Knossos was the greatest of the Minoan palaces and the political and ceremonial heart of Bronze Age Crete. First built around 1900 BC and rebuilt after destruction, its rambling complex of storerooms, workshops, halls and light-wells so impressed later Greeks that they remembered it as the Labyrinth of King Minos, prison of the Minotaur. Its walls carried vivid frescoes of dolphins, bull-leapers and processions, and its administration kept records in the still-only-partly-read Linear B and Linear A scripts. Sir Arthur Evans excavated the site from 1900 and gave the vanished civilisation the name Minoan, controversially rebuilding parts of it in concrete to convey how it might have looked. The palace fell, along with Minoan power, in the 15th to 14th centuries BC, for reasons still debated, among them earthquake, invasion, and the distant eruption of Thera.
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