The monumental staircase
A ceremonial approach rising to the west court.
Jerzy Strzelecki โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Jebulon โ CC0 ยท Jebulon โ CC0 ยท Jebulon โ CC0
**Knossos** on a first visit: the most famous, the largest and the nearest (five kilometres from Heraklion), and Evans's coloured reconstruction makes the site **legible** to a non-specialist โ you see rooms, columns and frescoes rather than foundations. But it is **very crowded** and its restoration is contested. **Phaistos** if you prefer **authenticity and quiet**: unreconstructed, in a far finer hilltop setting, with few visitors โ but it asks for imagination. โ Better still: **both**, on a combined ticket, Knossos in a morning and Phaistos on another day.
A fired clay disc about sixteen centimetres across, found at Phaistos in 1908, stamped on both faces with **241 signs** arranged in a spiral, made with punches pressed into soft clay โ which makes it **the earliest known text printed with movable type**, thousands of years before printing. And it is **undeciphered**: we know neither the language nor the meaning of the signs, the text is far too short for statistical analysis, and there are no comparable texts. Dozens of readings have been proposed and none accepted. โ The disc is displayed in the **Archaeological Museum in Heraklion**, not at Phaistos.
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**The second largest Minoan palace** after Knossos, standing on a hill above the fertile **Messara plain** with the Ida mountains on the horizon โ one of the finest settings in archaeological Crete. It was built around **1900 BC**, destroyed by an earthquake and rebuilt around 1700 BC, and that is what you see today: a **monumental staircase** rising to the west court, a large central court, storerooms with their great jars, workshops, apartments and an advanced drainage system. The essential difference from **Knossos** is that Phaistos **was not reconstructed**: when Arthur Evans excavated Knossos in the early twentieth century he rebuilt parts of it in concrete and colour according to his own conception โ a restoration still argued over. The Italians who dug Phaistos left it as they found it. So what you see here is **entirely original**, though it asks more of your imagination. From here came the **Phaistos Disc**: a fired clay disc of about 1700 BC stamped on both faces with 241 signs โ **still undeciphered**, and among the most famous puzzles in archaeology. The disc is displayed in the Archaeological Museum in Heraklion, not here.
A ceremonial approach rising to the west court.
The fertile plain and the Ida mountains from the central court.
The undeciphered Phaistos Disc came from here.
Phaistos, 70200 Tympaki, Crete