Knossos

Knossos is an archaeological site on the island of Crete, just outside the modern city of Heraklion. It is best known for a vast building complex of the Bronze Age, usually called the Palace of Minos, which was the largest of several similar complexes on Crete. The people who built it are called Minoans, a modern name invented by the archaeologist Arthur Evans after the legendary King Minos.

The palace was not a single building put up at one time. It grew over centuries around a large open courtyard, with wings of rooms rising two or three storeys on every side. It contained storerooms, workshops, shrines, halls for ceremonies, living quarters and a sophisticated system of drains and light wells. Around it lay a town of houses, roads and cemeteries.

Knossos is also one of the oldest settlements in Europe. People first lived on the hill around 7000 BCE, in the Neolithic period, and the layers of their houses built up into a mound several metres deep before the first palace was built.

Knossos matters for two reasons. It is the key site for understanding the Minoans, the first complex, urban civilisation in the Aegean. And through Greek myth it has shaped the European imagination for nearly three thousand years, as the home of Minos, Daedalus, the Minotaur and the Labyrinth.

The heart of the palace is the Central Court, a paved rectangle roughly fifty metres long, oriented approximately north–south. Every Minoan palace has such a court, and it was probably used for gatherings and ceremonies. All the main wings open onto it.

On the west side lay the rooms for storage and ritual. A long corridor gives access to narrow storerooms (magazines) where enormous clay jars, called pithoi, held olive oil, wine and grain; stone-lined pits in the floors may have held valuables. Next to the court is the so-called Throne Room, with a stone seat against the wall flanked by painted griffins, stone benches and a sunken area that Evans called a lustral basin. Nearby were small shrines where Evans found figurines of women holding snakes.

On the east side, built into the slope, is the so-called Domestic Quarter. A Grand Staircase descended several floors around a light well, an open shaft that brought daylight and fresh air into the lower rooms. Here Evans identified the “King’s Megaron” and “Queen’s Megaron”, with a room containing what he interpreted as a bath and a toilet flushed by the drainage system. These names are Evans’s interpretations, not ancient labels.

Other features to look for are the west façade of large cut blocks, the ceremonial entrances with long painted corridors, stone “horns of consecration” (a sacred symbol shaped like a pair of bull’s horns), and double axes (labrys) carved as signs on stone blocks. Much of what visitors see today, including the red columns that narrow towards the bottom, is a reconstruction, but it is based on the original column bases and on painted images of Minoan buildings.

Minoan painters decorated walls with frescoes, painting on wet lime plaster. Famous scenes from Knossos include the Bull-Leaping Fresco, in which young people grasp a charging bull’s horns and somersault over its back; the Procession Fresco, with rows of people carrying gifts; the Cup-Bearer; the Dolphin Fresco; and the so-called Prince of the Lilies. Colour conventions distinguish figures: men are usually painted red-brown and women white.

Minoan craftspeople were also masters of small-scale art. They carved seals in hard stones with tiny scenes, made fine thin-walled pottery painted with sea creatures and plants, and produced objects of faience, ivory and gold. A stone vessel in the shape of a bull’s head, from the Little Palace at Knossos, has eyes of rock crystal and horns once covered with gold.

The Minoans lived by farming, herding and trade. Crete produced olive oil, wine, wool and textiles, but lacked metals, so its ships sailed across the Aegean and to Cyprus, the Levant and Egypt. Egyptian texts refer to a land called Keftiu, generally identified as Crete, and paintings in Egyptian tombs of the fifteenth century BCE show Keftiu people bringing vessels as gifts.

Bulls appear everywhere in Minoan art and religion: in bull-leaping, in the horns of consecration, in bull-shaped vessels. This may help explain why later Greeks associated Crete with a bull-headed monster.

Archaeologists divide the Minoan Bronze Age into Early, Middle and Late Minoan periods, a system created by Evans and his assistant Duncan Mackenzie on the basis of pottery styles. The first palace at Knossos was built around 1900 BCE, in the Middle Minoan period, at the same time as the palaces at Phaistos and Malia. This “Old Palace” period saw the use of Cretan hieroglyphic writing and the fine, colourful pottery called Kamares ware.

Around 1700 BCE the palaces were badly damaged, probably by earthquakes. They were rebuilt on a grander scale, beginning the “New Palace” or Neopalatial period, the height of Minoan civilisation. Most of what is visible at Knossos today belongs to this phase. Linear A was now the main administrative script.

