People settled the gentle hill of Kephala around 7000 BC - earlier than Sumer, earlier than the pyramids, earlier than almost anything in the European archaeological record. The first inhabitants were a hamlet of perhaps fifty people who lived in wattle-and-daub huts, kept animals, grew grain, and buried their children under the floors of their houses when grief required it. Their hearths still lie under what would later become the central court of the palace, suggesting that ritual feasting on this spot continued unbroken for nearly five millennia before the Bronze Age palace ever rose. By the time the first palace was built around 1900 BC, this hill had been continuously occupied for fifty centuries. Knossos is, by most counts, the oldest city in Europe.

The myth says King Minos commissioned the inventor Daedalus to build a maze beneath the palace to hide the Minotaur, the half-bull child of his wife Pasiphae. Theseus came from Athens, navigated the maze using a thread Ariadne gave him, killed the monster, and sailed away with the princess. When the American consul William Stillman first published reports of the ruins in the 1870s, he noticed something the diggers had uncovered: double-axe symbols, called labrys in Greek, scratched and chiseled all over the walls. Stillman was the first to call the place 'labyrinthine'. Arthur Evans agreed. Then in 1900, when Evans began excavating, he found a Linear B tablet - Knossos Tablet Gg702 - that recorded a jar of honey offered da-pu2-ri-to-jo po-ti-ni-ja, 'to the mistress of the labyrinth'. The myth and the ground touched. Some core of the legend was real.

What you see today is, in part, Evans's vision of what Minoan Crete should have looked like. He poured reinforced concrete columns to replace the rotted cypress originals - inverted-trunk columns wider at the top than the bottom, painted bright red. He rebuilt staircases. He hired the Swiss artist Emile Gilliéron and his son to fill in fragmentary frescoes from Egyptian conventions and educated guesswork; the bull-leaping fresco you see today contains far more modern paint than ancient pigment. The decisions were not malicious - Evans loved this place and believed he was saving it from ruin - but they were irreversible. Modern archaeologists working on similar sites would never make the same choices. As one critic put it, Evans and his restorers were not so much discovering Minoan civilization as constructing an early-twentieth-century artifact based on it. The famous photograph of Evans seated on the throne in 1903, framed by his own concrete reconstructions, captures the problem exactly. Visitors should walk through Knossos knowing this. The reconstructions are part of the experience now, but they are not what the Minoans actually built.

The Minoans wrote. Their script - Linear A - covered clay tablets, libation tables, gold rings, and pottery, and we have hundreds of inscriptions. After 1450 BC, mainland Greeks took over Knossos and adapted the writing system to record their own language; Michael Ventris deciphered this Linear B in 1952, proving that Mycenaean Greek was the language of the takeover. Most Linear B tablets are administrative - jars of oil, sheep, soldiers' rations, slaves. Linear A remains unread. The underlying language is unknown. Whoever the Minoans were and whatever they called themselves, they cannot tell us. We have their bookkeeping, their architecture, their water-flushing toilet (the first one ever found, in the queen's quarters), their dolphin frescoes, and a jar of honey for the mistress of the labyrinth - but the words and names are silent.

Around 1350 BC the palace burned. Whether the fire was deliberate, accidental, or the result of an earthquake, no one is sure. The upper stories collapsed. The administrative center never recovered. People kept living on the hill - by 1000 BC Knossos was again a major Cretan town, and it stayed important through Hellenistic and Roman times before fading in the Byzantine centuries. Then it was buried, then it was found, then it was rebuilt, and now it receives more visitors than any archaeological site in Greece except the Acropolis. The 1,300-room complex has reduced to corridors and partial walls and Evans's red columns. The Minotaur is a story. The labyrinth was a building. The mistress of it ate honey. The rest, even the priest-king on the alabaster throne, slips between the layers.