Insides, outsides and the labyrinth: Knossos, palatial space and environmental perception in Minoan Crete

Abstract

This article employs the labyrinth as an analytical and interpretive tool for thinking about Minoan architectural and especially palatial space with a particular focus on Knossos. Whether or not Minoan ruins inspired later Greek mythical narratives, Knossos can be examined as a kind of a labyrinth towards developing new perspectives on Knossos as an experienced environment and how it was entangled with broader cultural and cosmological ideas. A labyrinth perspective enables bringing together multiple spatial, material and cultural forms for the heuristic purposes of exploring palatial space in relation to how the environment and world were perceived in Minoan Crete. Knossos afforded participants a mystical experience that provided glimpses of, or openings into, different dimensions of a layered reality—the richness of the world extending beyond the readily perceivable surface of reality—in a literally and figuratively labyrinthine experienced palatial environment.