The Labyrinth

Also Known As: Greek Λαβύρινθος, Labyrinthos; also called the Cretan Labyrinth or the Labyrinth of Knossos
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: A roofed warren of stone corridors built so cunningly that anyone who walked in could not find the way back to the door.
Role in Mythos: It was the prison King Minos built to hold the Minotaur, and the place where the Athenian tribute of youths and maidens was fed to it until Theseus went in.
Relation to Humans: Mortals entered it only as victims or as prisoners, and the ancient accounts agree that the building itself, not the monster, was the real sentence. Only three people are said to have got out alive: Theseus with Ariadne’s thread, and Daedalus and his son on wings.

Torchlight gave out before the corridor did. Ovid wrote that the eye was led astray by a mazy multitude of winding ways, which is the courteous version of what the building did to people: it doubled back on itself so often that Daedalus, who had drawn every line of it himself, could barely find his own way out again.

It was built to hide a family disgrace. Minos of Crete had asked Poseidon for a bull out of the sea as proof of his right to rule, promised to sacrifice the animal, then kept it because it was too fine to kill. The god took his payment through Minos’s wife. Pasiphae conceived a passion for the bull, Daedalus built her a hollow wooden cow to lie inside, and what she bore had the face of a bull on a human body. The Cretans called him Asterion, the starry one. Everyone else called him the Minotaur. Minos consulted an oracle and, on its instructions, had the creature shut away under guard rather than killed, and Daedalus got the commission for the cage.

The sources describe that cage in language that keeps sliding out of focus. Apollodorus reaches for a phrase so knotted that translators have never settled it, something along the lines of an enclosure of convoluted bends that confounds the way out. Diodorus Siculus says only that the passages wound so badly that anyone unfamiliar with them struggled to escape. Pliny the Elder, who counted the Cretan Labyrinth among four such buildings in the world, records that they were roofed with vaults of carefully worked stone, then adds the line that spoils it for every later treasure hunter: of the Cretan one, nothing remained in his day. Seneca supplies the only sound in the place, the bellowing of the thing inside filling the whole structure. Darkness, stone, turning, and no door in sight. On everything else the sources disagree.

Every ninth year, by most tellings, a ship came in from Athens under a black sail carrying seven young men and seven girls, unarmed, the compensation Minos had extracted for the death of his son Androgeus. They were walked to the entrance and put inside. Plutarch preserves two versions of what followed and it is hard to rank them: either the Minotaur found the Athenians, or it did not, and they walked until they stopped walking.

On the third tribute Theseus put his own name on the list. Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, went to Daedalus and got the secret out of him, and the secret was humbler than the building deserved. A ball of thread. Theseus tied one end to the door and let it pay out behind him through every turn, found the Minotaur in the furthest part of the maze, and killed it there; Apollodorus says he did it with his fists. Then he hauled himself back along the line, hand over hand through corridors he had never seen in daylight, and came out with the rest of the Athenians behind him.

The building then took its architect. When Minos worked out how Theseus had managed it, he shut Daedalus and his son Icarus inside the Labyrinth, which is one way to settle an invoice. Daedalus made wings of feathers and wax, told the boy to fly neither so high that the sun softened them nor so low that the sea soaked them, and lost him anyway. He came down safe at Camicus in Sicily, at the court of a king called Cocalus. Minos hunted him across the Mediterranean carrying a spiral seashell and offering a reward to anyone who could pass a thread through it, on the reasoning that only one man alive would treat that as a challenge rather than a chore. Cocalus handed the shell to his guest. Daedalus drilled a hole, tied the thread to an ant, and let it walk through. Thread beat the Labyrinth twice, once on the way in and once on the way out of hiding.

What the place does needs no guard on the door. It does not hold people with bars, it holds them by making every direction look equally reasonable, and a person who has lost the memory of where they came from is already finished; the walls only have to wait. Its limit is just as plain. The Labyrinth is finite, and it is beaten by anyone who keeps a physical connection to the entrance. A thread does it. So do wings, and so, at the end of the story, does an ant with a string tied to its leg. Every ancient account that gets someone safely out has them holding on to something that leads back.

