There were minor fortifications, chiefly near the north gate, consisting of a guard-house and bastions, but strategic considerations did not contribute to the main architecture at all.
It is an amazing structure. Built as long before Christ as the world has existed since Christ, it seems incredible that, for instance, it should have an underground drainage system. There is no doubt that Cretan architects were men of accomplishment. Mr. H. R. Hall says, in The Ancient History of the Near East (p. 47), that, “in comparison with this wonderful building (the later palace at Knossos), the palaces of Egyptian Pharaohs were but elaborate hovels of painted mud. Knossos seems to be eloquent of the teeming life and energy of a young and beauty-loving people for the first time feeling its creative power.”
The present ruins belong to three structures built at different times. The first was built in M.M.I, or before 2000 B.C., and was burnt down towards the end of M.M.II (about 1700 B.C.). It was later (about 1600 B.C.) rebuilt on a bigger scale, and this building in its turn, after some three hundred years of use, was remodelled and enlarged. Sir Arthur Evans made an important discovery in his 1922 excavation, which proves that the Middle Minoan III period was brought to a violent end by a big earthquake (about 1600 B.C.). He found some small houses overwhelmed by huge blocks—“some about a ton in weight, hurled some twenty feet from the Palace wall by what could only have been a great earthquake shock.”
It is the last magnificent palace, built on the ruins of 1600 B.C., that predominates in to-day’s ruins; in it the Cretans reached the height of their culture. This period, to which belongs what is known as the “Palace Style” in art, was as short-lived as it was brilliant. Within fifty years (so the evidence seems to show) the palace was raided and burnt, and that was the end of Ancient Crete; for the same invaders who sacked Knossos also destroyed the palace at Phæstos.
It is lucky, however, that Minoan libraries were made not of paper, but of clay tablets. They were preserved, not destroyed, by the fire. The baking they then underwent enabled them to survive the dampness of the soil, and they remain to this day, a potential interpreter of much that is still obscure. They cannot yet be read. Scholarship has the hard but grateful task before it of discovering from these documents the Minoan language. It is lucky, again, that the sackers of Knossos had no use for clay tablets, which accordingly escaped the doom of more “valuable” loot. Dr. Burrows, in The Discoveries of Crete (p. 19), quotes in comment a Reuter telegram which, in reference to the fire at Seville in 1906, announced that “the archives were totally destroyed, but the cash and valuables were saved!”
The outer walls of the palace were mainly built of gypsum, a stone composed of crystals of calcium sulphate, which is found plentifully around Knossos. It was so soft that it needed a covering of lime plaster to protect it against the weather. The exterior of the building, therefore, presented an expanse of white plaster, relieved perhaps in places by decoration or colour. (See Noel Heaton on “Minoan Lime Plaster and Fresco Painting” in the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, xviii, p. 697 (1911).) The palace was a square building covering about five acres, or as big an area as Buckingham Palace, and had a flat roof. In shape it was a hollow rectangle with a central court, measuring nearly two hundred feet from north to south, and not quite half as much in breadth, so that the encircling wings on the east and west were proportionately broader than the strip of buildings on the north and south. The bulk of the building was, in fact, divided up between these two wings, the one on the west standing higher up the hillside and having fewer storeys than the one on the east, whose foundations sloped down to the valley. Beyond the west wing there was another court—the meeting-place for the people of the town and the people of the palace; and out to the north-west a smaller building—the Little Palace—connected with the palace proper by what Sir Arthur Evans has called “the oldest paved road in Europe,” while a little to the north-east was the Royal Villa.
BULL LEAPING
From The Annual of the British School at Athens
If you follow the course of this paved road as it approaches the Palace, you will see a small open space, forty feet by thirty, enclosed on two sides by rising tiers of steps with a raised platform in the corner between them. This was the theatre. Some scholars identify it with the dancing-place (choros) which, so tradition tells us, “Dædalus wrought in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne” (Homer, “Iliad,” xviii. 590); although Sir Arthur Evans thinks the choros was in a Palace Court. It would hold about 500 spectators, who made part or all of the “great throng that surrounded the lovely dancing-place, full of glee” (to quote the same tradition). No doubt the boxing contests and other forms of sport were held there. The Cretans, to judge by the pictures which have been discovered, were given to strenuous and exciting, possibly cruel, forms of sport. A painted panel depicts a bull-fighting scene. In it are two girls and a boy, the girls distinguished from the boy by their white skin, although all three wear the same sort of “cowboy” dress. A bull, head down, is charging one of the girls, who grips its horns in the attempt, apparently, to turn a somersault over its back, a feat which the boy is represented as in the process of accomplishing. He is half-way over, and the second girl stands ready to catch him. (See Journal of Hellenic Studies, xxiii, p. 381. There is a copy of the fresco in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.)
Fifty yards to the east of the theatre is the northern entrance of the palace, which leads directly into the central court. Round this court are grouped the various rooms of the palace.