A 4,000-Year History of Mazes: From Knossos to Pac-Man

First, a Crucial Distinction

Before we trace 4,000 years of history, we need to untangle two words that most people use interchangeably but mean very different things:

• Labyrinth: a single, winding path with no branches and no dead ends. You cannot get lost in a labyrinth. You enter, follow the one available path, reach the center, and walk back out. There are zero decisions to make.
• Maze: a network of paths with branches, forks, and dead ends. You can — and will — get lost. Every junction forces a decision.

This distinction matters because most of the ancient world built labyrinths, not mazes. True mazes with dead ends and branching paths are largely a Renaissance invention. Keep this in mind as we trace the timeline.

~1700 BCE: Knossos and the Myth That Started Everything

The Palace of Knossos on Crete, excavated by Arthur Evans beginning in 1900, is a sprawling complex of over 1,300 interlocking rooms, corridors, and stairways. It is easy to see how visitors — or invaders — could get hopelessly turned around. Evans believed this was the inspiration for the Greek myth of the Labyrinth: King Minos orders the architect Daedalus to build an inescapable prison for the Minotaur.

But here is the thing: the palace is not a labyrinth in any formal sense. It has no single winding path and no deliberate dead ends. It is simply a very large, complicated building. The "labyrinth" was likely a cultural memory of the palace's disorienting layout, amplified over centuries of oral retelling. Coins from Knossos minted around 300 BCE depict the classical seven-circuit labyrinth pattern — but this pattern is unicursal (one path, no choices), nothing like the palace's actual floor plan.

The word "labyrinth" itself may derive from labrys, the Minoan double-headed axe found throughout Knossos. But this etymology is debated; linguist Beekes (2010) considers it pre-Greek with no certain origin.

Roman Mosaics: Labyrinths as Art (1st–4th Century CE)

The Romans loved labyrinths — as decoration. Over 300 labyrinth mosaics from the Roman period have been catalogued across the former empire, from Tunisia to England. Most depict the Minotaur at the center, surrounded by a classical unicursal labyrinth pattern rendered in tessellated stone.

These were floor mosaics in villas, baths, and public buildings. They were not puzzles; you could not get lost in them. They were symbols — of order imposed on chaos, civilization triumphing over the bestial. The labyrinth was a metaphor first, a puzzle second.

A particularly well-preserved example is the Theseus mosaic at the Roman villa in Salzburg, Austria (3rd century CE), showing Theseus slaying the Minotaur at the center of a square labyrinth. Hundreds more examples exist in museum collections and archaeological sites across Europe and North Africa.

Chartres Cathedral: Walking Meditation (~1200 CE)

Around 1200 CE, builders set a 12.9-meter-diameter labyrinth into the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France. It is unicursal — a single 261.5-meter-long path that winds back and forth 11 times before reaching the center. Walking it takes roughly 20 minutes at a meditative pace.

This was not a puzzle. It was a spiritual practice. During the Crusades, many Christians could not afford or survive a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Walking the Chartres labyrinth on your knees was recognized as a symbolic substitute — you could "travel to Jerusalem" without leaving France. The center of the labyrinth, once adorned with a copper plaque (now lost), represented the Holy City.

Similar church labyrinths were installed at Amiens, Reims, and other French cathedrals. Most were later destroyed (the Reims labyrinth was torn up in 1779 because children were too noisy playing on it during services). Chartres survives because chairs covered it for centuries, protecting it from wear.

Hampton Court: The Birth of the Hedge Maze (1690)

The transition from labyrinth (one path) to maze (branching paths with dead ends) happened in European gardens during the Renaissance. The earliest known multicursal hedge maze still in existence is at Hampton Court Palace near London, commissioned by William III around 1690 and planted with hornbeam hedges (later replanted with yew).

Hampton Court covers roughly one third of an acre. Its paths total about half a mile in length, with intentional dead ends and an island that defeats wall-following. It was designed as aristocratic entertainment — an intellectual puzzle disguised as a garden stroll. Daniel Defoe, writing in 1724, described visitors' delighted confusion.

Hampton Court spawned imitators across Europe. By the late 1700s, hedge mazes were common at country estates and public pleasure gardens. The maze had completed its transformation from sacred symbol to secular entertainment.

1882: Trémaux Formalizes Maze-Solving

Charles Pierre Trémaux, a French telegraph engineer, published his algorithm for solving any finite maze in 1882. This was not an academic exercise — Trémaux needed to route cables through Paris's irregular underground tunnel network, which formed graphs with cycles. His algorithm (mark your path, never enter a twice-marked passage) is one of the earliest known graph traversal algorithms, predating formal computer science by decades.

The 20th Century: Mazes Go Digital

Three moments transformed mazes from physical structures into digital phenomena:

Pac-Man (1980)

Toru Iwatani designed Pac-Man for Namco as a fixed-layout maze with four AI-controlled ghosts. It became the best-selling arcade game of its era, grossing over $2.5 billion in quarters by 1990 (adjusted for inflation, roughly $6 billion). Pac-Man proved that maze navigation — eating dots while avoiding enemies — was an endlessly compelling game mechanic. The maze was not randomly generated; it was the same layout every time. The challenge came from the ghosts' increasingly aggressive AI patterns.

Doom (1993)

id Software's Doom popularized the first-person perspective in maze-like environments. Each level was a hand-designed maze of corridors, rooms, and secrets. Players navigated by building mental maps — no mini-map was provided in the original release. Doom's level designers (John Romero, Sandy Petersen, American McGee) treated maze complexity as a core difficulty dial. The game sold over 3.5 million copies and spawned an entire genre built on maze-like level design.

Procedural Generation (2000s–Present)

Modern games like Spelunky (2008), The Binding of Isaac (2011), and Hades (2020) use procedural maze generation to create unique levels on every playthrough. Algorithms like the ones described in our maze generation article power these systems. James Dashner's novel The Maze Runner (2009, film 2014) brought mazes back into popular culture as a central narrative device — a lethal, shifting maze as dystopian prison, echoing the original Minotaur myth 3,700 years later.

4,000 Years in One Thread

The line from Knossos to your screen is unbroken. A Minoan palace becomes a Greek myth. The myth becomes a Roman mosaic. The mosaic becomes a cathedral floor. The cathedral floor becomes a hedge garden. The garden becomes an algorithm. The algorithm becomes a video game. At every stage, humans have been drawn to the same fundamental challenge: find the path through complexity.

Your turn to add to the story.