Introduction; Historical outline; Myth and tradition; History of the excavations;Minoans and Knossos; The archaeological site; Route from Herakleion to Knossos; Tour of the palace; The main features; West court - west façade; West porch - corridor of the procession - central court; South propylaeum - west magazines - piano nobile; Throne room - tripartite shrine - pillar crypts; Grand staircase - hall of the double axes - queen's hall; Upper floor of the domestic quarter - shrine of the double axes; Royal workshops and magazines - east hall; North entrance - north lustral area - theatral area; The dependencies of the palace; Art treasures from Knossos.

In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle. Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints an unforgettable portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.

On March 23, 1900, Arthur John Evans and his staff began to excavate on Crete, looking for the fabled site of Knossos, where an extraordinary civilization, a precursor to classical Greece, was rumored to have existed. Almost from the first shovel stroke, artifacts began to emerge. Evans realized that here was "an extraordinary phenomenon, nothing Greek, nothing Roman. A wholly unexplored world." The Palace of Minos at Knossos recounts the exciting story of uncovering a remarkable society lost to the world for 3,500 years, from its initial discovery through its excavation to the structure we see today. Sidebars on archaeological techniques, illustrations of the sites, tables, and diagrams throughout provide a wealth of information on the Palace. The use of artifacts and other "documents" recovered from the Palace bring out the voices of the people of the past, offering clues to who they were and how they lived. The Palace of Minos at Knossos concludes with an interview with archaeologist Chris Scarre who talks about the misperceptions about Knossos and what we really know about its culture.

With the help of the princess Ariadne and other friends in the palace at Crete, Theseus enters the Labyrinth and slays the hideous Minotaur, thus spearheading the resistance of the Athenian people against King Minos.

Knossos, like the Acropolis or Stonehenge, is a symbol for an entire culture. The Knossos Labyrinth was first built in the reign of a Middle Kingdom Egyptian pharaoh, and was from the start the focus of a glittering and exotic culture. Homer left elusive clues about the Knossian court and when the lost site of Knossos gradually re-emerged from obscurity in the nineteenth century, the first excavators - Minos Kalokairinos, Heinrich Schliemann, and Arthur Evans - were predisposed to see the site through the eyes of the classical authors. Rodney Castleden argues that this line of thought was a false trail and gives an alternative insight into the labyrinth which is every bit as exciting as the traditional explanations, and one which he believes is much closer to the truth. Rejecting Evans' view of Knossos as a bronze age royal palace, Castleden puts forward alternative interpretations - that the building was a necropolis or a temple - and argues that the temple interpretation is the most satisfactory in the light of modern archaeological knowledge about Minoan Crete.