Daedalus Daedalus, and he to Hephaestus, son of Zeus." This suggests that Daedalus was related to Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, and therefore to Zeus himself. Daedalus is first mentioned by Homer as the creator of a wide dancing-ground for Ariadne. He also created the Labyrinth on Crete, in which the Minotaur (part man, part bull) was kept. In the story of the labyrinth as told by the Hellenes, the Athenian hero Theseus is challenged to kill the Minotaur, finding his way with the help of Ariadne's thread. Daedalus' appearance in Homer is in an extended metaphor, "plainly not Homer's invention",
Labyrinth four examples of labyrinths are all complex underground structures, and this appears to have been the standard Classical understanding of the word. It is also possible that the word labyrinth is derived from the Egyptian "loperohunt", meaning palace or temple by the lake. The Egyptian labyrinth near Lake Morris is described by Herodotus and Strabo. By the 4th century BC, Greek vase painters also represented the Labyrinth by the familiar "Greek key" patterns of endlessly running meanders. When the Bronze Age site at Knossos was excavated by explorer Arthur Evans, the complexity of the architecture prompted him to suggest that