The Palace of Knossos

From “The Palace of Knossos and the Sea Power of Minos” in The Discoveries in Crete and their bearing on the History of Ancient Civilisation by Ronald M. Burrows, 1907

Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.

Since the famous telegram in which Schliemann informed the King of the Hellenes that he had discovered the tomb of Agamemnon, there has been nothing in archaeology that has made such a vivid impression on the popular imagination as Mr. Arthur Evans’s excavations at Knossos. The Minotaur! the Labyrinth!—such words do not suggest the solemnities of antiquarian research.

The average fairly equipped scholar knows that the French have explored Delos and Delphi; but, unless he is working at archaeology, he does not know what they have found there. The work of the British School at Megalopolis and in Melos is familiar only to the more painstaking members of the Hellenic Society. Knossos alone appeals to no mere esoteric audience of specialists. It moves along the broad ways, and carries us back’, behind our learning and education, to the glamour and romance of our first fairy stories.

Nor is the impression solely due to the nature of the material; it is largely due to Mr. Evans himself. It is not only that he has the gift of clear and attractive writing, or that he tries consciously to interest a wide public in work which must necessarily involve large expense. Mr. Evans naturally does not see things in a dry light. He has the dramatic instinct, and impresses it on all he touches. What could be more dramatic than the photograph which he printed as the frontispiece of the first report of the Cretan Exploration Fund? The excavation of the Throne Room is in process; in the foreground four peasants are bending at their work; at the back are the plank was and the baskets of dug-out earth, and all the apparatus of exploration; and there, in the centre of the picture, with its carved back scarcely three feet below the surface of the soil, is the throne of the ancient king, with the lines of its strange crocketing fresh and unchipped, unmoved from the day when first it was packed away in the earth three-and-thirty centuries ago.

Take, again, one of Mr. Evans’s own descriptions in that first fascinating article in which he gave his results to the world. He had just discovered the fresco of the “Cupbearer.”

“The colours were almost as brilliant as when laid down over three thousand years before. For the first time the true portraiture of a man of this mysterious Mycenaean race rises before us. There was something very impressive in this vision of brilliant youth and of male beauty, recalled after so long an interval to our upper air from what had been till yesterday a forgotten world. Even our untutored Cretan workmen felt the spell and fascination.

“They, indeed, regarded the discovery of such a painting in the bosom of the earth as nothing less than miraculous, and saw in it the ‘icon’ of a saint! The removal of the fresco required a delicate and laborious process of under-plastering, which necessitated its being watched at night; and old Manolis, one of the most trustworthy of our gang, was told off for the purpose. Somehow or other he fell asleep, but the wrathful saint appeared to him in a dream. Waking with a start he was conscious of a mysterious presence; the animals round began to low and neigh, and there were visions about; ‘Φαντάζοι,’ he said, in summing up his experiences next morning, ‘The whole place spooks!’”

“The finds of that first season’s work were indeed marvellous. Besides the Throne and the Cupbearer, there were the long corridors with their rows and rows of huge Aladdin’s jars, twenty in a single store-room, many of them still standing in position and intact, as when once they held the oil or wine of King Minos. On the walls were frescoes of “his minions and his dames,” in garden or in balcony “viewing the games”; the men close-shaven and with flowing hair, the women with puffed sleeves and flounced skirts, frisées et décolletées, altogether ladies of fashion and the Court, of whom the French savant might well exclaim, “Mais ce sont des Parisiennes!”

In contrast to these miniatures, in which the men’s figures are sketched in thin dark lines on rough patches of reddish brown for flesh, the women’s figures on a similar ground of white, there were wall paintings on a larger scale. There were men bearing vases in procession, tribute perhaps to Minos from the islands of the Ægean, just as we see Crete itself bringing tribute to Egypt on the walls of the XVIIIth Dynasty tombs of Senmut and Rekhmara; and, in another mood, there had been painted by an earlier artist a nature scene of singular delicacy—a boy picking the white crocuses, with which the Cretan meadows are still bright in spring, and placing them in a vase.

All this was found during the early months of 1900. Above all, the great hoard of clay tablets in the unknown scripts gave a sensational promise of revelations to come. For beauty and picturesqueness and sheer thrill these discoveries remain unmatched by those of any subsequent year. None the less, no one, not even Mr. Evans himself, ever expected that so much was to follow. In the first report he talked of the work as “barely half completed”; but, in fact, it has gone on for five more years, and there is still much to be done.

Only in the last year of excavation the paved way leading from the Theatral Area has been found to connect the Palace with a “Little Palace” farther west, whose fine gypsum walling runs at a considerable depth of earth straight into the hillside opposite. The excavation of this important building has only just been begun, and may lead to far-reaching results when Mr. Evans returns to it in future years; while around it, facing towards the east, like the domestic quarters of the Palace, may well be the long-sought-for royal Tombs; and above it traces of an early Doric Temple suggest to us the tenacity of religious tradition and the chance of lighting upon some, central Minoan sanctuary.

