Palace once meant Rome’s Palatine Hill imperial houses
A palace is a grand residence for royalty or high dignitaries, named from Latin Palātium—the Palatine Hill where emperors lived. Unlike castles, palaces are not primarily fortified. Minoan Knossos offers an early architectural complex modern writers still call a palace.
European cognates often cover urban aristocratic townhouses English would not label palaces. Paul the Deacon around 790 used “palace” for government itself. Charlemagne consciously revived Roman imperial memory in his court buildings. Charlemagne travelled constantly and built fourteen palaces, though only the chapel of his Aachen palace survives, and in the Holy Roman Empire even the Electors lived in palaces, a sign of how widely power was spread.
Assyrian Nimrud and Nineveh and Persian Persepolis and Susa supply early Near Eastern examples. Scholars now doubt Minoan “palaces” were royal homes in a simple sense, yet they combined political, economic, and ritual functions.
The Palatine was one of Rome's seven hills. Augustus lived there in a deliberately modest house marked only by two laurel trees by the door, a triumph honour from the Senate, but his successors, above all Nero with his Golden House, expanded it until it covered the hilltop, and the name shifted from the neighbourhood to the emperor's residence. Knossos on Crete, built around 2000 BC, is the earliest known palace in the architectural sense.
Bronze Age Greek palaces at Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos were administrative centres, as their written records show, with rooms grouped around courtyards and a megaron, a throne room built around a circular hearth ringed by four columns. Staircases at Pylos show a second storey for royal quarters. Today many former palaces serve as parliaments, museums or hotels, French courthouses are called palais de justice, and a grand cinema can be a movie palace.
Source: Palace
