aegean civilization was long known only from Homer's account of the Trojan War in the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as from Greek legends centering on Crete. The earliest exca- vations(by Heinrich Schliemann during the 1870s in Asia Minor and Greece and by Sir Arthur Evans Crete shortly before 1900) were undertaken to test the factual core of these tales. Since then, a great amount of fascinating mate has been brought to light-far more than the literary sources would lead us to expect. But even now our knowledge of n civilization is very much more limited than our knowl- edge of Egypt or the ancient Near East. Unfortunately, our reading of the archaeological evidence has so far received lim- ited aid from the written records of the Aegeans