The great Palace itself, as now excavated, is a vast complex of chambers, courts, and corridors, bewildering to the lay mind as laid out in the plans prepared by Mr. Evans’s architects, and hard to find one's way through even on the spot.

The dominating feature in the situation is the great central court, a paved area 190 feet long by 90 feet wide, with corridors, halls, and chambers grouped around it, so that the whole forms a rough square that is about 400 feet each way. Mr. Evans believes that the Palace was definitely conceived as a symmetrical square, with, four main avenues approaching it at right angles, and compares it to a Roman camp or the plan of Thurii as built by Hippocrates.

Owing to the many subsequent remodellings of the original plan, and the fact that the upper stories only partially remain, it is difficult to estimate how far we can press this suggestion. The rooms themselves, at any rate, are more remarkable for the irregularity of their grouping than for anything else, and seem to be a development on a large scale of the rambling many-roomed houses of the people that we find in contemporary Crete, as at Palaikastro.

While the Central Court was the focus of the inner life of the Palace, there was another court on the west that formed the meeting-ground between palace and city. Due north of this again, at the extreme north-west corner of the Palace, is the Theatral Area, a paved space, about 40 feet by 30, backed on two sides by tiers of steps. These steps, which are adjacent, and at right angles to each other, cannot have ever led into a building. They must have supplied standing room for rows of spectators, and the area between them must have been meant for some kind of show or sport. The tiers themselves, one of which is still eighteen steps high, a platform on which the most distinguished guests may have had seats, and a central bastion between the two tiers that may have acted as a royal box, could have between them accommodated from four to five hundred people.

What went on before them we can only conjecture. For the favourite Minoan sport of bull-baiting there was no room. That boxing played almost as important a part in the Palace life we have evidence from the figures of boxers on the clay mould of a seal, and the exciting prize fights carved on the steatite vase from Hagia Triada. Nor can we shut out the possibility that ceremonial dancing may have formed part of the programme of this earliest type of theatre. “The twinkling of the dancers’ feet” comes to us in the Odyssey as a memory from that palace of Alkinoos, whose wonders recall to us so much that we have found in Crete; while the Iliad tells us how the Fire-god worked upon the shield of Achilles a Choros, or dancing-ground, “such as once in broad Knossos Daedalus wrought for fair-haired Ariadne.”

From the theatre a paved way led west about 300 yards to the “Little Palace” already mentioned. To the north it was half a mile to the cemetery of Zafer Papoura, which lies on the slopes of the protecting chain of hills that hide the low knoll of Knossos from the sea. It was these hills that made its first Stone Age citizens settle at Knossos, as the nearest point up the Kairatos river that was safe from the eye of the wandering pirate.

For Knossos was lived in from Stone Age days, and the hill itself, like the apex of the mound of Hissarlik, was largely composed of the remains of successive strata of early habitations. At Hissarlik, the builders of what is called the second city of Troy, which is roughly contemporary with what we shall later describe as the early Minoan periods, laid their foundations direct upon

the Neolithic mound; but the sixth or “Homeric” city, that corresponds in date to the latest periods of the Knossian palace, needed a larger circuit for its walls, and was built altogether outside the original central cone. This is the reason why Dr. Schliemann never discovered these finer walls at all till within a few months before his death, but dug straight below the Roman foundations on the top of the cone, and assumed that the second city, which was the top pre-classical stratum that he found beneath them, was the Homeric Troy. At Knossos, however, the cone of the Neolithic strata was planed away early in the history of the Palace, and the level plateau that was thus formed was large enough for the Central Court and the whole western wing.

East of the Central Court, however, the ground sloped down towards the river, which may have run farther west and closer to the hill than now, so that it flanked the Palace on its eastern side and had its “water-gate.” Here it was that those great unknown architects found scope for their skill in engineering. A scheme of internal staircases and upper stories enabled the rooms built upon this eastern slope to communicate with the Central Court on the crown of the hill.

Upper stories indeed were not confined to this part of the site. The explanation of the fact that mere storerooms, like the Western Magazines, occupy the extensive and important area to the west of the Throne Room, is, without a doubt, that they were only the basements of splendid upper halls that commanded the Western Court. These upper walls seem mainly to have been formed, not of sun- or fire-baked mud bricks, as at Gournia or Palaikastro, but of clay or rubble, coated with plaster or faced with gypsum slabs. There are indeed masses of red calcined earth at certain points, which must be the remains of brickwork, but bricks do not seem to have been found intact, whereas in Eastern Crete they have survived in large numbers undamaged, and seem to have been almost as durable as stone.

The conflagration of the Palace cannot altogether account for the difference, and it is probable that the invariable practice of plaster or gypsum facing meant that brickwork, even where it was used at Knossos, was not made so carefully as for city houses. To the fact, however, that at Knossos the upper walls were not durable, but fell in and filled up the ground-floor level, we owe not a little that the wall decoration of the ground floor has been so well preserved ; while on the eastern slope, where the stories were piled up highest, the superstructure happened in some cases to fall in such a way that it actually propped up the stone staircases and upper flooring, and kept them in position.

