Knossos

The Mycenaean Greek name of the city, ko-no-so, written in the Linear B syllabary and found on the clay tablets of Knossos itself: the palace administration recorded the place by name and its inhabitants as ko-no-si-jo, “the Knossians.” It is the oldest written form of the city’s name, set down by the Mycenaean Greek scribes who ran the palace after about 1450 BCE, centuries before the Greek alphabet existed. The syllabary, writing only open syllables, spells the cluster and the doubled sibilant of Knōsos as ko-no-so.

Ko-no-so is the headwater of the name and a rarity in this atlas: a city attested in its own contemporary archive, naming itself. Most Bronze Age places are known only through the records of their neighbors, Egypt or Mesopotamia; Knossos kept its own books, and so its name survives in the first person, as the palace wrote it. The pre-Greek word was already old when the Mycenaeans took it over, and from this earliest form descend the Homeric Knōsós and the Latin Cnosus, the name passing down the whole length of Greek from the clay tablet to the printed page.

The Greek name of the city, Knōsós (also spelled Knōssós), the form under which Knossos entered literature, as the city of Minos in Homer’s Crete “of ninety cities,” where the Odyssey places the great king who “talked with Zeus.” To the classical Greeks Knossos was a place of legend, the seat of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, even as it continued as an ordinary Cretan town.

Knōsós is the same pre-Greek name the Mycenaean tablets wrote as ko-no-so, now in alphabetic Greek and carrying its full sibilant. It is the link between the Bronze Age archive and the modern world: from the Greek came Latin Cnosus and the European forms, so that the name the palace scribes pressed into clay around 1400 BCE runs unbroken, through Homer and the Roman poets, into the “Knossos” of every guidebook to Crete. Few names in the atlas can be followed so continuously across so many centuries of Greek.

The Latin name of the city, Cnosus (also Cnossus, Gnosus), taken from the Greek, with the derived adjective Gnosius that the Roman poets used as a byword for Crete and its legends: Vergil’s Gnosia tellus, the Cnosian land, and Ovid’s Cnosian princess Ariadne. Rome knew Knossos chiefly through the myths of Minos, Daedalus, and the Labyrinth that the Greek tradition had attached to it.

Cnosus is the western, Latin terminus of the name, carrying the Greek Knōsós on into the European languages with little more change than the swap of a k for a c. It completes a transmission of unusual depth: from the Mycenaean clay ko-no-so, through alphabetic Greek Knōsós, to Latin Cnosus and the modern “Knossos,” one pre-Greek place-name held across more than a thousand years of writing, by three stages of one civilization’s languages and scripts.