Crete did not hold a monopoly on the word. Herodotus, the earliest Greek historian, describes an enormous building he calls a labyrinth and puts it in Egypt, not Crete; its remains were later dug at Hawara in the Fayum at the foot of Amenemhat III’s pyramid. Pliny counted four, the Egyptian first, then the Cretan, then one on Lemnos famous for a hundred and fifty columns so finely balanced a child could turn them, then the Etruscan tomb of King Porsena. Homer, the earliest Greek voice on Knossos at all, mentions no labyrinth there. What he gives Daedalus is a dancing floor, built for Ariadne.

The design everyone now recognises is older than the literature that describes a maze, and it is not a maze. Somebody scratched it onto the back of a Linear B tablet at Pylos around 1200 BC. Knossos struck it on its coins from the fifth century onward, sometimes with the Minotaur curled at the centre, and that pattern has no branches and no dead ends: seven circuits, one road in, the same road out, a shape you could walk while thinking about something else. A Pompeian scratched the same figure on a wall and wrote beside it that the Minotaur lived there.

The search for the real thing ran for centuries and produced the wrong answer first. Cretans long pointed to the quarry galleries near Gortyn, two and a half kilometres of cut passages that supplied stone for Phaistos and later for Roman Gortyn, their walls layered with visitors’ graffiti from the fifteenth century onward. The Florentine priest Cristoforo Buondelmonti walked them in 1415, recognised a quarry when he saw one, and drew the Labyrinth on his map of the island anyway. In 1878 a Heraklion businessman named Minos Kalokairinos, encouraged by Schliemann’s luck at Troy, cut into the Kephala hill and found worked walls carved with a double axe. Arthur Evans bought the land, excavated between 1900 and 1904, took the corridors of the building he named the Palace of Minos for the Labyrinth itself, and took the axe, labrys in an ancient gloss, for the origin of the name. Maximilian Mayer had floated that etymology in 1892. It has not aged well. When Linear B was deciphered in the 1950s a Knossos tablet catalogued as Gg702 appeared to record an offering to the mistress of the labyrinth, which pushes the word back a thousand years before the Athenian story, though the reading is contested and so is any link to the axe. In 2024, on a hill called Papoura, work clearing ground for an airport radar uncovered seven overlapping rings of stone about fifty metres across, built somewhere between roughly 2300 and 1800 BC, with no known parallel on the island. Nobody has claimed it is the Labyrinth. It is a very old Cretan building that goes round and round, and no one yet knows what it was for.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Labyrinth in Greek mythology?

The Labyrinth is a maze of winding stone corridors on Crete, built by the craftsman Daedalus on the orders of King Minos to imprison the Minotaur. Its defining property is that anyone unfamiliar with it could not find the way back out. Ancient writers describe it as dark, roofed with worked stone, and without any visible exit, but none of them leaves a floor plan.

Who built the Labyrinth and why?

Daedalus built it for King Minos of Crete. Minos needed somewhere to hide the Minotaur, the bull-headed child born to his wife Pasiphae after Poseidon punished him for keeping a sacred bull instead of sacrificing it. An oracle told Minos to confine the creature rather than kill it, so he commissioned a building no one could escape.

How did Theseus escape the Labyrinth?

Theseus escaped using a ball of thread given to him by Ariadne, the daughter of Minos. He tied one end to the door, let the thread trail behind him as he went in, killed the Minotaur in the deepest part of the maze, and then pulled himself back along the line to the entrance. Ariadne had obtained the method from Daedalus himself.

Where was the Labyrinth, and was it a real place?

No structure has ever been confirmed as the Labyrinth. Pliny the Elder already reported in the first century AD that nothing of the Cretan one survived. Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos between 1900 and 1904, identified the palace’s corridors as the Labyrinth and read the name as “house of the double axe,” but that etymology is now doubted, and earlier candidates included the quarry tunnels near Gortyn.

Why does the labyrinth symbol have only one path?

The classic seven-circuit labyrinth design found on Knossos coins, on a Linear B tablet from Pylos, and scratched on a wall at Pompeii is unicursal: a single path in and out, with no branches and no dead ends. That makes it impossible to get lost in, which contradicts the literary descriptions of a bewildering maze. The symbol and the story appear to have developed side by side rather than from one another.