Farming and animal husbandry appears to have reached the shores of the Aegean Sea and mainland Greece by 7,500 BCE, traveling from agricultural origins in West Asia at a pace that brought them to Crete by 6000 BCE and all of Europe by 4,000 BCE (Cavalli-Storza and Bodmer 1994,107–108). To Crete migrant farmers brought an array of domesticated plants and animals. The evidence suggests they were Indo-European speakers from Anatolia, the earliest location where historical records of this huge language family have been found, principally in the thousands of clay tablets of the Hittites (Mallory 1989, 24–25). According to Colin Renfrew (1987; 1989) Anatolia may be the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans, but the competing Kurgan theory by Maria Gimbutas (1985) locates it to the northeast of the Black Sea in the Russian steppes, in which case Anatolia was a way station and its migration to Crete may have been the first Indo-European entry into Europe.

Over the next three millennia, a village population grew in Crete and domestication expanded to include indigenous olives and grapes. By 3000 BCE, a complex society organized around a kingship had emerged at Knossos (Pfeiffer 1977, 278–79). Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks, is said to have been born and raised in Crete; his abduction of Europa, the eponymous ancestress of an entire continent, provides an emblem for Crete as the earliest monumental culture of Europe (Kofou 2000, 20–26). Everything we know about ancient Crete is mired in myth. The coupling of Zeus and Europa led to the birth of King Minos and thus the Minoans, but King Minos who married Pasiphae, the daughter of the sun god Helios, is said to have unified a hundred cities from his citadel at Knossus. These stories provide an example of narrative anachronism: Minos is both an original founder of Knossus and centuries later an imperial king known on the mainland. Whether Minos was a historic ruler fictionalized or a complete fiction, he was the first divine king of Europe by virtue of the myth of his direct descent from Zeus.