Aegean Art and Architecture (Oxford History of Art)

by Donald Preziosi

The subtlety and complexity of Cretan art and architecture seemed to lend material credence to the stories of that great Cretan artist-inventor whom the later Greeks called Daedalus: the designer of mazes, automata, and flying machines; the primordial inventor of writing and of art itself.

Minos' two brothers were named Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon, and the later Greeks installed this male trinity as the wise old guardians of their underworld.

We do not know how the population of Crete during its two-millennium-long Bronze Age might have been distinct from their contemporaries in Greece, the Aegean islands, or Anatolia, or whether they were in fact a single people, at one or another period.