Daily life in Knossos during c. 1700 BCE

A grounded look at Middle Minoan Knossos at the transition from the First to the Second Palace period, reconstructed from buildings, pottery, food remains, tools, seals, and undeciphered records.

“Around 1700 BCE” is an approximate archaeological frame, not a documented year in the life of Knossos. It falls near the end of Middle Minoan (MM) IIB and the beginning of MM IIIA, the conventional transition from the First or Old Palace period to the Second or New Palace period. The palace and parts of the town were altered after destructive episodes, commonly linked to earthquakes, but the evidence indicates a sequence of damage, clearance, rebuilding, and continued occupation rather than a single event that can be dated precisely. A recent study of Building 2 at Gypsades, south of the palace, found a structure built in MM IIB, chiefly occupied in MM IIIA, and ultimately abandoned after severe damage, probably caused by an earthquake.[1][2]

Knossos was already a large urban settlement in the Knossos valley. Its monumental complex concentrated storage, administration, gatherings, and specialized production, while occupation extended well beyond it. The modern label “palace” should not imply that archaeologists know exactly who ruled there or how authority worked. Nor do the surviving Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A documents provide readable lists of residents or occupations: both scripts remain undeciphered. Daily life must therefore be reconstructed from buildings, pottery, sealings, tools, plant and animal remains, human bone chemistry, and comparison between contexts, all of which preserve palace and burial settings more readily than the lives of poorer households.[3][7]

Housing and Living Spaces

Housing around the palace ranged from relatively modest buildings to substantial multi-room houses. Local stone and gypsum were used in foundations and dressed architectural elements; rubble, mudbrick, timber, and plaster completed walls and upper structures. Building 2 at Gypsades offers a rare, relatively undisturbed plan from the relevant transition, while survey across the valley shows that the settlement cannot be reduced to the excavated palace and its immediate “town houses”. Even so, later rebuilding and the early excavation history make a single model of the ordinary Knossian home unsafe.[1][2][3]

Domestic rooms were working and storage spaces as well as places to eat and rest. Cooking pottery, cups and bowls, grinding equipment, loom weights, and containers can identify activities, but their presence does not always fix one room to one purpose. Portable equipment allowed tasks to shift with light, weather, and the needs of the household. Upper stories are attested in larger Minoan buildings, although their arrangements are often reconstructed from stairs, fallen debris, and wall thickness rather than preserved rooms.

Storage made social difference visible. During the First Palace period, large pithoi of roughly 100–150 liters became more common, with some exceeding 200 liters, and palace stores required considerable planning and labor. Evidence from ordinary houses is thinner and many domestic units had far less capacity. The circular kouloures in the West Court have often been called grain silos, but their function remains disputed. Large stores therefore demonstrate the collection of agricultural goods without proving that the palace routinely redistributed them to everyone. At household scale, protecting grain, pulses, liquids, seed, tools, and fiber between productive seasons would have shaped space and routine.[6]

Food and Daily Meals

Food at Knossos rested on mixed farming. Charred grains and animal bones document cereals, pulses, sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs; other evidence indicates fruit and nuts, wine, and olive oil. These remains identify resources, not recipes or their proportions in every diet. Isotope analysis suggests that, as Knossos grew through the First Palace period, cultivation and herding became more extensive and probably reached farther from the settlement. Sheep and goats were increasingly managed in different grazing regimes. Urban meals thus depended on labor and land well beyond the palace precinct.[4][5][9]

Grain needed cleaning and grinding, pulses soaking or boiling, water carrying, and fires a continuing supply of fuel. Jars and other containers extended the usable life of seasonal produce, but the contents of any one vessel are rarely certain unless residues or plant remains survive. Large palace assemblages of cups and serving vessels also record communal consumption and feasting more clearly than small household meals. They should not be turned into a precise “typical menu”.

Human bone chemistry from the Ailias and Lower Gypsades cemeteries provides a different scale of evidence: it reflects long-term intake rather than named dishes. The results for about 1900–1600 BCE indicate varied access to animal protein and identify marine protein in some diets. No clear division by sex, tomb, or cemetery appeared in the sample, although burial communities are not a complete cross-section of the town. Fish and meat were therefore not merely imaginable additions to a cereal-and-pulse diet, but neither their frequency nor their preparation can be reconstructed for every household.[5]

Work and Labor

Agriculture connected the settlement to the Knossos valley and a wider hinterland. Sowing, harvesting, threshing, tree and vine care, grazing, watering, and processing animal products were seasonal rather than uniform daily tasks. Isotope evidence from crops and livestock suggests increasingly extensive cultivation and herding by the Old Palace phase, including use of rough grazing and browse. This complicates the familiar image of a self-contained palace economy: maintaining a large settlement required repeated movement of people, animals, fodder, crops, fuel, and manure across the landscape.[4]

Craft production is more directly visible. Potters made cooking and storage vessels as well as thin-walled, elaborately decorated Kamares and related fine wares. The huge variation in ceramic fabric, form, and finish implies different skills and scales of production. Loom weights attest weaving; stone and metal tools, worked bone, sealstones, masonry, and plaster point to further specialist knowledge. Imported metals, ivory, and some pottery show that craftspeople and consumers participated in networks beyond central Crete. Archaeology does not reveal whether each specialist was independent, attached to a household, or supported by the palace, and those arrangements need not have been the same for every craft.[1][2][9]

