00:00He could hear it breathing in the dark, somewhere beyond the next turn of stone,
00:05in a maze built so that no one could ever find the way out.
00:09Something huge was moving on two legs, and it was coming toward him.
00:14The young man from Athens had only a sword in one hand and a thin thread in the other,
00:21and behind him the thread was the only road home that had ever existed.
00:26This is the story of how it was born, how it was fed on the children of Athens,
00:32and how one hero walked into his labyrinth to kill it,
00:36and of what archaeologists later found beneath the palace where the story was set.
00:423,000 years ago, the island of Crete ruled the Aegean Sea.
00:47At the head of that sea power stood King Minos,
00:49a ruler so famous that the whole civilization of Bronze Age Crete is still named after him,
00:56the Minos.
00:57Greek storytellers said Minos was the son of Zeus himself,
01:02and that his word was law from one end of the Aegean to the other.
01:06Crete was not a small island kingdom.
01:09It was a thalasocracy, a sea empire,
01:12and its fleet kept the pirates down and the trade routes open,
01:16which is why no other Greek city could challenge it.
01:18Its palaces were not fortresses with high walls because the sea itself was the wall,
01:25and for centuries no enemy fleet reached its shores.
01:28That confidence is important because a king who has never been invaded
01:32begins to believe that no power, human or divine, can touch him,
01:37and that belief is exactly what the story punishes.
01:41Minos wanted proof that the gods favored his claim to the throne,
01:45so he prayed to Poseidon for a sign,
01:48and the god answered by sending a magnificent snow white bull up out of the waves.
01:53Poseidon did not forget the insult.
01:55In revenge, the god made Minos' queen,
01:59Pasiphy, fall in love with the white bull itself.
02:03That craftsman was D. Dallas,
02:05the most ingenious inventor in the ancient world,
02:08and the queen begged him to build her a way to approach the bull.
02:12D. Dallas built a hollow wooden cow covered in real hide,
02:16and inside it Pasiphy hid.
02:18From that union, the myth says,
02:21a child was born who was neither fully human nor fully beast.
02:25The child was called Asterius,
02:28but history knows him by another name,
02:30the Minotaur, the bull of Minos.
02:33Build me a prison,
02:34the king commanded,
02:36that no one can escape from,
02:38not even the prisoner inside it.
02:40D. Dallas designed a maze of twisting corridors
02:43and blind turns of passages that double back on themselves.
02:48A building so confusing that a man could walk in it for days
02:52and never find the door.
02:54It was called the Labyrinth,
02:55and the Minotaur was locked inside it,
02:58in the dark,
02:58to be fed,
02:59and to be forgotten.
03:01D. Dallas worked in secret,
03:03and the maze he built had no straight lines and no landmarks,
03:07only turn after turn,
03:09so that a man inside it lost all sense of direction within minutes.
03:13The Minotaur was given food and water in the dark,
03:17and the doors were shut,
03:18and for a time,
03:19Crete tried to pretend the problem was solved.
03:23The son Androgeos had traveled to Athens,
03:25and there,
03:26in circumstances,
03:27as the stories tell in different ways,
03:30the young prince was killed.
03:31Minos blamed Athens for the death of his son,
03:34and he sailed against the city with his fleet,
03:37and forced it to accept a terrible peace.
03:40Every nine years,
03:41Athens would send seven of its finest young men,
03:44and seven of its finest young women across the sea to Crete,
03:49though they would be driven into the Labyrinth,
03:51with no map and no weapon and no way back,
03:54to wander in the dark until the Minotaur found them.
03:57The third time it all due,
03:59the parents of Athens wept in the streets,
04:02because the lots had been drawn,
04:04and fourteen more children were already chosen to die.
04:08Among those watching was Theseus,
04:10the young prince of Athens,
04:12son of King Aegeus.
04:14He could not bear to watch his city pay this price again,
04:17so he stepped forward and offered himself as one of the seven youths,
04:22not to die in the maze,
04:24but to kill the monster inside it.
04:26If I return alive,
04:27he said,
04:28I will hoist white sails,
04:30so you will know from the shore that your son lives.
04:33If the sails stay black,
04:34you will know I have failed.
04:36The ship crossed the Aegean to Crete,
04:39and the fourteen young Athenians were paraded before King Minos in his palace.
04:44The ship that carried them was a grim sight,
04:47with black sails raised for a voyage of mourning,
04:50because everyone in Athens expected these children to die.
04:54Theseus had spent his youth proving himself on the road from Trozen to Athens,
04:59defeating bandits and monsters,
05:01and he carried that confidence with him onto the ship.
05:04He could hear it breathing in the dark,
05:07somewhere beyond the next turn of stone,
05:10in a maze built so that no one could ever find a way out.
05:13Something huge was moving on two legs,
05:16and it was coming toward him.
