This…
Crete, ca. 1450 BCE. The seal is 1.3″ (34mm) in size, tiny, with extraordinary fine detail, wax will not faithfully reproduce its fidelity. It has milling holes of 0.06mm and tool placement tolerances of 0.01mm, see hairline. Dividing calliper scoring arcs are shown under high magnification which were not polished out. The calliper is accredited to Talos/Perdix, Daedalus’ nephew, the significance of this is it dramatically improves engineering tolerances. It is often the unseen tools to make these artefacts that are more impressive than the artefact themselves, a calliper is hugely important for standardisation, engineering and geometry. A seal of this precision would not be seen again until some time after the age of enlightenment. Its detail is comparable with early banknote plates (around the C18th CE). The section below is approximately 10mm in view size.
No, these optical lenses…
Similar dating, Mount Ida, Crete, ca 1400 BCE, however, this may be when the lenses were stored in the Caves of Minos. Made from precision ground rock-crystal (natural glass), see what I mean, with a dividing compass (callipers) one can create an arc to create a lens and critically measure the arc to improve; in this case: optics.
Hang on a minute, maybe these white-hulled ships…
Santorini (Thera) before the eruption of 1628 BCE. The reconstruction team thought they used flax linen cloth in pine resin (a natural thermoplastic) with limestone powder to make the hull white (a composite matrix) over a wooden frame. The reinforcement is shown inside and out, if the hull is compromised on rocks, it will delaminate, keeping the hull watertight to make landfall and repair, saving the crew, ship and cargo. Glass fibre composites were invented in 1950’s COMMON ERA. Flax is almost as strong in tension.
No this…
Later bronze casting currently in the Met Museum, NY, ca 700 BCE from originally Samos, Greece. It's the closest thing I’ve seen to what Daedalus’ glider may have been. An airframe! If the fabled account of Icarus is correct: the remains of his glider were found at Icaria
this is over 200kms from Crete, which could be achieved by Island hopping to pick up the next thermal on the sun-facing side of hills, the same method is used by Griffon Vultures that can be observed on Crete. A 7-metre wingspan (1m chord at midpoint) wicker frame elliptical top wing (skinned with linen cloth and sealed with pine resin), wicker handrails to shift the pilot's weight about held in a leather harness and with linen cloth between splayed legs will do it (extended poles pushed through a sleeve would give improved stability in flight). This configuration has a better sink rate than a modern delta wing hang glider! It is very much within their manufacturing capability and it is likely that Daedalus is a position, the master craftsman to the warchief and had access to all the palace workshops, the finest cloth, the best craftspeople in every class. My money is on the early flight pioneers, they have better tech and more practical experience of ultralightweight structures (shields) than George Cayley did. What is shown is a simple and very capable little airframe, a hang glider, it couldn’t be simpler. I have built a model and it flies, VERY well. The actual myth recorded is in itself extraordinary to an engineer, it details chambered wings, lift-generating asymmetric aerofoils, there is a reference to Orions sword, this is an unambiguous reference to the minimum glide angle (5 degrees declination)! I have built experimental aircraft for the UK Government - my gut feeling is this simple aircraft flew! Whether it was a hand launch model or an airframe that carried the first pilots is debatable, however, I can not see the first warranting significant attention for it to be passed down by oral tradition.We have little idea of what technology the Minoan’s really had, most of it has decayed and is lost to time. The Athenians kept the white hull ship Theseus returned in, it was on display for centuries as a trophy of Athens increasing power. According to myth, Theseus tried to secure magnetite and got thrown off a cliff on Skyros, a source of Magnetite! Athens didn’t know how to make another white-hull, they fell out of use, it is sufficiently advanced that they were unable to reproduce it.
A communication network across the Aegean? Well, they had one according to Homer, the fall of Troy was reported to Argos in a few hours using island fire beacons (Peak Sanctuaries which have line-of-sight between them and are present throughout the entire Aegean), e.g. a message relayed at a few hundred miles per hour using long-distance signals, fires at night, gravity cast flat mirrors called Labyrs (double-axe) in the day.
Peak sanctuary above. Note all the measuring devices!
Kit check: Lodestone compasses? Check. Minoan buildings aligned to magnet North from around 1900 BCE. Iron in the bronze age. Check. Doors that open with fire (steam), check. Catapults (Talos), check. Automatons (according to myth), likely using pulleys and gravity-powered. Daedalus; automaton are said to use mercury which is 13.5 times denser than water and could also be used for sequencing movement and making the automaton sing as air is drawn through a whistle as the mercury escapes the chamber, all functions that they are said to have done. Basic robots. Check.
Orbital calculator/calendar. Check.
Blind embossing printing: Check. Money (Palace gold tokens): Check. Sewers, flushing toilets, interlocking clay pipes with injectors to remove debris, aqueducts, tunnels straight through mountains, hot and cold running water to upper stores. Check, check, check, check, check and check. Are you getting dizzy? All of these things are technically demonstrated in the mid second millennium before common era and were (largely) lost in Bronze Age collapse to be rediscovered often centuries and in some rare cases many millennia later.
The fingers. The (Idaean) Dactyls: Facts, Information, and Mythology. According to myth reared baby Zeus with their sisters (priestess), e.g. in their time off when they weren’t making things or trading things. The Dactyls guarded the caves where Minos kept the metal ingots (proceeds from trade and likely duty on plain wooden hulls in their territorial waters, ships that they could identify from peak sanctuaries and had 3m gravity-cast Labyrs mirror to signal fleet to intercept!). What the military call today a C4ISTAR system. Zeus’ very real lightning bolts.
What is shown above is miltech from the Bronze Age and it makes advanced research agencies of today look like they are playing at it! We should have been on the moon at the beginning of the common era on this trajectory. An enlightenment had already happened before the common era, then an island erupted (1628 BCE), then the Mycenaeans invaded (1450 BCE), then Bronze Age Collapse (1225 BCE): the world had gone very badly wrong and took a different course… We would otherwise have had a more globalized economy sooner based on trade and increasing production outputs, instead, we inherited unproductive raiding and war became a strategy to expand!
What can we not understand about Minoans?
And if its prehistory, this…
Oldest obsidian bracelet reveals amazing craftsmen's skills in the eighth millennium BC The innovation is not the obsidian bracelet (which profile is ground to 0.1mm tolerance) but the machine to make it, a grinding WHEEL. The best technology in any age is exceptional, often being (many) Millennium ahead of the curve. It can take considerable time for these new technologies to be broadly adopted.
This is all hidden in plain sight. The Dactyls are the Quartermasters to those perceived as Gods. They made the tools, machines, weapons and systems. One hand is male, the other female. They built the most extraordinary things: transformative technology and systems.
Administration may be the glue of civilization, but it is the technology that increases efficiency and with that increased output. Without technology, we would never be able to support such truly huge populations of today and we would otherwise still be living in the stone age, all 7 million of us; three orders of magnitude difference to the actual population of today: 7 billion and counting.
These technologies (particularly the old ones) are critical enablers: calendars, machines and platforms to facilitate increased trade in surpluses giving prosperity. Although old in this context is relative.
Addison Jump asked for further details of the artifacts which are available here with references for further reading: Nick Deakin's answer to What can we not understand about Minoans?
Footnotes