oriented around a war-chief; while they seemed to have borrowed some elements such as writing from the Minoan civilization, the Myceaneans had a culture of battle and conquest. We call them the Myceneans after the best-preserved of their cities, and their greatest accomplishment, it would seem, was the destruction of a large commercial center across the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor: Troy. Shortly after this defining event, their civilizations fell into a dark ages, in which Greeks stopped writing and abandoned their cities. It was an inauspicious start for the Europeans: while their trading partners, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians and the Cuneiform peoples of the Fertile Crescent had enjoyed almost two thousand years of continuous civilization, in Europe the experiment began with the brilliance of the Minoan commerce and cities that translated into the brief, war-like city-states of the Mycenaeans, only to slip back into the tribal groups that had characterized European civilization for almost all of its history. Even though they slip into obscurity, the Greeks will permanently remember the Myceneans as the defining moment in their history.
Lost to human memory for over three and a half millennia, the Minoans stand at the very beginning of European civilization. While Europeans had known about the pre-Homeric world through the poems of Homer, only the Greeks and Romans seem to have taken these poems seriously as history. That pre-Homeric world, however, was lost in the haze of generations of oral story-telling before it finally got fixed in the poems of Homer. However, in 1870, an amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, determined to find the real Troy of the Trojan War, the war that is the center of the Homeric poems. After successfully locating and digging up Troy, he turned his sights to the Greek mainland and discovered two ancient cities, Myceanae and Tiryns, which together revealed a civilization that up until that point had only been known in the poems of Homer and Greek drama. His discoveries inspired a man named Arthur Evans to begin digging in Crete in order to discover what he thought would be an identical, Mycenean culture thriving on that island; instead, what he found was a people far more ancient than the Myceneans, and far more unique than any peoples in the ancient world: the Minoans.
They were a people of magnificent social organization, culture, art, and commerce. There is no evidence that they were a military people nor do we know much about their politics; they thrived instead, it seems, on their remarkable mercantile abilities. This lack of a military culture, however, may have spelled their final downfall. For the Minoans also exported their culture as well as goods, and a derivative culture grew up on the mainland of Greece, the Myceneans, who were a war-like people. Strangely enough, the direct inheritors of their traditions may have been the agents of their destruction.
But we know now that Greek civilization began at least a millenium before the Age of Athens and almost eight hundred years before Homer. It began off the mainland of Greece, in the Aegean Sea, in the palaces of the bureaucrat-kings of Minoans.
1. The main idea of this reading is:
A. Heinrich Schliemann discovered the remains of Troy, Mycenaea, and Tiryns.
B. While the Mycenaeans borrowed elements of Minoan civilization, their culture consisted largely of battle and conquest.
C. Sir Arthur Evans, an archaeologist unearthed the remains of the Minoan civilization.
D. The Minoan civilization was known to the ancient Greeks through Homer’s literature.
E. The Minoans produced a civilization oriented around trade and bureaucracy with little or no evidence of a military state.
2. Which statement is a valid fact which can be concluded based on the above reading.
A. The Minoans are related to the Myceaneans.
B. Heinrich Schliemann suspected that Troy existed in Crete based on his reading of Homer.
C. The Minoans had a system of writing but we cannot read their script.
D. The Mycenaeans borrowed their culture from the Minoans.
E. The Minoans were a warlike people, fighting the Mycenaeans for control of trade.
3. In the first paragraph, locate the underlined word “inauspicious”. Based on the italicized portion of the paragraph, inauspicious can mean all of these EXCEPT:
A. Unimportant
B. Unfavorable
C. Untimely
D. Bad
E. Unfortunately
4. The Minoan writing system likely was
A. Copied from contact with the Mycenaeans.
B. An indigenous invention.
C. Copied from the Assyrians.
D. Borrowed from the Phoenicians.
E. Borrowed from the Egyptians.
5. Based on the reading,
A. Archaeologists can conclude that the Minoans migrated to Italy and founded Rome.
B. Historians have translated Minoan literature.
C. Minoan political structures remain largely unknown.
D. Nobles dominated Minoan society.
E. Minoan society was a patriarchal society.