Throne room

We finally brave the heat and join the long queue in the central courtyard to enter the throne room. Again there are doubts about the actual use and even those who believe it to be a throne room don't think it operated in a way we would recognise as such. We were shuffled through in the queue and only got to see it briefly. It made for a fitting end before we left to get the bus back to Heraklion, slightly dumbfounded by what we had seen. It's so hard to appreciate while you are there but hopefully it will help to add a dimension when I come to read up some more on this ancient civilisation. The building technology was clearly far from the sophistication of anything Greek or Roman but in some ways that makes the scale of the achievement even greater. And of course the even more ancient civilisations of Egypt and the Near East had built huge structures we are very familiar with, but the significance here is in how it feeds into the whole story of Western civilisation.