Administration also required trained labor, but its scope must be described cautiously. Cretan Hieroglyphic tablets and sealings belong to the First Palace system at Knossos; Linear A was increasingly used during MM III. These objects show recording, authentication, counting, and the handling of transactions. Because the scripts are undeciphered, they do not allow the named offices, rations, textile quotas, or occupational lists known from the much later Linear B archive to be projected back to 1700 BCE. What can be said is that making tablets and sealings, maintaining stores, moving containers, and rebuilding the monumental complex joined specialized administrative work to large amounts of carrying, cleaning, construction, and repair.[7]

Social Structure

Knossos was unequal, but labels such as king, priest, servant, or merchant are interpretations rather than readable Middle Minoan titles. Differences in house size and finish, storage capacity, seals, metalwork, fine pottery, imported materials, and burial treatment indicate unequal access to resources and display. Palace storage was far greater and more carefully organized than storage in most known houses. Yet the archaeological record cannot show that every person associated with a modest assemblage was poor, or that possession of a seal mapped neatly onto one social rank.[6][7]

Households almost certainly organized much food preparation, storage, textile work, care, and the transfer of skills between generations, while the palace drew some production and gatherings into a larger institutional setting. Beyond that broad distinction, family form, landholding, labor obligations, and legal status remain obscure. Later Linear B terms for dependent workers and later Aegean ideas about gendered work cannot simply fill the gap. Objects associated with weaving or cooking identify activities more securely than the sex, age, or status of the person who performed them.

Ritual participation also crossed household and institutional settings. The palace courts, deposits of special vessels and figurines, seal imagery, caves, and peak sanctuaries document repeated acts of display and offering, but they preserve selected occasions rather than the full religious life of the town. Large gatherings required food, vessels, fuel, preparation, and cleaning, and could bring people of different standing together while also making rank visible. The evidence supports hierarchy and coordinated labor; it does not reveal a single uniform “Minoan” way of life.[9]

Tools and Technology

Everyday technology combined durable stone and pottery with poorly preserved wood, fiber, hide, and basketry. Querns and mortars processed plant foods; cooking pots met heat directly; cups, jugs, and pithoi served consumption and storage. Bronze supplied cutting edges and prestige objects, but its survival and recovery make it more visible than many cheaper implements. Tool lists are therefore incomplete: the archaeological record is strongest for objects that were fired, made of stone or metal, or preserved by burning.

Pottery itself preserves chains of technical decisions, from clay selection and forming to surface treatment and firing. The dated deposits from the palace and Gypsades contain both plain and decorated vessels, including signs of imported pottery, while loom weights attest a warp-weighted weaving technology even where the wooden loom and cloth have vanished. At palace scale, stone channels and Protopalatial slotted terracotta drainpipes show investment in moving water, but these installations should not be treated as amenities shared equally across the town.[1][2][8]

Maintenance was part of this material system. Roofs, plaster, drains, handles, baskets, and wooden equipment demanded recurring attention, and broken pottery could be mended, repurposed, or discarded as fill. Measuring, sealing, and storing were also technologies: they coordinated goods over time and distance. Their benefits were uneven, however, because access to large stores, fine tools, imported raw materials, and trained specialists was concentrated.[6]

Clothing and Materials

Actual Middle Minoan textiles survive only rarely, so clothing is reconstructed from loom weights and other tools, animal evidence, figurines, seals, and comparison with a small number of preserved fibers. Wool and flax were available, and textile production involved fiber preparation, spinning, setting up a warp-weighted loom, weaving, finishing, and repair. These stages required substantial time, but neither the tool finds nor the undeciphered records identify who performed each task in a particular Knossian household.[4][8]

Middle Bronze Age figurines and seals depict elaborate female dress, including flared skirts, high-backed forms, and headgear. They are valuable evidence for the possibilities of textile construction and elite or ceremonial display, not a wardrobe catalogue for the whole population. Frescoes familiar from Knossos mostly belong to later phases and must be used cautiously for 1700 BCE. Simpler work clothing is poorly represented, and proposed tunics, kilts, wraps, or sandals remain reconstructions unless a securely dated image or object supports them. Beads, pins, and seals show that dress and adornment could communicate identity and access to valued materials, but precise meanings are not recoverable.[8]

Daily life at Knossos around 1700 BCE joined a changing palace to a large settlement and an increasingly extensive agricultural hinterland. Courts, stores, scripts, pottery, and specialist crafts reveal concentrated organization; houses, food remains, tools, and human bones reveal more varied routines. The strongest conclusion is not a detailed timetable but a dependence on seasonal cultivation, herding, storage, skilled making, carrying, and maintenance during a period of disruption and rebuilding.

References

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Velegraki, M. (2024). “The Pottery Deposits from Building 2 at Knossos–Gypsades.” Annual of the British School at Athens, 119, 185–247. https://doi.org/10.1017/S006824542400011X.
University College London, Institute of Archaeology. (n.d.). The Knossos Urban Landscape Project. Project overview and publication list.
Isaakidou, V., Halstead, P., Stroud, E., Sarpaki, A., Hatzaki, E., Nitsch, E., & Bogaard, A. (2022). “Changing Land Use and Political Economy at Neolithic and Bronze Age Knossos, Crete: Stable Carbon (δ13C) and Nitrogen (δ15N) Isotope Analysis of Charred Crop Grains and Faunal Bone Collagen.” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 88, 155–191. https://doi.org/10.1017/ppr.2022.4.
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Jones, B. R. (2015). Ariadne's Threads: The Construction and Significance of Clothes in the Aegean Bronze Age. Aegaeum 38. Peeters. JSTOR record.
Hemingway, C., & Hemingway, S. (2002). Minoan Crete. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Museum essay.