Insight into the social order on Crete after the conquest can be gleaned from the Linear B tablets found at Knossos, where Linear B had replaced Linear A by the 14th century Bc. The decipherment in 1952 of the Linear B tablets as Greek by Michael Ventris, working with John Chadwick, has been widely accepted. Still, there are some skeptics who reject it; and, while most of these believe that the language of the tablets will prove to be Greek when (in their view) it is correctly deciphered, a minority think it will not. At the same time, among philologists who do accept the Ventris decipherment, there are a few who regard the language of the tablets as a form of Greek with little or no relation to the Greek of later times, which, in this minority view, was introduced into the Mycenaean world by new peoples of Greek speech at the end of the Bronze Age. The tablets have many personal names and place-names but very little connected descriptive Greek, making them hard to read; nonetheless, they are of enormous potential value. Knossos seems to have been the only Cretan centre with a genuine archive recording income, palace issues of expensive equipment like chariots and bronze corselets, and outlays on gifts to the gods (some of whom were Greek, some traditional Cretan), mainly in the form of donations of oil and cloth. The Knossos records are valuable in allowing reconstruction of farming practices, the wool industry, and military defense, as well as in providing lists of personnel and places scattered around the countryside of Crete that owed or brought sheep and produce to the palace. The bureaucratic apparatus seems to have been well organized and extensive, whereas the rest of Crete in the 14th and 13th centuries, though rebuilt after the earlier disasters and the abandonment of the 15th century and prosperous, does not give evidence of the same degree of control and record keeping. How far the countryside was subservient to Knossos is not known.

The fusion of cultures on Crete

The last decades of the 15th century and the first part of the 14th century saw a wonderful fusion of Cretan and mainland skills; the fabric and firing of pottery improved, and there were formidable and often elegant and richly ornamented bronze weapons in the warrior graves at Knossos and Phaistos. Sword hilts were sometimes sheathed in gold, and their pommels made of fine stones and ivory. Warriors were armed with large thrusting spears as well as throwing spears, or javelins; boar spears were used for hunting. Shields were painted on walls as well as hung there, and there were new bronze arrowheads and conical helmets with a plume knob and cheekpieces. The old mainland helmet plated with tusk plaques of the wild boar reached Crete, too. Bronze armour was issued by the palace, with chariots and pairs of horses; the transverse strokes on the cuirass ideogram on the tablets suggest a link with the transverse bronze bands of the armour suit from Dendra near Mycenae from about 1400 bc. There seems to have been a disciplined set of chariot squads, perhaps often composed of men from abroad, patrolling the island. It may be that a memory of this energetic military epoch is preserved in the Iliad, in the passages describing the exploits of the Cretan princes Idomeneus and Meriones. Gold rings from this period have a rich religious iconography of shrines and worshipers, and there are fine sealstones. About 1400 the fused customs or beliefs of the Cretan and Mycenaean worlds appear on the painted limestone sarcophagus from Ayía Triadha, a small palace near Phaistos; depicted on one side are libations on the left and, probably, offerings to a dead man on the right. The other side shows a bull being sacrificed while a man is playing the double pipe. Pairs of women in chariots drawn by wild goats or griffins are represented on the ends. Historically the sarcophagus occupies a dividing line: Knossos was burned again after 1400.

There seems to be a marked difference in economic power or aesthetic achievement between the earlier (1600–1400) and the later (1400–1200) periods of Minoan, Cycladic, and Mycenaean cultures. Frescoes are duller—more repetitive, coarser in outline, and muddier in colour. The grand swords are no longer made, and rings and seals are simpler. Metal becomes rarer, and blue glass tends to replace lapis lazuli from the east. It is uncertain whether this decline in art reflects a change of governmental forms, a restriction on trade with Egypt and the east, a decrease of creative energy leading to an unimaginative reproduction of traditional patterns in familiar materials, or the loss of palace-controlled Cretan workshops that had supplied the earlier fine standards for the developing Greek world.