Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age culture centered on the island of Crete, often regarded as the first civilization in Europe. It developed from the local Neolithic culture around 3100 BC and lasted until approximately 1100 BC, with major settlements also found across the Aegean Sea.
Arthur Evans coined the term "Minoan" when he excavated at Knossos in the early twentieth century and recognized the culture as distinct from mainland Mycenaean Greece. He derived the name from the mythical King Minos, whom Classical Greeks believed had ruled Knossos, possibly drawing on an earlier suggestion by Karl Hoeck.
Neither Linear A nor Cretan hieroglyphs has been deciphered. Linear B, a later script adapted from Linear A to write Mycenaean Greek, was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris, drawing on earlier work by Alice Kober. The Minoan language encoded by Linear A is unknown and may not belong to any well-attested language family such as Indo-European or Afroasiatic.
The Neopalatial period ended around 1470 BC with severe destructions throughout Crete, thought to have been deliberate because they spared certain sites in ways inconsistent with natural disasters. Scholars debate whether Mycenaean conquerors, internal upheavals, or lingering effects of the Thera eruption around 1600 BC were responsible. By around 1450 BC, Mycenaean Greek had become the language of administration on Crete.
The eruption of the Thera volcano, which occurred around 1600 BC near the end of the LM IA subperiod, ejected roughly 60 to 100 cubic kilometers of material and measured 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, making it one of the largest volcanic explosions in recorded history. It destroyed Cycladic settlements such as Akrotiri and led to the abandonment of some sites in northeast Crete.
A study by Lazaridis and colleagues published in 2022 found that roughly 70.9 to 76.7 percent of Minoan DNA came from Early European Farmers, with additional ancestry from populations related to Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture. A 2013 study in Nature Communications found that ancient Minoan skeletons from the Lasithi Plateau were genetically very similar to modern-day Cretans and to Neolithic Europeans, but distinct from Egyptian or Libyan populations.