Nine thousand years on one hill
People lived on the hill of Knossos from the Neolithic period, starting around 7000 BCE, until Roman times. The great age came with the Minoans: a first palace was built in the nineteenth to seventeenth centuries BCE and a second in the sixteenth to fourteenth, with luxurious houses around it. The tablets written in Linear B in the fourteenth century still name the place: ko-no-so.
Around 1450 BCE Knossos was partly destroyed, and Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland settled there. The city lived on: it flourished again in the Hellenistic period, and in 67 BCE it was taken by the Roman general Quintus Caecilius Metellus, who earned the surname Creticus. According to tradition, Knossos was the seat of King Minos. Legend also set here the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, with the story of Daedalus and Icarus.
Four wings around a court
The palace is built around a large central court, with four wings arranged on its sides. They held royal quarters, workshops, shrines, storerooms and repositories, the Throne Room and halls for banquets. Long rows of storerooms kept goods in tall clay jars, and an elaborate system of water channels ran through the building.
Knossos was the largest of several such centres, alongside Phaistos, Malia and Zakros, which shared the same plan around a central court and had no defensive walls. What makes Knossos special is its scale, and the fact that its plan, with rooms and corridors piled up on several levels, fed the legend of the Labyrinth.
The Throne Room
The most famous room of the palace was uncovered in April 1900, on the west side of the central court. It has a stone seat against the north wall, benches of gypsum along the other sides, and a sunken basin on the south side, the kind of room archaeologists call a lustral basin, probably used for rituals of purification.
Two painted griffins, mythical animals with a lion’s body and an eagle’s head, flank the seat. They are a reconstruction. And who sat there? Evans called it a throne, but the room’s use is still debated: some scholars think the seat belonged to a priestess or to a goddess’s cult, others to a ruler. In its present form the room dates from the last phase of the palace, after the Mycenaeans arrived.
How much did Evans rebuild?
The site was first identified in 1878 by Minos Kalokairinos. Arthur Evans excavated it from 1900 to 1931, uncovering the palace, a large part of the Minoan town and its cemeteries. Then he began to put it back together. With the architects Fyfe and Doll (1904-1905), and from the 1920s Piet de Jong, he rebuilt walls, columns and upper floors, using reinforced concrete. Evans called it a “reconstitution”.
Part of it was protection: the Greek Ministry of Culture notes that most interventions were imposed by the need to preserve what had been uncovered. But they also froze one man’s interpretation in concrete. When Knossos joined the other Minoan palatial centres on the UNESCO World Heritage List in July 2025, UNESCO noted the extensive early-twentieth-century reconstructions as a challenge to the site’s authenticity, while stressing that they are well documented and that most of the site is original. Today the archaeological service carries out only consolidation work.
A palace, or a court compound?
Even the word “palace” is Evans’s. He assumed that buildings like Knossos were royal residences that also served as centres of government, economy, crafts and religion, and over the decades each of those roles has been questioned. The archaeologist Jan Driessen has called them “court compounds”, and others speak of “court-centred buildings”, names that describe the architecture without deciding who lived there. Others still, such as Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, defend the idea of a royal residence whose court served as a stage for the ruler’s public appearances.
So the name stays, as a convenient label. What is not in doubt is the role UNESCO describes: the palatial centres were the administrative, economic and religious hubs of Minoan Crete, with storage on a huge scale and some of the earliest writing in Europe.
How Knossos ended
The palace was finally destroyed in the fourteenth century BCE, but exactly when and how is still argued over. The debate turns on the Linear B tablets found in the burnt palace: Evans dated the destruction to about 1400 BCE, while other scholars have argued for a much later date, and the pottery and clay sealings from the fire are now used to narrow it down within the fourteenth century. A date around 1350 BCE is the one most often given.
Where to see it
Knossos lies just outside Heraklion, reached by city bus number 2. The finds from the palace, from frescoes to the faience figurines of the Temple Repositories, are in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.
Sources
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Odysseus portal, “Knossos” (history, description, site monuments, information).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Minoan Palatial Centres” (1733), 2025.
- Ashmolean Museum, Knossos and the Evans archive (on the Throne Room and the reconstructions).
- J. Driessen, “The Court Compounds of Minoan Crete: Royal Palaces or Ceremonial Centers?”, Athena Review 3, no. 3 (2003); D. Panagiotopoulos, on the Minoan court as royal stage (2006).
- “The Destruction of the Palace of Knossos and its Pottery”, Antiquity.
