Labyrinth

lab'i-rinth, a structure having numerous intricate winding passages. The tradition remains of a famous labyrinth in the island of Crete, constructed by Daedalus. Once involved in its passages, it is said that no one could escape without falling prey to the monster Minotaur. It is thought that nothing of the sort existed, but that the legend was suggested by the many winding passages in a cavern of that island. The famous Egyptian labyrinth was a building in the Fayum, Egypt, half above and half below ground. It contained 3,000 rooms. It was constructed probably as a burial place. The Etruscans built a labyrinth at Clusium in Italy as a sepulcher for their king, Porsenna. Labyrinths or mazes formed of intricate winding hedgerows were formerly the delight of landscape gardeners. One of the most famous may still be seen at Hampton Court, near London. Bailey's Cyclopedia gives a cut of a celebrated labyrinth at Winchester, England. The labyrinth in the Fayum is described by Edwards:

This platform, which measures 1,000 feet in length by 800 in breadth, represented the site of the labyrinth--that famous building of which it was said by Herodotus that it was "larger than all the temples of Greece put together, and more wonderful than the pyramids." The labyrinth was utterly destroyed by order of the Roman government some seventeen or eighteen centuries ago, and all that remains of its former magnificence is this platform, heaped six feet deep with thousands and tens of thousands of tons of limestone and granite chips. This tremendous destruction was undoubtedly wrought by order of the Roman government, and the people who smashed up and quarried out the most splendid building of the ancient world lived in that little town on the southwest corner of the platform. As they went on clearing the site they made use of it for a cemetery; and so, in course of time, the last vestiges of the labyrinth disappeared, and the place thereof became a city of the dead.