Thus it is that in what Mr. Evans calls the domestic quarter of the Palace, by the Queen’s Megaron and the Court of the Distaffs, it has been possible to replace the rubble and brickwork debris by pillars and girders, and keep the upper flooring still in position. We can sit on the Stone Bench in the room that bears its name, immediately above where we had stood a minute before in the Room of the Plaster Couch. Here too a great staircase, five flights high, led from the Hall of the Colonnades up to the Central Court, and of its fifty-two massive stone steps thirty-eight are still preserved. With a height of 4½ and a depth of 18 inches, these steps allowed an easy and ample tread, while their width from wall to wall was, in the lower flights, as much as 6 feet.

Advantage was taken, too, of the steep gradient to develop an elaborate drainage system in the private living rooms that lay op this eastern slope, with an arrangement of lavatories, sinks, and manholes that is staggeringly modern and "all Inglese,” as Dr. Halbherr gracefully calls it. The main drain, which had its sides coated with cement, was over 3 feet high, and nearly. 2 feet broad, so that a man could easily move along it; and the smaller stone shafts that discharged into it are still in position.

Farther north we have preserved to us some of the terracotta pipes that served for corinections. Each of them was about 2½ feet long, with a diameter that was about 6 inches at the broad end, and narrowed to less than 4 inches at the mouth, where it fitted into the broad end of the next pipe. Jamming was carefully prevented by a stop-ridge that ran round the outside of each narrow end a few inches from the mouth, while the inside of the butt, or broader end, was provided with a raised collar that enabled it to bear the pressure of the next pipe’s stop-ridge, and gave an extra hold for the cement that bound the two pipes together.'

Still lower down the slope, on a staircase by the Eastern Bastion, there is an elaborate piece of hydraulic science for checking the flow of water. A stone runnel is made to descend the stairs in a series of parabolic curves which would subject the water to friction, and thus reduce its velocity and the consequent danger of a flood on the pavement below.

The idea of drainage was not new to the World. Terracotta pipes, though not so scientifically constructed, were found by Hilprecht in what he terms the pre-Sargonic stratum at Nippur in Mesopotamia; the larger ones, 2¾ feet in diameter, serving as vertical shafts, the smaller, from 6 to 8 inches in diameter, lying horizontally. Apart from this, however, we can find no parallel for the drainage and sanitation of Knossos in classical or mediaeval days, but have to take the leap direct into our own times.

The detached building that Mr. Evans calls the Royal Villa, lying about 130 yards due east of the northern entrance, carries us almost as far ahead in history, though by a more gradual process. It was long ago suggested that the Roman Basilica, which formed the earliest type of Christian church, was derived both in structure and in name from the “Stoa Basilike” or King’s Colonnade at Athens. This was the place where the King Archon, the particular member of the board of nine annual magistrates who inherited the sacred and judicial functions of the old kings, tried cases of impiety. It had further seemed possible that the building as well as the title was a survival from some earlier stage, when a king was a king in more than name. What we have found at Knossos seems curiously to confirm this suggested chain of inheritance.

At one end of a pillared hall, about 37 feet long by 15 wide, there is a narrow raised dais, separated from the rest of the hall by stone balustrades, with an opening between them in which three steps give access to the centre of the dais. At this centre point, immediately in front of the steps, a square niche is set back in the wall, and in this niche are the remains of a gypsum throne. The throne is broken beyond repairing, but on the second step a tall lamp of lilac gypsum still stands intact in position.

We seem to have here, as Mr. Evans suggests, a pillar hall with a raised “Tribunal” or dais bounded by “Cancelli” or balustrades, and with an “Exedra” or seated central niche which was the place of honour. Even the elements of a triple longitudinal division are indicated by the two rows of columns that run down the Hall. Is the Priest-King of Knossos, who here gave his judgments, a direct ancestor of Praetor and Bishop seated in the Apse within the Chancel, speaking to the people that stood below in Nave and Aisles?

In all this description one point must have struck the reader: not a word has been said about fortifications. This peculiarity—for indeed there neither are nor were any fortifications to describe—may seem strange at first sight to those who are familiar with the mighty walls of Tiryns and of Mycenae. Not only were those cities fortified, but their architects based their whole system on the strategical possibilities of the site, and closely followed its defensible contours. The architects of Knossos were untrammelled by any such considerations, and saw in a rise of ground nothing but a good excuse for the piling up of stately buildings.

The reason for the difference is not far to seek. Paris is fortified, London is not. Nor does the analogy of London stop with the fact that it is on an island. The Empire of Knossos rested on Sea Power, on the ships that were beached a few miles away in the broad shallow harbour on which issued the Kairatos.

Burrows, Ronald M. The Discoveries in Crete and their Bearing on the History of Ancient Civilisation, John Murray, 1907.

Ronald M. Burrows

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