Greece has its own Pompeii: Thera buried Akrotiri in ash 17th-16th century BCE

> Most Greek islands have their Chora, the capital village, on a high point of the island.

Well, others are mostly at sea level, with only some high points. Thira has very little land at sea level.

What Plato describes perfectly fits a volcanic island, including the central pillar of rock that some volcanoes have as a volcanic plug, and the ring of water inside the caldera.

And the way Atlantis supposedly ended also fits what happens on volcanic islands.

There are some claims of deciphering some parts of the Linear A Minoan documents, which are not corroborated yet by other researchers, but which are nonetheless more plausible than all the earlier claims of deciphering Linear A, which were definitely wrong.

If this partial decipherment were right, the language of Linear A would be Hurrian, i.e. the language of a state that was important around 4 thousand years ago and which was located in the territory of present Syria.

The Hurrians from Syria also used writing, but there they had adapted a variant of the cuneiform writing. Some Hurrian texts have also been found written with the Semitic alphabet used in Ugarit. There are some features of the Hittite variant of cuneiform writing that seem to have been taken from their Southern neighbors, the Hurrians, so it is possible that the Hittites have learned writing from the Hurrians, who had been using cuneiform writing for a few centuries before the Hittites, instead of taking writing directly from Assyria. This would be similar to how the Greek users of Linear B have taken writing from the Minoan users of Linear A.

It seems that the Hurrians had a rich mythology, which influenced many of their neighbors, and a few of their myths have been preserved, inclusively in the Hittite archives.

There exists no certain relationship between Hurrian and any language that survives today. In the antiquity there was a related language spoken in Urartu, on the territory of present Armenia. There are however a few similarities between Hurrian and some of the languages of the Caucasus area, but due to the difference in time of many thousands of years it cannot be known whether there is any genetic connection between them.

So if the claims about a decipherment of Linear A were true, that would imply that the Minoans have colonized Crete, and probably also Cyprus, by coming from the nearby territory where today is Syria. This sounds plausible, and that territory is one that had become "civilized" before the more Northern territories of Anatolia and Greece.

They are magnificent! I'd guess their civilization was influenced by the Ancient Near East as well as Old Europe. Hybrid creatures, women flanked by big cats, priestly figures holding serpents, all Minoan iconography with corrolaries in Egypy and the Levant. How I wish we had their myths, their histories.