In Greek myth, Poseidon punished Minos by making his wife Pasiphaë lust for a white bull. Sometime later, Pasiphaë gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man. As the Minotaur grew, he became increasingly fierce and even began eating people. Fearing that his people would rise against him, Minos sought to contain his stepson in a series of ever-stronger cages; but after he broke out of the strongest cage, he asked Daedalus to build a maze of tunnels beneath his palace. The Labyrinth, as it came to be called, was so intricate that even Daedalus, having built it, struggled to escape from it.

In time, the Minotaur was killed by Theseus, who retraced his steps out of the Labyrinth with the help of a ball of crimson thread given to him by Minos’ daughter Ariadne.

In the early twentieth century, the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, working on Crete, uncovered the existence of a complex civilization whose people he called the Minoans after the mythical King Minos. Minoan Crete flourished from 3000 to 1500 BCE and revolved around a series of palace complexes, the largest of which was at Knossos in the north of the island. The palace at Knossos covered an area of around six acres (or........

© Psychology Today