Theseus crept through dark woven passageways, trying to find the beast. People did not usually look for the monster, but then, most people did not have Theseus’s skills. The princess Ariadne, after instantly falling in love with him, had disobediently supplied a long thread and a sword, the first so he would not get lost in the tunnels and the second so he could kill the monster. In the gloom, he unexpectedly ran into something long and straight, barring his path. Not the string again, he grunted in disgust. I can’t believe how long it’s taking to find the Minotaur with walking in circles like this. He untangled his illegal lifeline, unsheathed his smuggled sword, and tried the left instead.
The well-known story of the Minotaur and the labyrinth contains one of the oldest known references to mazes, found in several ancient Greek works of art dating from as far back as the seventh century B.C. Related by such famous authors as Ovid and Plutarch, the tale tells of the Greek hero Theseus’s quest to destroy the Minotaur of Crete, a monster half man, half bull, which waited within its labyrinth home to devour whoever entered. Although the tale seems to be based on fact to a point, there is much confusion over the location of the labyrinth.
Although more famous today, the Cretan labyrinth of legend was only one of two highly regarded ancient labyrinths. The other was in Egypt. Greek historian Herodotus describes the Egyptian labyrinth: “I have seen this building, and it is beyond my power to describe… The pyramids, too, are astonishing structures…but the labyrinth surpasses them.” He describes the structure as having two levels, the upper of which he personally went through (he was forbidden access to the underground tunnels because they contained the tombs of the kings and the sacred crocodiles), and three thousand total rooms and galleries with “baffling and intricate passages” between rooms.
The earliest known drawn labyrinths appear doodled on backs of tablets and as graffiti, dating as early as 1200 B.C. These however, all were in the common form of a single, long, unbranching path, looking something like this:
Many people today still use the term labyrinth to refer to this kind of design, which is not really a maze since it lacks any diverging paths to choose from. However, descriptions of the Egyptian and Cretan labyrinths clearly show that they were designed more like modern mazes. Possibly the first modern-style picture mazes are a series of woodcuts by a 15th century Italian architect which depict different animals and people in maze form. However, although they look a great deal like today’s mazes in structure, the style was mainly figurative and lacked any defined start and finish. Shortly thereafter, gardeners of large estates began to do something new with the paths running through their hedges, which would eventually far surpass whatever repute these simple drawings had.
For several hundred years after this, the standard maze was made for walking in, and as the years went on, though hedge mazes remained the most common, some innovators designed similar puzzles made with panels of wood, mirrors, and other materials. These experienced a period of neglect during the first half of the 20th century due to the world wars, but starting in the late 1960s began to revive in interest. This new interest exploded in the next decade, which saw a tremendous increase in published maze books, not just for children but for adults too. It was during this period that more complicated mazes, such as those with passages going over and under each other in bridges, were developed.
This interest has died down somewhat since, but new adult maze books still come out regularly today, in smaller numbers. Children’s mazes are the standard now –– googling “difficult mazes” yields results like “children absolutely love our easy mazes, so we’ve prepared a nice collection of medium to hard mazes for teens and adults” –– children’s mazes always come first. Many mazes today are computer generated, a method which creates mazes easily, but renders few of particularly good quality.
Today, besides being featured in cornfields, amusement parks, and on pieces of paper, mazes often appear in video games as a graphically simple way to create a reasonably complicated playing field, including such famous games as Pac-man –– a very different inhabitant from the ancient monster in the labyrinth of Crete.
To conclude, here is another maze to solve. It ought to be harder than last month’s –– expect them to improve as time goes on!
Works Cited
Bounford, Julie E. Curious History of Mazes: 4,000 Years of Intriguing Twist and Turns. Wellfleet Press, U S, 2018.
Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfinch’s Greek and Roman Mythology: The Age of Fable. Dover Publications, 1859.
Burne-Jones, Edward. “Theseus and the Minotaur.” Wikipedia, 16 Nov. 2013, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Burne-Jones_-_Tile_Design_-_Theseus_and_the_Minotaur_in_the_Labyrinth_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg.
De Sélincourt, Aubrey, translator. The Histories, edited by John Marincola, by Herodotus, Penguin Books, 2003, pp. 156–157.
“Hard Mazes.” Best Coloring Pages For Kids, 21 Nov. 2018, www.bestcoloringpagesforkids.com/hard-mazes.html.
Sbardella, Amaranta. “The Monstrous Minotaur RIVETED Ancient Greece and Rome.” National Geographic, 1 Oct. 2019, www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2019/10/monstrous-minotaur-riveted-ancient-greece-and-rome.
Maze images credit: Rees Pingel