Cyclades

The Cyclades were a number of islands in the Aegean Sea, east of Attica. The name comes from the fact that the islands seemed to circle around the island of Delos, the holiest of islands, because it was the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis.

The Cyclades were important centres of the Bronze Age, where archaeologists have found many stone female figurines scattered throughout the islands, paralleling the Minoan civilisation on Crete and the Bronze Age Helladic peoples on mainland Greece.