Palace of Knossos (c. 1900 BC): The Minoan Labyrinth of Crete

The Palace of Knossos was the largest and most important centre of the Minoan civilisation of Bronze Age Crete. First built around 1900 BC on a hill near modern Heraklion, it was the seat of a powerful elite for some five centuries, with painted halls, vast storerooms and a writing system of its own. Its maze of rooms, rediscovered by Arthur Evans from 1900, is widely seen as the origin of the Greek legend of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur.

Background: Crete before the palace

The Kephala hill at Knossos is one of the oldest settled places in Europe. Farmers lived there from around 7000 BC, and over the next four thousand years their mud-brick houses built up a mound several metres high. By the Early Bronze Age, in the third millennium BC, Knossos was one of the largest communities on Crete.

Crete’s position between Greece, Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt helped its people grow rich through farming, crafts and sea trade. Around 1900 BC, in what archaeologists call the Protopalatial or “Old Palace” period, several Cretan sites built large complexes arranged around central courts. Knossos, Phaistos and Malia were the greatest of them.

The term “Minoan” is modern. Arthur Evans coined it after Minos, the legendary king of Crete in Greek myth. We do not know what the people of Bronze Age Crete called themselves, because their own scripts remain largely unread.

The palace and how it grew

The first palace at Knossos was built around 1900 BC and damaged several times, probably by earthquakes. After a major destruction around 1700 BC it was rebuilt on an even grander scale. This “New Palace”, the building whose ruins visitors see today, flourished from about 1700 to 1450 BC.

The complex covered roughly 2 hectares (about 5 acres) and rose to two or three storeys in places. At its heart lay a paved central court about 50 metres long and 25 metres wide. Around it were wings for ceremonies, storage, workshops and living quarters, connected by corridors, staircases and light wells that brought daylight into lower rooms.

Minoan builders used timber-framed walls of rubble and cut stone, gypsum facing slabs and distinctive wooden columns that were wider at the top than at the bottom. The so-called Grand Staircase in the east wing descended several floors. Terracotta pipes and stone channels carried fresh water and drained rainwater and waste, an advanced system for its time.

Around the palace stood a substantial town with houses, villas and cemeteries. Estimates of its population vary widely, from about 10,000 to more than 20,000 people, and depend on how much of the surrounding area is counted.

Frescoes, storerooms and the Throne Room

Knossos is famous for its wall paintings, made by applying pigment to wet or damp lime plaster. Surviving fragments show processions of youths carrying vessels, women in elaborate dress, dolphins and fish, flowers and birds. The best-known scene, the Bull-Leaping Fresco, shows athletes somersaulting over a charging bull, a ritual sport that appears often in Minoan art.

Many frescoes survive only as small pieces. Evans’s restorers, including the Swiss artists Émile Gilliéron and his son, filled in large missing areas. The “Prince of the Lilies”, for example, was assembled from fragments that may not belong to a single figure. The originals are now kept in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, while copies hang at the site.

The west wing held long, narrow storerooms, or magazines, lined with huge clay jars called pithoi. Some stood taller than a person and stored olive oil, wine and grain. Stone-lined pits in the floors may have held valuables. These stores show that the palace collected, recorded and redistributed the produce of the surrounding countryside.

Nearby is the Throne Room, a small chamber with a high-backed gypsum seat flanked by stone benches and painted griffins. In its present form it probably dates to the final phase of the palace, after about 1450 BC. Whether a king, a priestess or a religious official sat there is still debated.

Writing, religion and the double axe

Clerks at Knossos kept accounts on clay tablets. In the earlier periods they used Cretan Hieroglyphic and then Linear A, a script that has never been deciphered. In the final phase they wrote in Linear B, an early form of Greek, and several thousand Linear B tablets and fragments have been found in the palace.

Minoan religion appears to have centred on female deities, sacred animals, mountain peak sanctuaries and caves. Faience figurines of women holding snakes, found in stone-lined repositories in the palace, date to around 1600 BC. Stone “horns of consecration” crowned buildings, and the double axe, or labrys, was carved on walls and pillars.

One Linear B tablet records an offering of honey to the “Mistress of the Labyrinth” (da-pu-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja). It shows that a place called the labyrinth existed at Knossos in the late Bronze Age. Some scholars link the word to labrys, though this connection is uncertain.

