Cultural History of Mazes

The Cretan Labyrinth in which Theseus encounters the Minotaur offers perhaps the most famous ancient maze, through which the Ancient Greek hero found his way only with the help of Ariadne’s thread. While such necessity suggests that the structure was a maze, having multiple decision points, early depictions of the structure were labyrinthine, in other words, monocursal. Regardless of the depictions, the myth portrays a space of twisting paths that is difficult to navigate, and it establishes the challenge of path-finding puzzle in Western culture.

The Cretan maze may have its origins in Egypt, where Herodotus describes a labyrinthine building: [I won’t be using all of this]

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It has twelve covered courts - six in a row facing north, six south - the gates of the one range exactly fronting the gates of the other. Inside, the building is of two stories and contains three thousand rooms, of which half are underground, and the other half directly above them. I was taken through the rooms in the upper storey, so what I shall say of them is from my own observation, but the underground ones I can speak of only from report, because the Egyptians in charge refused to let me see them, as they contain the tombs of the kings who built the labyrinth, and also the tombs of the sacred crocodiles. The upper rooms, on the contrary, I did actually see, and it is hard to believe that they are the work of men; the baffling and intricate passages from room to room and from court to court were an endless wonder to me, as we passed from a courtyard into rooms, from rooms into galleries, from galleries into more rooms and thence into yet more courtyards. The roof of every chamber, courtyard, and gallery is, like the walls, of stone. The walls are covered with carved figures, and each court is exquisitely built of white marble and surrounded by a colonnade.</blockquote>

Other Egyptian Labyrinths date back to 3400 BCE and a labyrinth in the tomb fo King Perabsen of the Second Dynasty.

In her book, Mazes and Labyrinths of the World, Janet Bord examines appearances of maze in other parts of the globe. For example, she mentions the “long barrows, megalyths, camps and henges of Britain and north-west Europe” as signs that these sorts of patterns, labyrinthine or mazelike, were “not in the first instance diffuse outward from an original birthplace, but developed independently in more than one area” (10).

The search for the antecedent to the physical mazes perhaps is the wrong path to pursue. Jeremy Douglass argues that the history of mazes should not start with the earliest mention or depiction of mazes but with the formulation of walled architecture or social spaces with intersecting passages… Furthermore cave structures, for example, the paths modeled in Adventure, offer naturally occurring mazes (more on that in a moment)

Mazes and Labyrinths, however, are not associated only with their physical structures or two-dimensional forms; They can also be patterns of physical movements. In other words, pathways. Dance executions of mazes have been and continue to be performed as areas, such as Italy, Corfu, Munich, Upper Bavaria. Thre is the Geranos (Crane) dance performed by Theseus performed on Delos.

Another commemorates the killing of Hainuwele (divine maiden) on one of the Molucca Islands.