Ancient city, south-central Crete , Greece.
Although unimportant in Minoan times, it later displaced Phaestus as the dominant city. It shared or disputed control of Crete with Knossos until the Roman annexation in the 1st century BC, when it became the administrative capital of the Roman province of Crete and Cyrenaica. Among the city's ruins, the great civic law code of Gortyn, discovered in the 19th century, is the most extensive account of Greek law before the Hellenistic Age.