Theseus seven most courageous youths and the seven most beautiful maidens were to board a boat and be sent as tribute to Crete, never to be seen again. In another version, King Minos had waged war with the Athenians and was successful. He then demanded that, at nine-year intervals, seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls were to be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster that lived in the Labyrinth created by Daedalus. On the third occasion, Theseus volunteered to talk to the monster to stop this horror. He took the place of one
Labyrinth be walked. Unicursal patterns have been used historically both in group ritual and for private meditation, and are increasingly found for therapeutic use in hospitals and hospices. "Labyrinth" is a word of pre-Greek origin, which the Greeks associated with the palace of Knossos in Crete, excavated by Arthur Evans early in the 20th century. The word appears in a Linear B inscription as da-pu-ri-to. As early as 1892 Maximilian Mayer suggested that "labyrinthos" might derive from "labrys", a Lydian word for "double-bladed axe". Evans suggested that the palace at Knossos was the original labyrinth, and since the double axe motif