During this period, probably in the sixteenth century BCE, the volcano on the island of Thera (Santorini), about 110 km north of Crete, erupted with enormous force. It buried the Minoan town of Akrotiri on Thera and caused tsunamis and ashfall on Crete. The exact date is disputed, and the eruption did not bring Minoan civilisation to an immediate end: Knossos continued and even flourished.

Around 1450 BCE many sites across Crete were destroyed by fire. Knossos suffered less and survived as the island’s main centre, but its administration now used Linear B, a script adapted to write Greek. This shows that Mycenaean Greeks from the mainland had taken control, or at least that a Greek-speaking elite now ran the palace. The final destruction of the palace is conventionally dated to the fourteenth century BCE, around 1375–1350 BCE, though some scholars argue for a later date. People continued to live at Knossos, and in the first millennium BCE it became one of the leading Greek city-states of Crete.

Because Linear A cannot be read, we know little directly about Minoan politics. Evans imagined a priest-king ruling from Knossos over a peaceful island empire, a “Pax Minoica”, and even suggested a thalassocracy, or rule of the sea, echoing the Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote that Minos was the first to build a navy. Modern archaeologists are more cautious. It is unclear whether Crete was unified under Knossos, whether the palaces were independent centres, or how power was shared.

Unusually for Bronze Age art, Minoan images rarely show a king, battles or rulers smiting enemies. Instead they show processions, ceremonies, nature and many women in prominent roles, often as priestesses or goddess figures. This has led some to suggest that women held special religious authority, although the older idea of a matriarchal society is not supported by clear evidence.

Minoan religion took place in the palaces, in household shrines, in caves and in peak sanctuaries on mountaintops, where worshippers left clay figurines. Important symbols include the double axe, the horns of consecration, sacred trees and pillars. The “snake goddess” figurines found at Knossos in 1903 are among the most famous Minoan objects, though their exact meaning is debated.

The picture of peaceful Minoans has been challenged by evidence of weapons, fortifications at some sites and possible human sacrifice. At Knossos, excavations around 1980 found children’s bones with cut marks in a building of the Late Minoan period, which some interpret as ritual practice and others explain differently. The debate shows how much Evans’s early vision still shapes the questions archaeologists ask.

Knossos has produced examples of three Bronze Age scripts. Cretan hieroglyphs, used mainly on seals, appear in the Old Palace period. Linear A, a syllabic script written on clay tablets, sealings, stone offering tables and metal objects, was used across Crete in the Neopalatial period. Neither has been deciphered, and the Minoan language behind them remains unknown.

Evans also found thousands of clay tablets and fragments in a third script, which he named Linear B. These tablets were made of unfired clay and survived only because the fire that destroyed the palace baked them hard. In 1952 the architect Michael Ventris, building on the analytical work of Alice Kober and working with the philologist John Chadwick, showed that Linear B recorded an early form of Greek, now called Mycenaean Greek.

The decipherment transformed the history of Knossos. The tablets are administrative records: lists of personnel, sheep and wool, textiles, chariots and armour, land and offerings to gods. Some divine names are familiar from later Greek religion, such as Zeus and Athena. One tablet from Knossos records an offering of honey to the “Mistress of the Labyrinth” (da-pu2-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja), showing that the word “labyrinth” was already associated with Knossos in the Bronze Age.

Linear B proves that, in its final palatial phase, Knossos was run in Greek. It also raises a difficult chronological question, discussed below: when exactly were the Linear B tablets written and the palace destroyed?

Greek myths told of Minos, a powerful king of Crete and son of Zeus and Europa. His wife Pasiphaë gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with a bull’s head, which Minos kept in the Labyrinth, a maze built by the craftsman Daedalus. Athens was forced to send young men and women to be devoured by the monster, until the Athenian hero Theseus killed it with the help of Minos’s daughter Ariadne.

Homer already knew of Knossos. In the Odyssey, Crete is described as a land of many cities, among them Knossos, where Minos ruled. In the Iliad, Idomeneus, grandson of Minos, leads the Cretan contingent to Troy. These poems were composed centuries after the palace fell, but they preserve a memory of Crete’s Bronze Age importance.

It is tempting to connect the myth directly with the ruins: the complex, many-roomed palace as the Labyrinth, bull-leaping as the origin of the Minotaur story, and the double axe (labrys) as the source of the word “labyrinth”. These connections are attractive but uncertain; the labrys etymology in particular is debated by linguists. What is clear is that the Greeks associated Knossos with a powerful ancient kingdom, and that this association guided the first excavators to the site.

