As an island people the inhabitants of the Cyclades always had close contacts to their neighbours. The islands were probably settled by a people from the East, from the Levant and Asia Minor. Since the Stone age close ties also existed to the northern Aegean and Bulgaria; these areas being probably settled by the same tribes advancing further north. During the Bronze age, trade with neighbouring peoples was intensified. One can summarize the relations of the Cycladic...

Even in the late Stone age, people occasionally used metal to make simple tools or jewelry. These were mostly made of metals, which could be found in a pure form in nature, not as an ore, like silver and gold, but also lead and copper. The beginning of the Bronze age was marked by the development of metal processing, in which an alloy was produced or the metal was extracted from ores. The discovery of the production of bronze, an alloy of copper with tin or arsenic, led to...

We don’t know exactly who the people were who lived in the Cyclades in the Early Bronze age. There is no direct written evidence from the time of the Cycladic culture; the first writings in Greece, the Minoan Linear A- and the Mycenaean Linear B-script, appear around 2,000 and 1,400 BC respectively (after the Sumerians had already developed cuneiform writing around 3,300 BC). We know that the first Greek tribes appeared on the Greek mainland around 2,000 BC. They...