Destructions and the end of the palace

Around 1600 BC the great volcanic eruption of Thera, about 110 km to the north, spread ash across parts of Crete. Knossos itself survived, and Minoan palace life continued for several more generations.

Around 1450 BC fires destroyed palaces, villas and towns across Crete. Knossos was damaged but remained in use, and from this time Mycenaean Greeks from the mainland appear to have controlled it, as the Linear B tablets show. Warrior graves with bronze weapons appear around the town in the same period.

The palace was finally destroyed by fire around 1375 BC, according to the most widely cited date, although some archaeologists argue for a later date around 1300 BC or after. The causes are unclear. Afterwards the hill was never again the seat of a great power, though Knossos remained a Greek and later a Roman city.

Rediscovery and Arthur Evans

In 1878 Minos Kalokairinos, a merchant and antiquarian from Heraklion, dug trial trenches at Knossos and found storerooms full of pithoi. Crete was then under Ottoman rule, and the authorities halted further work. Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy and Mycenae, tried to buy the land in the 1880s but could not agree a price.

The British archaeologist Arthur Evans, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, bought the site after Crete became autonomous in 1898. He began digging in March 1900 with the Scottish archaeologist Duncan Mackenzie and more than a hundred local workers. Within a few seasons they had uncovered most of the palace. Excavations continued intermittently until the 1930s.

Evans published his results in The Palace of Minos at Knossos (1921–1935). He also rebuilt parts of the palace in reinforced concrete, restoring columns, upper floors and painted walls. These reconstructions protect fragile remains and give visitors a vivid impression, but they reflect Evans’s own interpretations. Today archaeologists treat them as part of the site’s history rather than as accurate copies of Minoan buildings.

Key people

• Arthur Evans (1851–1941): excavated and reconstructed the palace, named the Minoan civilisation and published the first major study of Linear A and Linear B.
• Minos Kalokairinos (1843–1907): first excavator of Knossos, in 1878.
• Duncan Mackenzie (1861–1934): Evans’s field director, who kept the daily excavation notebooks.
• Michael Ventris (1922–1956): deciphered Linear B in 1952, proving that the last rulers of Knossos kept records in Greek.

Myths and facts

Myth: Knossos was the Labyrinth built by Daedalus to hold the Minotaur. In Greek legend, King Minos imprisoned the half-bull Minotaur in a maze, and the Athenian hero Theseus killed it with the help of Ariadne. No maze has been found, and the story was written down many centuries after the palace fell. It probably reflects later Greek memories of a vast, confusing building, bull imagery and a place called the labyrinth.

Myth: the Minoans were peaceful and had no rulers. Early twentieth-century writers pictured a gentle, unwarlike society. Weapons, fortifications at some sites and depictions of armed men suggest a more complicated picture, and the palaces clearly concentrated wealth and power.

Myth: the Thera eruption destroyed Knossos. The eruption came several generations before the destructions of about 1450 BC, and Knossos continued to function long after it.

Timeline

• c. 7000 BC: First Neolithic settlement on the Kephala hill.
• c. 1900 BC: The first palace is built at Knossos.
• c. 1700 BC: The palace is destroyed, probably by earthquake, and rebuilt as the “New Palace”.
• c. 1600 BC: The Thera eruption spreads ash over parts of Crete; Knossos survives.
• c. 1450 BC: Widespread destructions on Crete; Mycenaean Greeks take control of Knossos.
• c. 1375 BC (debated): Final destruction of the palace by fire.
• 1878: Minos Kalokairinos excavates the west storerooms.
• 1900, March: Arthur Evans begins large-scale excavations.
• 1921–1935: Evans publishes The Palace of Minos at Knossos.
• 1952: Michael Ventris deciphers Linear B, showing the late tablets are in Greek.

Legacy

Knossos gave the modern world its first full picture of a European civilisation older than classical Greece. Its discovery, together with Schliemann’s finds at Mycenae, transformed Greek myths about Minos, Theseus and the Trojan War into questions that archaeology could investigate.

The palace’s colourful frescoes and graceful architecture shaped popular images of the Minoans, influencing early twentieth-century art and design. In 2025 Knossos was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with other Minoan palatial centres of Crete.

Why it matters

Knossos was the political, economic and religious heart of Bronze Age Crete and one of the earliest complex societies in Europe. Its ruins reveal how a palace economy, long-distance trade and a sophisticated artistic culture worked more than 3,500 years ago, and they explain how one of the best-known Greek myths may have begun.