Evans's scheme divides the Minoan period into three main eras Early Minoan (EM), Middle Minoan (MM), and Late Minoan (LM).

The influence of the Minoan civilization outside Crete has been seen in the evidence of valuable Minoan handicraft items on the Greek mainland.

There was a Minoan colony at Ialysos on Rhodes.

In late 2009, Minoan style frescoes and other Minoan style artifacts were discovered during excavations of the Canaanite palace at Tel Kabri, Israel, leading archaeologists to conclude that the Minoan influence was the strongest foreign influence on that Caananite city state.

Minoan techniques and styles in ceramics also provided models, of fluctuating influence, for Helladic Greece.

The island is the site of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history the Minoan eruption (sometimes called the Thera eruption), which occurred some 3600 years ago at the height of the Minoan civilization.

These eras are further subdivided, for instance into Early Minoan I, II, III (EMI, EMII, EMIII).

It is likely that the ruling house of Mycenae was connected to the Minoan trade network.

c. 3000 BC Cycladic civilization in the Aegean Sea starts c. 3000 BC Minoan civilization starts.

Around 1450 BC, Minoan culture experienced a turning point due to a natural catastrophe, possibly an earthquake.

Mycenean civilization Beginning in 1420 BC, the Minoan civilization was overrun by the Mycenean civilization from mainland Greece.

This period (the 17th and 16th centuries BC, MM III Neopalatial) represents the apex of the Minoan civilization.

After the invasion of the Hyksos in the Second Intermediate Period, Minoan style frescoes were found in Avaris.

After around 1700 BC, the material culture on the Greek mainland achieved a new level due to Minoan influence.

It is believed that a precursor of Artemis was worshiped in Minoan Crete as the goddess of mountains and hunting, Britomartis.

Some modern mythologists regard the Minotaur as a solar personification and a Minoan adaptation of the Baal Moloch of the Phoenicians.

The most peculiar feature of the Minoan belief in the divine, is the appearance of the goddess from above in the dance.

In the Hellenistic period a small sanctuary dedicated to Zeus Velchanos was founded at the Hagia Triada site of a long ruined Minoan palace.

To judge from the palace sites, the island was probably divided into at least eight political units during the height of the Minoan period.

Minoan cultural influence indicates an orbit that extended not only throughout the Cyclades (so called Minoanisation ), but in locations such as Egypt and Cyprus.

The Egyptian hieroglyphs served as a model for the Minoan pictographic writing, from which the famous Linear A and Linear B writing systems later developed.

Once continental Greece was free from Crete's dominance, the myth of the Minotaur worked to distance the forming religious consciousness of the Hellene poleis from Minoan beliefs.

While the Eteocretan language is believed to be a descendant of Minoan, there is not enough source material in either language to allow conclusions to be made.

Some writers include the periods of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, while others argue that these civilizations were so different from later Greek cultures that they should be classed separately.

On the other hand, Nilsson claims that she was the goddess of the palace who protected the king, and that the origin of Athena was the Minoan domestic snake goddess.

There are signs of earthquake damage at many Minoan sites and clear signs of both uplifting of land and submersion of coastal sites due to tectonic processes all along the coasts.

The city reemerged after the end of the Minoan period as an important city state in Classical Greece, one whose domain extended from Chania Bay to the feet of the White Mountains.

Sometimes the Minoan language is referred to as Eteocretan, but this confuses the language written in Linear A scripts and the language written in a Euboean derived alphabet after the Greek Dark Ages.

By the late Bronze Age, however, a series of treaties had established safe passage for merchants around the Eastern Mediterranean, spreading from Minoan Crete and Mycenae in the northwest to Elam and Bahrain in the southeast.

The eruption left a large caldera surrounded by volcanic ash deposits hundreds of metres deep and may have led indirectly to the collapse of the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete, to the south, through a gigantic tsunami.

Unfortunately, the evidence about myths and rituals at Mycenaean and Minoan sites is entirely monumental, as the Linear B script (an ancient form of Greek found in both Crete and mainland Greece) was used mainly to record inventories, although certain names of gods and heroes have been tentatively identified.

The local child of the Great Mother, a small and inferior deity who took the roles of son and consort , whose Minoan name the Greeks Hellenized as Velchanos, was in time assumed as an epithet by Zeus, as transpired at many other sites, and he came to be venerated in Crete as Zeus Velchanos ( boy Zeus ) often simply the Kouros .

Archaeological sources The discovery of the Mycenaean civilization by the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the nineteenth century, and the discovery of the Minoan civilization in Crete by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in the twentieth century, helped to explain many existing questions about Homer's epics and provided archaeological evidence for many of the mythological details about gods and heroes.

Although Gerald Gardner initially demonstrated an aversion to homosexuality, claiming that it brought down the curse of the goddess , it is now generally accepted in all traditions of Wicca, with certain groups like the Minoan Brotherhood openly crafting their philosophy around it, and various important figures in the Craft, such as Alex Sanders and Eddie Buczynski, being openly homosexual or bisexual.