“The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at some point, the volatile result of a change of era and the fall of empires. Ruins are a fantastic land where one no longer knows whether reality slips into a dream or whether, on the contrary, dream makes a brutal return into the most violent of realities”
Marchan & Meffre 2014: 16

Introduction

1We will never be able to ‘see’ LM IIIB early Knossos (Fig. 3.1), but perhaps Yves Marchan and Romain Meffre’s stunning The Ruins of Detroit (2014) can provide a visual parallel of urban decay of a city once defined by opulence. But unlike Detroit’s fabulous but derelict, overtly empty, and abandoned standing ruins, Knossos in LM IIIB is not a picture book easy and readily available to visualise and understand, rather quite the opposite. In this paper, I discuss two interconnected themes, data and historical synthesis. The first part aims to give a ceramic overview of Knossos in LM IIIB, with an emphasis on LM IIIB e