"Minoan pottery is more than a useful tool for dating the mute Minoan civilization. Its restless sequence of quickly maturing artistic styles reveal something of Minoan patrons' pleasure in novelty while they assist archaeologists to assign relative dates to the strata of their sites. Pots that contained oils and ointments, exported from 18th century BC Crete, have been found at sites through the Aegean islands and mainland Greece, on Cyprus, along the coastal Syria and in Egypt, showing the wide trading contacts of the Minoans. The extremely fine palace pottery called Kamares ware, and the Late Minoan all-over patterned "Marine style" are the high points of the Minoan pottery tradition. "--Wikipedia.