The Palace of Knossos: 250 Tonnes of Liquid Gold

In the summer of 1878, a Cretan merchant and antiquarian named Minos Kalokairinos began digging into a hillside at Kephala, just south of Heraklion. He was not the first to suspect something lay beneath the soil -- local farmers had been turning up fragments of painted pottery for generations -- but he was the first to put a spade to the earth with purpose. Over several weeks, Kalokairinos uncovered parts of two storerooms and extracted a dozen large storage jars, some standing taller than a man. The Ottoman authorities, wary of foreign interest, shut the excavation down. It would be another twenty-two years before anyone returned. When Arthur Evans arrived in 1900, armed with funding from the Ashmolean Museum and a determination bordering on obsession, he began what would become one of the most consequential archaeological excavations in European history. Within months, the Palace of Knossos revealed itself: a sprawling complex of over 1,300 rooms covering roughly 20,000 square metres, with workshops, throne rooms, lustral basins, and elaborate drainage systems. But it was the western wing of the palace that would reshape our understanding of the ancient Cretan economy -- and of olive oil's role at the very centre of it. The Magazines: A Subterranean Treasury Running along the western side of the palace, Evans uncovered eighteen long, narrow storerooms -- the magazines. Arranged in parallel rows and accessed from a single corridor, they were clearly designed for one purpose:...