It is the last magnificent palace, built on the ruins of 1600 B.C., that predominates in to-day’s ruins; in it the Cretans reached the height of their culture. This period, to which belongs what is known as the “Palace Style” in art, was as short-lived as it was brilliant. Within fifty years (so the evidence seems to show) the palace was raided and burnt, and that was the end of Ancient Crete; for the same invaders who sacked Knossos also destroyed the palace at Phæstos. It is lucky, however, that Minoan libraries were made not of paper, but of clay tablets. They were preserved, not destroyed, by the fire. The baking they then underwent enabled them to survive the dampness of the soil, and they remain to this day, a potential interpreter of much that is still obscure. They cannot yet be read. Scholarship has the hard but grateful task before it of discovering from these documents the Minoan language. It is lucky, again, that the sackers of Knossos had no use for clay tablets, which accordingly escaped the doom of more “valuable” loot. Dr. Burrows, in _The Discoveries of Crete_ (p. 19), quotes in comment a Reuter telegram which, in reference to the fire at Seville in 1906, announced that “the archives were totally destroyed, but the cash and valuables were saved!” The outer walls of the palace were mainly built of gypsum, a stone composed of crystals of calcium sulphate, which is found plentifully around Knossos. It was so soft that it needed a covering of lime plaster to protect it against the weather. The exterior of the building, therefore, presented an expanse of white plaster, relieved perhaps in places by decoration or colour. (See Noel Heaton on “Minoan Lime Plaster and Fresco Painting” in the _Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects_, xviii, p. 697 (1911).) The palace was a square building covering about five acres, or as big an area as Buckingham Palace, and had a flat roof. In shape it was a hollow rectangle with a central court, measuring nearly two hundred feet from north to south, and not quite half as much in breadth, so that the encircling wings on the east and west were proportionately broader than the strip of buildings on the north and south. The bulk of the building was, in fact, divided up between these two wings, the one on the west standing higher up the hillside and having fewer storeys than the one on the east, whose foundations sloped down to the valley. Beyond the west wing there was another court--the meeting-place for the people of the town and the people of the palace; and out to the north-west a smaller building--the Little Palace--connected with the palace proper by what Sir Arthur Evans has called “the oldest paved road in Europe,” while a little to the north-east was the Royal Villa. [Illustration: BULL LEAPING From _The Annual of the British School at Athens_]