Knossos sits on Kefala Hill, a few kilometers south of Heraklion on Crete, where people lived continuously from about 7000 BC. The first palace went up around 1900 BC, an earthquake destroyed it around 1700 BC, and the Minoans rebuilt a grander second palace of roughly 20,000 square meters around a central court. They used timber-reinforced masonry to flex in earthquakes, downward-tapering columns, light wells that pulled in sea breezes, and terracotta drains. The word labyrinth likely comes from labrys, the double axe carved across the site, and the maze-like west wing turned out to hold storage magazines full of giant pithoi for oil, grain, and wine.

Around 1450 BC a wave of destruction brought Mycenaean Greek influence. In the 1950s Michael Ventris and John Chadwick showed that Linear B, with 80 to 90 signs, was a syllabary writing early Greek, meaning mainland administrators ran the palace in its last phase, while the older Linear A remains unread. After a final fire around 1350 BC, Minos Kalokairinos dug in 1878, and Arthur Evans bought the site in 1900, coined the word Minoan, and rebuilt it in reinforced concrete with repainted columns and reconstructed frescoes. That iron rebar is now rusting and spalling into the ancient stone.

• How Ventris used place names found only on Cretan tablets to unlock the sound values
• The bull-leaping, dolphin, and Prince of the Lilies frescoes, and the gypsum throne flanked by griffins
• Why Evans’s concrete cannot simply be removed without taking Minoan stone with it
• A survey of 11 square kilometers showing Knossos thrived long after the palace burned
• Classical Knossos minting silver coins with a labyrinth, and the Roman Villa of Dionysus