Quick questions on Minoan decline, Aegean relations and historiographical evaluation: HSC Ancient History

From the Middle Bronze Age, Minoan-style pottery, weights, loom weights, seals and fresco techniques spread widely through the Cyclades, a process archaeologists call "Minoanisation." The best-preserved example is Akrotiri on Thera, a Cycladic town buried, and so remarkably preserved, by the later Thera eruption. Akrotiri's multi-storey buildings contained frescoes closely paralleling Minoan palace art, including the "Flotilla" (or "Miniature") frieze from the West House, showing ships travelling between towns, and evidence of Linear A signs and Minoan-style ritual objects such as horns of consecration.

Every evaluation of Minoan Crete runs into the same wall: Linear A, the Minoans' own administrative script, has never been deciphered, despite recording a real, still-unidentified language. This means historians cannot read a single Minoan sentence in the Minoans' own words. Everything asserted about Minoan religion, kingship, law or self-understanding is inferred from archaeology, art and analogy, or read backwards through Linear B, a script that only appears at Knossos once Mycenaean Greek speakers had taken control and belongs to a different language and, arguably, a different administrative culture. Eric Cline's broader caution against confident, single-narrative accounts of Late Bronze Age societies applies directly here: without Minoan testimony, "Minoan civilisation" remains, in important respects, a historian's reconstructed model rather than a society's own self-portrait.