Knossos is full of bullshit that I really have no reason to care about at the moment. I am sure there is tons of cool shit ready to talk about in a paper that would contain a strong thesis but right now I have been procrastinating the hell out of this thing, I have blah blah blah blah blah, the motion of writing "blah" is a strange one. My typing skill is actually pretty slow compared to some texters.
Minoan culture is cool to learn about because it is lil stories about people who lived tons of years ago. What did people do back then? Were they happier than we are now? Did they eat better or was it the cleaner air that they got to breath hella of? My best guess is that basically they had the same problems that humans have now. Dealing with people, avoiding things they didnt want to bother with and on the flip side, dealing with things that they didn't want to with a smile and gusto that creates good leaders. or at least leaders.
The minoans hired a dude named Daedelus to create a labrynth. This is by far the most popular story from Minoa and it also happens to be the only thing I am actually interested in when it comes to minoan mythology. It is a story with a monster. Allow me to be redundant and repeat that. A story created by humans, (who love monsters because we are pretty certain they don't exist and therefore they are not as terrifying as the story suggests, and hence making them interesting to talk about). A story about a beast that was created because A god, proabably Zeus came down to earth and had his eye on a woman who happened to be the queen I guess.
Anyway because Zeus was so confident that he could get any woman in the world he made a bet with another god that he could score with this woman even if he were disguised as a bull. Zeus won that bet and the loser had to spend the rest of eternity monitoring the underworld. So some time passed and the king of Knossos came to find out that his wife is the bearer of an immaculately conceieved child and was feeling suprised and blessed all at once. Months later a beast that was half boy and half bull was birthed and was hideous to behold. The king feeling ashamed at his initial thought of killing the beast that very moment, decided that instead he would let the beast live and build it a place to live.
So the king calls up Daedelus and says, hey bud we need to hide this hellspawn that my awful wife made, you got anything for me? And daedelus did have something. He created an amazing and nearly impossible labyrinth, amazing in size and difficulty to master.
Time past and the Bull beast which is now known as a minotaur grew to full size and in order to feed the man monster the King forced his people to pay tribute to this terrifying creature by sending children into the labyrinth. I imagine this happened on the minotaurs birthday, which another one of my best guesses was probably 06/06/06 B.C.E. I think this because there are a few cool things about this.
First the beast gets a really good meal for once instead of just whatever is thrown into the maze as a joke by village dullards, scraps of junk, old tires, alligators, bananas, whatever.
Second this is like a game for the creature, the kids aint gettin out so there is only the hunt and chase for the monster and he completely knows that these little kids are really really scared of him, they probably don't even know what this monster looks like, their imaginations are running wild at this point, for all they know the creature in this confusing mess could be a a Blind turkey.
Anyway the reason this story is so appealing In my opinion is because I totally made up a lot of that information and the cool thing is that it works. This is more than likely the same process that built this story over many many years. People hearing things and passing them on, some dude wanting to sound cool in front of some girls or something kind of exaggerates something he heard while hanging around the palace, who knows, but I bet that is what happened.
