Ancient Crete: From Successful Collapse to Democracy's Alternatives, Twelfth–Fifth Centuries BC - Softcover

'... [an] important book ... Essential.' Choice

'... useful and comprehensive and will stimulate much discussion.' Bryn Mawr Classical Review

'This book presents a coherent argument and an original synthesis. Wallace's knowledge of the island cannot be equaled.' American Journal of Philology

'Ancient Greece' with its associations of city states, democratic governance, and iconic material culture, can no longer be envisaged as a uniform geographical or historical entity. The Classical city-states of Crete differed considerably in culture, history and governance from those of central Greece. In this book, Saro Wallace reaches back into Crete's prehistory, covering the latest Bronze Age through the Archaic periods, to find out why. It emphasizes the roles of landscape, external contacts, social identity construction and historical consciousness in producing this difference, bringing together the wealth of new archaeological evidence available from the island with a variety of ancient text sources to produce a vivid and up-to-date picture of this momentous period in Crete's history.