The myth has had a long afterlife, from Ovid and medieval maps to Picasso’s minotaurs and modern novels and films, making Knossos one of the most imaginatively charged places in Europe.

In 1878–79 a local merchant and antiquarian from Heraklion, Minos Kalokairinos, dug trial trenches at the site and found storerooms full of pithoi. Crete was then under Ottoman rule, and further excavation was stopped. Heinrich Schliemann, excavator of Troy and Mycenae, also tried to buy the site but failed.

After Crete became autonomous, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, who had bought part of the land, began large-scale excavations in March 1900 with Duncan Mackenzie and a large team of Cretan workers. Within a few seasons they uncovered most of the palace. Evans published his results in The Palace of Minos at Knossos, four volumes issued between 1921 and 1935.

Evans went further than any excavator of his time in rebuilding what he found. To protect the ruins and to help visitors understand them, he had walls, columns, staircases and upper floors reconstructed, mostly in reinforced concrete in the 1920s and 1930s, and had copies of frescoes painted and placed on the walls. The Swiss artists Émile Gilliéron and his son restored many frescoes from small fragments.

Today the reconstructions are part of the history of the site and are themselves protected. They help visitors picture a multi-storey building, but they also fix Evans’s interpretations in concrete. Some restored frescoes, such as the Prince of the Lilies, combine fragments that may not belong together, and several room names reflect Evans’s assumptions about royalty and religion.

The date of the Linear B archive. Evans dated the destruction of the palace, and hence the Linear B tablets, to around 1400 BCE. In the 1960s the philologist Leonard Palmer challenged Evans’s and Mackenzie’s records of the excavation, arguing that the tablets belonged to a much later destruction, closer to that of Pylos on the mainland (around 1200 BCE). The resulting “Palmer–Boardman debate” led to intensive re-study of the excavation notebooks. Most scholars now accept a fourteenth-century date for the main archive, but the tablets from the Room of the Chariot Tablets may be earlier, and the question of later occupation and administration at Knossos remains discussed.

The Thera eruption. Radiocarbon measurements, including on an olive branch buried at Thera, tend to point to the later seventeenth or sixteenth century BCE, whereas traditional archaeological synchronisms with Egyptian chronology suggest the mid-sixteenth century or later. Recent revisions of the radiocarbon calibration curve have narrowed the gap but not closed it. The debate affects the absolute dates of the whole Neopalatial period, and therefore of Knossos’s most famous phase.

What was the “palace”? Evans assumed a royal residence. Many scholars now question whether a king lived there, whether the complex was primarily religious, administrative or communal, and whether the model of Near Eastern palaces fits Crete at all. Some prefer neutral terms such as “court-centred building”. The central courts suggest large communal ceremonies, and the storerooms suggest the collection and redistribution of goods, but the relationship between these functions is debated.

Minoans and Mycenaeans. How Greek-speakers came to control Knossos, whether by conquest, gradual infiltration or alliance with local elites, is still unclear. Studies of burials, pottery and more recently ancient DNA have been used to address the question, which touches on the broader problem of how archaeological cultures relate to languages and peoples.

Much of our knowledge of Knossos depends on excavations conducted early in the twentieth century, before modern recording methods. Evans and Mackenzie kept notebooks and daybooks, but stratigraphic information was often incomplete, and many deposits were removed entirely. Later excavators, working for the British School at Athens and the Greek Archaeological Service, have re-examined parts of the site, dug beneath floors and in the surrounding town, and re-studied the stored finds.

Scientific methods now contribute much. Radiocarbon dating refines chronology; petrographic and chemical analysis of pottery and clay traces trade; analysis of animal bones and plant remains reveals diet and economy; isotope studies track mobility; and surveys of the wider Knossos valley show how the town grew. Wall paintings are studied with microscopy and pigment analysis, which help distinguish ancient paint from modern restoration.

Conservation poses special problems. The early concrete reconstructions have deteriorated, and the reinforcing iron inside them has corroded. Conservators must protect both the fragile ancient remains and the historic reconstructions, while coping with very large numbers of visitors. Shelters, walkways and restoration programmes have been introduced by the Greek authorities.

In 2025 Knossos was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with five other Cretan sites (Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, Zominthos and Kydonia) as the “Minoan Palatial Centres”. The listing recognises the palaces as a group, reflecting the modern view that Knossos should be understood as part of a network of Minoan centres rather than in isolation.