On a ridge above the fertile Messara plain in southern Crete, Phaistos was the second great Minoan palace after Knossos, commanding the richest farmland on the island. Like Knossos it was first built around 1900 BC, destroyed and rebuilt, its grand staircase, paved central court and storerooms laid out with a restraint that many find more elegant than its larger rival. Italian archaeologists excavated it from 1900, and left it unreconstructed, so it is read from its foundations rather than from concrete rebuilding. Its most famous find is the Phaistos Disc, a fired clay disc stamped on both sides with a spiral of pictographic signs that remain undeciphered, one of the earliest known examples of movable type and among the enduring puzzles of the ancient world. Nearby lies the smaller royal villa of Agia Triada.
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