05:18The young man from Athens had only a sword in one hand and a thin thread in the other,
05:23and behind him the thread was the only road home that had ever existed.
05:27This is the story of how it was born,
05:30how it was fed on the children of Athens,
05:33and how one hero walked into its labyrinth to kill it,
05:36and of what archaeologists later found beneath the palace where the story was set.
05:41Theseus promised that if he lived,
05:43he would take Ariadne with him to Athens and make her his wife.
05:47The corridors turned and turned again,
05:50and every passage looked like the one before it,
05:53so that within minutes a man could no longer tell whether he was walking deeper into the maze
05:58or back toward the door he had entered by.
06:01Theseus kept one hand on the thread,
06:03feeling it run out behind him,
06:06and he listened for the sound that every victim before him must have heard last.
06:10Step by step, the thread grew shorter in his hand and the passages grew narrower
06:16until at last he reached the innermost chamber,
06:20the heart of the labyrinth, where the monster slept.
06:23The stone was cold under his feet,
06:26and the only light came from the doorway behind him,
06:29growing smaller with every turn until it vanished altogether.
06:33He counted his steps,
06:35but counting was useless in a maze
06:37because the corridors refused to behave like ordinary rooms,
06:41and a left turn could bring him back to a passage he had already walked.
06:46The minotaur woke,
06:48and the fight that followed became one of the most famous battles in all of Greek myth.
06:54The creature charged with its horns lowered,
06:57strong enough,
06:58the stories say,
07:00to smash a man against the stone,
07:03and Theseus met it with the sword,
07:06darting aside and striking whenever the beast turned.
07:10The minotaur,
07:11the terror of Crete,
07:13the eater of Athenian children,
07:15lay dead on the floor of its own labyrinth,
07:18and Theseus stood over it,
07:21covered in blood,
07:23alive.
07:23But he had...
07:25The...
07:25The...
07:25The...
07:26The...
07:26The...
07:27The...
07:27The...
07:28The...
07:29The...
07:29The...
07:29The...
07:30Outside,
07:31Ariadne was waiting,
07:32and with her the other 13 Athenians,
07:35who had hidden from the monster while Theseus fought it.
07:39Together they ran for the harbor,
07:41and before Minos could raise an alarm,
07:43they cut the cables of their ship and sailed for home,
07:47with Ariadne beside Theseus on the deck.
07:49Then came the second tragedy,
07:52because in his grief or his haste,
07:54Theseus forgot his promise to his father.
07:57The ship approached Athens still flying its black sails,
08:01and old King Aegeus,
08:03watching from the cliffs and believing his son dead,
08:06threw himself into the sea.
08:08For 2,000 years,
08:10the minotaur was only a story,
08:12until archaeologists began to dig at Nassos itself.
08:16What Evans found was not a single maze,
08:20but something stranger and more suggestive.
08:22A palace covering more than 20,000 square meters,
08:26with hundreds of rooms on several levels,
08:28staircases that doubled back,
08:31corridors that seemed to lead nowhere,
08:33and storerooms filled with giant jars of olive oil.
08:37Evans found clay tablets too,
08:39written in a script he called Linear B,
08:41which was finally deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventress,
08:46revealing not poems or myths,
08:48but the account books of a powerful Bronze Age kingdom,
08:52listing sheep in grain and oil.
08:54The palace Evans uncovered had light wells,
08:58and running water in a drainage system more advanced than anything in Europe for another 3,000 years,
09:04which tells you how wealthy and organized this kingdom really was.
09:08Stahler still argue about whether the labyrinth was this palace itself,
09:12or a building inside it,
09:14or simply a memory of its endless corridors.
09:16But the scale of the place makes the confusion understandable,
09:20because a stranger walking us for the first time could easily believe he would never find his way out.
09:24So was the Minotaur real?
09:27No bones,
09:28no beast,
09:29no labyrinth with a monster at its center has ever been found,
09:34and no serious historian believes one will be.
09:37But the story endures because it was never only about a monster,
09:41and it is about a real palace at Nassos,
09:44a maze of stone rooms where bulls were sacred and kings were mighty,
09:48a place confusing enough that any Greek sailor who walked its corridors might believe a monster could hide inside.
09:55The Minotaur is dead,
09:57killed by Theseus in the dark at the heart of the labyrinth.
10:01But the labyrinth itself,
10:03the twisting palace,
10:04the bulls,
10:05and the king,
10:06those were real,
10:07and they are still standing on Crete today,
10:10waiting for anyone brave enough to walk in.
10:12The bull still matters on Crete,
10:15where the animal appears on seals and frescoes and carved stone,
10:19a symbol of power and danger that the Minims painted again and again.
10:24When later Greeks looked at those bulls and at that twisting palace,
10:28they told a story that explained both at once a monster and a maze,
10:33and the story was so good that it outlived the palace,
10:36the kingdom,
10:37and the language of the people who built it.
