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 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