The Labyrinth

Daedalus builds a prison

The Labyrinth is the building that ancient writers place at Knossos on Crete. The craftsman Daedalus builds it for King Minos. Minos shuts Asterius, the bull-faced Minotaur, inside it. The building is a chamber designed to defeat anyone who tries to leave. Apollodorus, whose book the Library retells the Greek myths, describes its winding route in one borrowed line of verse: a chamber “that with its tangled windings perplexed the outward way”.

So the Labyrinth hides the Minotaur, and it also makes escape the problem that remains once the creature is found. The hero Theseus can kill the prisoner with his fists. He cannot find his way out alone. Ariadne asks Daedalus for the way out and gives Theseus a thread to draw behind him. The builder’s knowledge passes through her to the man going in, and the design is turned against the king who ordered it.

The earliest mention is a dancing floor

The Iliad, Homer’s poem of the Trojan War, puts Daedalus at Knossos but gives him something else to build. The god Hephaestus makes a shield for the hero Achilles. On it is a dancing floor like the one Daedalus made for Ariadne, with young people moving across it and a crowd around them.

The three names the later story needs are already together here: Daedalus, Knossos and Ariadne. The maze is missing.

This silence does not mean Homer rejected the Labyrinth. It shows only that the earliest surviving link between the craftsman and Knossos is about ordered dance, not a trap. Later prose writers turned the same skill at directing movement into a prison.

The labyrinth in Egypt

Pliny, who wrote in the first century AD, begins his chapter on labyrinths with one in Egypt. It stood in the district, or nome, of Heracleopolites, and he calls it the first ever built.

The historian Herodotus had gone to see it. He describes 12 roofed courts inside one outer wall, and 3,000 chambers: 1,500 above ground and the same number below. He writes that he was shown only the upper ones. The caretakers would not open the lower chambers. They said these held the tombs of the kings who built the place, and the tombs of the sacred crocodiles. Herodotus had seen the pyramids, and he wrote that this building surpassed them (Histories 2.148).

Pliny’s four labyrinths

Pliny holds that Daedalus took the Egyptian building as his model. He says Daedalus copied a hundredth part of it, “that portion, namely, which encloses circuitous passages, windings, and inextricable galleries” (Natural History 36.19).

Pliny counts four labyrinths in all. There is the one in Egypt and the one on Crete. There is one on the island of Lemnos. The last is in Italy, raised by Porsena of Etruria as his own tomb.

Pliny also gives the last ancient word on the building. Remains of the labyrinth on Lemnos could still be seen. The Egyptian one had outlasted every attempt to destroy it. But of the Cretan labyrinth and the Italian one, “not a vestige is left”.

The labyrinth on the coins of Knossos

Excavation at Knossos began in 1900 and has continued ever since. Long before that, the city’s own coins kept the sign. Knossos struck the labyrinth on the back of its money. On the front was a head of Zeus, a head of Apollo or a star with eight rays. A surviving silver coin of this type, called a tetradrachm, has Zeus on one face and the labyrinth on the other.

So the excavated palace should not be presented as the building Apollodorus describes. Even in Pliny’s day, no surviving building on Crete could be identified as the Labyrinth. What Knossos keeps for certain is the city’s image on its coins: a maze reduced to a compact square, opposite the head of a god. The people of Knossos chose the labyrinth as the sign of their city even when no traveller could point to its walls.