Palace of Knossos
Palace of Knossos is a settlement in Greece, the Bronze Age palace on the Kephala hill about 5 km inland from Heraklion in Crete, a hill lived on from about 7000 BCE. Pyramason catalogues it as PYR-096048 at 35.29793, 25.16314 (35°17'52.5"N 25°09'47.3"E).
The Greeks said the Labyrinth of the Minotaur ran under this palace. Those who hold the theory point to its plan of hundreds of rooms, to the double axe (labrys) cut again and again into its walls, read as "the house of the double axe", and to a Linear B tablet found here, KN Gg 702, which records an amphora of honey for the Lady of the Labyrinth. In 1939 Spyridon Marinatos argued that the eruption of Thera ended Minoan Crete, and others have read Plato's Atlantis into it.
The measured side: the first palace stood by about 1900 BCE; Arthur Evans dug here from 1900 and in the 1920s poured many of its famous columns in concrete; the tablets are an early form of Greek, deciphered in 1952, and record goods and offerings, not stories; and radiocarbon dates put the eruption of Thera between about 1600 and 1525 BCE, before the damage of about 1450 BCE and the fire of about 1350 BCE. On the Pyramason map the palace footprint measures about 1.2 hectares, and the line to Akrotiri on Thera runs 119 km. Since July 2025 Knossos is on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the Minoan Palatial Centres.
There are 20 other catalogued sites within 5 km of it, 71 within 25 km and 208 within 50 km. That density is itself the finding: this is not an isolated monument but part of a worked landscape.
Open on the mapThe record
| Pyramason ID | PYR-096048 |
|---|---|
| Country | Greece |
| Classified as | settlement |
| Coordinates | 35.29793, 25.16314 |
| 35°17'52.5"N 25°09'47.3"E | |
| Sites within 25 km | 71 |
| Sites within 50 km | 208 |
What is around it
- royal villa of Knossos0.0 km
- house of murals in Knossos0.1 km
- royal tomb-sanctuary0.1 km
- south house in Knossos0.1 km
- Knossos Guesthouse0.2 km
- Little Palace at Knossos0.3 km
- small palace of Knossos0.3 km
- Unexplored Mansion at Knossos0.3 km
- unexplored house in Knossos0.3 km
- Villa Dionysos (Knossos)0.6 km
Updates from the atlas
The shirt
The Knossos site-emblem tee: the monument, its geometry, and these exact coordinates printed beneath.
See the Knossos teeFurther reading
English Wikipedia · Journal: Knossos: Europe's First City and the Labyrinth Problem