Friday Story: What We Have Been Learning About in History

We have been studying about the Minoans in our history book. The Minoans were located on an island in the middle of the Meditteranean Sea named Crete. Crete was near southern Europe. The Minoans were more advanced than some of the civilizations today and they were around about 2200 B.C.



Did you know that the Minoans' name came from a great king called King Minos? His palace covered six acres and there were murals called frescoes. You would make a fresco by applying paint to wet plaster. The frescoes actually would last longer than our paintings today. King Minos was said to have made a maze to keep a creature called a minotaur in it. A minotaur is half bull and half man. One of the sports they liked doing was bull-leaping. People would catapult over bulls and it looked like they would do headstands on the bull's back.



Their culture only lasted for about eight hundred years. There was a nearby island that had a volcano and the volcano erupted. That's what probably made the Minoans extinct. In the 1900's a person called Sir Arthur Evans discovered the remains of their culture. It gave Plato a theory about Atlantis. He actually wrote a whole story about it. He claimed that the city sank because the people were so wicked. People have been trying and trying to get proof that Plato's story is true but they never have found any.