What were the giant jars and West Magazines at Knossos for?

Some of the most revealing rooms at Knossos look quite plain. In the west wing a corridor served a string of narrow storerooms. Picture someone collecting a vessel and carrying it back through that corridor. The arrangement begins to look like a working part of a large institution.

What does “magazine” mean on the Knossos plan?

Here the word means storeroom. The West Magazines formed the palace’s main storage complex. In the individual rooms, enormous jars known as pithoi provided above-ground storage. Notice the difference in scale between a jar that would stay in one place and the smaller vessel someone could actually carry through a doorway. That distinction helps put the pottery back into use.

What was kept beneath the floor?

Many rooms and parts of the corridor contained rectangular stone-lined compartments below floor level. The conservation project calls them kaseles and identifies them as places to keep valuable vessels and other objects. A floor that looks like a simple walking surface in a reconstruction could therefore conceal another layer of storage. Look for both levels when reading the plan.

What evidence links the storerooms with recordkeeping?

Excavators recovered Linear B tablets in the complex, along with a deposit of hieroglyphic tablets and sealings near the north end of the corridor. Those finds add a human task to the rows of jars. Someone needed to keep track of goods moving through the palace. Elsewhere on the site plan, the separately labeled Magazine of the Giant Pithoi gives you a second storage area to identify.