Dreros

Known only by a chance remark of the 9th-century Byzantine grammarian Theognostus (De orthographia), archaeology of the site shows Dreros to have been initially colonised by mainland Greeks in the early Archaic Period about the same time as Lato and Prinias.

The early Iron Age site, first excavated in 1917, was most prosperous in the 8th – 6th centuries BCE; later it became a minor satellite of Knossos and continued to be occupied into the Byzantine period.

In Hellenistic times, Dreros declined in importance to the extent that it was not included among the thirty Cretan cities that signed a pact with the Attalid king of Pergamum, Eumenes II, in 183 BCE.

Three statuettes made of bronze sheets hammered over moulding cores (sphyrelaton) "in the early orientalizing style of the late eighth century" (Boardman) were found in the precincts of the Temple of Apollo Delphinios; they are now at the Archaeological Museum of Herakleion.

Two Eteocretan inscriptions on blocks of grey schist were excavated in 1936 by Pierre Demargne and Henri van Effenterre from the western part of the large cistern mentioned above.