All places

Knossos

Accepted12/12HighCreteHomeric name(s): Κνωσός

Minos' city in the Odyssey and the largest palace on Crete — an identification nobody disputes, attached to a civilisation the poems only half remember.

Odysseus, lying to Penelope in Book 19, invents a Cretan identity and gives the island a description that is not invented: ninety cities, many peoples, and Knossos where Minos ruled. The Iliad's catalogue lists Cretan contingents under Idomeneus from Knossos, Gortyn and Lyctus.

The palace Evans excavated from 1900 is Minoan, older than the world the poems describe, but it was still occupied in the Mycenaean period and its Linear B archive is in Greek. What the poems preserve is a memory of Cretan importance rather than of Minoan civilisation as archaeology now understands it.

Identifications proposed

  • The palace at Knossos

    Proposed by: Continuous identification; excavated by Arthur Evans (from 1900)

    Accepted12/12High

    The largest Bronze Age complex on Crete, excavated by Evans from 1900 and occupied through the Mycenaean period, when its administration wrote Greek in Linear B. The Odyssey's Crete of 'ninety cities' and its 'great city Knossos where Minos ruled' fit an island whose palatial archaeology is the densest in the Aegean.

    35.2980, 25.1630· Site

    • ArchaeologyArthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos, 4 vols. (London, 1921–1935)
    • ArchaeologyLinear B tablets from Knossos, deciphered as Greek by Ventris and Chadwick (1952–1956)
    • ScholarshipKnossos and the Minoan palaces in the standard archaeological literature of Bronze Age Crete
    Confidence
    12/12 · High confidence
    Textual
    3
    Archaeological
    3
    Scholarly
    3
    Geographic
    3

Why this class

Accepted: the site, the name and the scale all agree, and the identification has never been contested. The interest of the entry is not the location but the gap between the memory and the material.

What is disputed

How much of Homer's Crete is Minoan memory, how much Mycenaean, and how much contemporary eighth-century knowledge of a large, populous island. Evans' reconstruction of the palace itself — concrete, repainted, partly conjectural — remains a live methodological argument.

Sources

  • Primary textHomer, Iliad (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1924)
  • Primary textHomer, Odyssey (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1919)
  • ArchaeologyArthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos, 4 vols. (London, 1921–1935)
  • ScholarshipKnossos and the Minoan palaces in the standard archaeological literature of Bronze Age Crete
  • ArchaeologyLinear B tablets from Knossos, deciphered as Greek by Ventris and Chadwick (1952–1956)