There have been many labyrinths. Visitors to the 13th-century cathedral at Chartres, in France, will find one inlaid in the floor of the nave. Another was fashioned from turf at Troy Farm, Oxfordshire, sometime around the 17th century. These labyrinths, like many others, are not puzzles to be solved. Far from being a maze of intersecting passages designed to bewilder with dead ends and wrong turns, they offer a single path that leads inexorably to the centre via a circuitous route, layered with disorientating twists and turns. This concept is an old one. The earliest datable appearance of this labyrinth motif stretches back to 1200 BC, when it was doodled on the back of a tablet inscribed with text known as Linear B at Pylos, Greece. Since then, the design has graced mediums as varied as Roman mosaics and the margins of medieval manuscripts. That some associated it with the most famous labyrinth of all is made plain by a Latin inscription accompanying a graffito in this style at Pompeii: ‘here lives the Minotaur’. Sure enough, the design also adorned coins minted from 425 BC at the home of the mythical Minotaur: Knossos, on the island of Crete.
By the time that this money was issued, Knossos was a Greek city, and the legend of the labyrinth already belonged to a distant, heroic past. The tale of Theseus journeying to its heart with the aid of a ball of twine and slaying the monstrous Minotaur was set in the era now known as Minoan, which dates to around 3000-1000 BC. How old the story itself is remains an open question. Depictions of a hero dispatching the Minotaur can be found on Greek vases dating back to the 6th century BC, indicating that at least some familiar elements of the myth were in place by then. But could its true origins lie much further back in time? Some of the pioneering excavators of Knossos certainly thought so. The first person to dig at the site was Minos Kalokairinos, a local businessman, who unearthed a great storage magazine in the 1870s. At the time, Crete was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and Kalokairinos was dissuaded from continuing his investigations, for fear that any outstanding artefacts would be claimed by the imperial authorities. It was clear enough, though, that the site was an important one. On a sketch map drawn in 1878, Kalokairinos labelled his discovery as the palace of Minos, after the legendary ruler of Knossos at the time of the Minotaur. That same map identified a subterranean stone quarry about a kilometre distant as the labyrinth.
Although the political situation brought a premature end to Kalokairinos’ digging, he was still happy to guide visiting scholars around the site. One such individual was Arthur Evans, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, who visited in 1894. He was immediately struck by similarities between the palace architecture exposed by Kalokairinos and the confusing nature of the Minotaur’s lair. Evans wrote in his diary that ‘I see no reason for not thinking that the mysterious complication of passages is the labyrinth’. Six years later, he had the chance to play this hunch. Evans used his family wealth to purchase the palace site and, after Crete gained independence, he began excavations at the site in 1900. To Evans’ delight, this work confirmed that the palace had a complex ground-plan, while the finds revealed a fondness for bull-themed accessories and décor. Tantalisingly, he even found a fragment of floor plaster with a painted labyrinth design on it, albeit different in style to the influential motif of a single, twisting path. Evans’ conviction that the building itself was the basis for the labyrinth deepened, with later Greek mythmakers perhaps inspired by the romantic ruins of the Minoan palace. This notion of Knossos as a place where reality and legend merge is explored in a fascinating new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Labyrinth: Knossos, myth & reality, which showcases extraordinary finds from the palace and its environs, as well as the Evans archive.
