Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Were the ancient Minoans a bunch of Bronze Age flower power hippies?

You might take that view if you study some of their surviving

artwork. However, according to Ellen Adams of King College London, and the author of a new book

called The Menowens, this civilization was much more complicated than that. In this Everything

You Wanted to Know episode, Ellen answers all of the big questions about these ancient people,

including, of course, what we should know about the mythical legend of the Minor Tour.

David Musgrove put the questions to Ellen and began by asking where and when exactly the Minoan civilization was.

Okay, so in a nutshell, we're talking about Bronze Age Crete. So we're talking about the southernmost Greek island, which is actually

the stepping stones between Europe, the Near East and Africa. So it's European now, but it's a

brilliant strategic location. We're talking about the Bronze Age, so it's European now, but it's a brilliant strategic location.

We're talking about the Bronze Age, so roughly 3,1,200 BC, the second millennium,

especially for the really prosperous part of the Minoan period.

Okay. And when and where does the term Minoan come from?

So this is a modern term. We don't know what they called themselves originally, but it almost

certainly wasn't the Minoan. So this actually comes from the ancient Greeks. And I probably should

mention them at the start as well, because this is first millennium BC, ancient Greeks,

kind of set the story up for us about the Minowans because this term comes from there,

King Minos, a Greek myth. He's the son of Europa who gives her name presumably to Europe.

She is in Greek Miss.

She's a Phoenician princess that sees from the shores by Zeus in the form of a bull,

taken over to Crete.

...