Phaistos, in the fertile Messara plain of southern Crete, was the second-largest Minoan palace after Knossos and, according to myth, the home of King Rhadamanthys, brother of Minos. Like Knossos, it was built and rebuilt in phases from around 1900 BC, with a grand staircase, storage magazines, and a theatral area for public gatherings, offering commanding views over the surrounding plain and Mt. Ida in the distance. Phaistos is world-famous for the Phaistos Disk, a unique fired-clay disk stamped on both sides with a spiral of pictographic symbols in a script that remains undeciphered to this day, discovered in the palace’s ruins in 1908. [Editor’s note: no old-site source material was found for this page. This paragraph was drafted as a placeholder using general reference sources and should be reviewed/expanded by Dr. Siegel.]