Knossos was the ceremonial heart of the Minoan world, a sprawling multi-storey palace that gave rise to the legend of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. What visitors see today is also the work of Arthur Evans, whose early twentieth-century reconstruction in concrete remains one of the most debated interventions in European archaeology.
At a glance
The Palace of Knossos stands a short distance south of Heraklion, on the site of a Minoan settlement that grew into the largest palace complex of Bronze Age Crete. Built and rebuilt across several centuries, it covered around 20,000 square metres and held over 1,300 rooms across multiple floors, served by an early drainage system and organised around storerooms, a throne room and a central court.
Much of what stands today reflects Arthur Evans’s reconstruction of the 1900s to 1930s, carried out in reinforced concrete and coloured plaster. His interpretations gave the site its familiar names, the Throne Room, the Queen’s Megaron, the Grand Staircase, though several of these readings have since been questioned by scholars.
Key facts
- Location: Knossos, roughly five kilometres south of Heraklion, Crete.
- Civilisation: Minoan, Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 1350 BCE.
- Scale: a palace complex of around 20,000 square metres with over 1,300 rooms.
- Reconstruction: excavated and partially rebuilt in concrete by Arthur Evans, 1900 to 1935.
- Script discovery: Linear B administrative tablets, the earliest surviving written Greek, deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952.
- Coordinates: 35.2983° N, 25.1624° E.
History
A Neolithic settlement preceded the first Minoan palace at Knossos, built around 2000 BCE. An earthquake destroyed this structure around 1700 BCE, and the palace was rebuilt on a grander scale during what is known as the New Palace period, which lasted until roughly 1450 BCE and is regarded as the peak of Minoan civilisation, when Knossos is thought to have been the largest city in Bronze Age Europe, with a population sometimes put as high as 100,000, though this figure is debated. During this period the palace administered trade across the eastern Mediterranean, reaching Egypt, the Levant and the Cyclades, and its scribes used the still undeciphered Linear A script.
Around 1600 BCE the volcanic eruption on Thera, one of the largest of the Holocene period, has long been linked to the decline of Minoan Crete, though most scholars now treat the destruction of the palaces around 1450 BCE as a separate event, possibly connected to a Mycenaean takeover. Every other Cretan palace was destroyed or abandoned at this point; why Knossos alone survived is not fully understood. Mycenaean Greeks then administered the site, and the Linear B tablets from this period, dated to roughly 1450 to 1380 BCE, record palace business in an early form of Greek. A fire around 1380 BCE brought the palace’s active life to an end.
Knossos was later refounded as a Roman colony, and Roman buildings were raised over the ruined palace. Crete subsequently passed through Arab, Venetian and Ottoman rule before gaining a measure of autonomy as the Cretan State at the end of the nineteenth century. Arthur Evans purchased the site in 1900 and began the excavations that would occupy him for the next thirty-five years.
The Linear B tablets, roughly 3,400 of them, are the oldest surviving written record of the Greek language, predating Homer by more than seven centuries. They record mundane palace administration, sheep counts, land holdings, oil allocations and personnel lists rather than literature, and survived only because the fire that destroyed the palace baked the clay hard. Michael Ventris, a British architect, deciphered the script in 1952, establishing that the Mycenaean Greeks were the direct ancestors of the Classical Greeks rather than a separate people, as had previously been assumed.
What you see
The Throne Room holds an alabaster seat generally regarded as the oldest surviving throne in Europe, still in its original position, along with a sunken basin thought to have been used for ritual cleansing. Nearby, the Grand Staircase, largely a product of Evans’s reconstruction, rises through several flights in gypsum stone. Corridors such as the South Propylaion carry copies of the palace’s best known frescoes, including the Procession Fresco, the Cupbearer and the Lily Prince, with the originals held in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.
Long, narrow magazines run along both sides of the central court; the West Magazines, in the basement of the west wing, once held around sixty-six large storage vessels for oil, wine and grain, and it was here that many of the Linear B tablets came to light. The so-called Queen’s Megaron, Evans’s own designation for what he read as an apartment suite, contains reconstructed copies of the Dolphin Fresco and evidence of an early drainage system with terracotta pipes, dated to around 1600 BCE. The Central Court, an open rectangular space at the axis of the palace, is where the bull-leaping ceremonies shown in the frescoes are thought to have taken place. A stepped area to the northwest, sometimes called the Theatral Area, has been proposed as an early form of theatre seating.
The myth of the Minotaur, the bull-headed creature confined in a labyrinth built by Daedalus and killed by the Athenian hero Theseus, is widely read as a later Greek reworking of Minoan realities: the bull-leaping frescoes point to genuine and dangerous bull ceremonies, and the word labyrinth may derive from labrys, the double-headed axe carved repeatedly into the palace walls.
Practical information
- Tickets and hours: vary by season; check the official channels of the Greek Ministry of Culture or the Heraklion Archaeological Museum before visiting.
- Combined visit: pairing the site with the Heraklion Archaeological Museum is worthwhile, since the originals of the frescoes, the throne and the Linear tablets are held there rather than at Knossos itself.
- Time needed: allow a couple of hours on site to take in the main rooms and courtyards.
Getting there
Knossos lies close to Heraklion and is reached by regular city bus from the town centre or bus station, or by taxi for the short run out of the city. Current timetables and fares are best checked locally on arrival.
Nearby
- Heraklion Archaeological Museum — around five kilometres away in Heraklion, and the principal home of Minoan originals from Knossos, including the throne, the frescoes and the Linear A and B tablets.
Sources
- Arthur Evans
- Michael Ventris
- Heraklion Archaeological Museum
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