Reconstructing the Labyrinth in the Ashmolean

There is one tantalising question at the heart of the Ashmolean’s latest exhibition: what if the labyrinth was real? It’s a question that haunted and tempted academics, map-makers and, perhaps most crucially, archaeologists. It’s a question followed like the mythical thread, unravelled through time and across oceans in search of the myth’s roots, the real places and ruins that were in turn exaggerated, expanded and made grand. It’s a question that led Arthur Evans to Knossos, and one that led me to the Ashmolean.

Knossos is the Cretan village thought to be the inspiration for Minos. Minos was the mythical city home to the Labyrinth, the elaborate maze imprisoning the minotaur. Half-man, half-bull, the minotaur is slain by Theseus—who uses a spool of thread to chart his progress and find his way home.

Vaulted ceilings, vast, empty corridors, serpentine knots littered with bones: what kind of place could inspire a story like this? As the archaeologists dug, they found, at least in their eyes, their answer. They uncovered vast chambers and burial sites, the material remains of a vast palace. They began a process of reconstruction, recreating first ancient Knossos and then, by association, mapping it onto the myths it had inspired. They sought to piece together a story from the fragments of a forgotten world.

On display until 30^th July at the Ashmolean, Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth& Reality charts this process. Its second room presents the uncertainty preceding these discoveries. Before the digs at Knossos, the notion of a ‘real labyrinth’ was the source of conjecture and academic bickering, laced in optimism and ideology. Some insisted it was real; others deemed this a fantasy. Mapmakers assigned the Labyrinth various locations in Crete, giving the maze undue athleticism as it leapt across the page, across Cretan soil, and into new theoretical confines. It has the texture of a mirage, hovering on the line between reality and fiction. It was a primordial maybe, either a trove of (career-making) revelations to be uncovered or a schoolboy fantasy. Entry into the exhibition places us on the same threshold as Theseus, at the moment of uncertainty preceding all journeys. It is the same uncertainty those archaeologists faced.

Heading further into the exhibition, the fog clears. The Cretan sand yields stone. A team of archaeologists, led by Sir Arthur Evans, discover an expansive palace near Knossos. The palace ticks all the boxes. It has hundreds of rooms and a twisting floorplan. It has ample bull iconography, easily paired with Theseus’ mythology: As well as slaying the Minotaur, Theseus also captured the Marathonian Bull. Emboldened by these parallels, Evans and his team posit that this site was the basis of the Labyrinth myth. Labyrinth, Evans proposes, translates as a reference to a double-headed axe, which is one of the palace’s key icons.

This is a rare phenomenon, a process I had thought one-way. I could picture concrete facts becoming myth: time, embellished accounts, agendas, that human need for things to be truer-than-true (an instinct you’ll see alive and well at your local pub), all of these could comfortably have palace walls jutting higher than the sky, could turn prisoners’ groans into a braying minotaur. But to see the reverse, whereby elusive myths became ‘real’ as Knossos was found, was a strange kind of alchemy.  Columns of smoke condense into brickwork: the beast dies again, a death far more definitive than that pathos-laced mercy-kill. There is a quiet sense of tragedy as the mythological Labyrinth is grounded, its phantasmic weightlessness anchored by real spaces. We wonder how it will survive when it is both real and imagined, dig-site and dream.

Though Evans’ discovery is monumental, his work to reconstruct Knossos is tinged by overconfidence. He continues the tradition of the ancient storytellers, who were very loose in their interpretation of Knossos’ ruins. They greatly exaggerated to form their Labyrinth: they weaved shards and fragments into vast narratives of heroism. Likewise, the same fervency seems to possess Evans and his team, as though the stone of Knossos has a hallucinogenic quality. Their archaeological study sees them reconstruct large frescoes and artworks from the few remaining pieces. They combine the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle and paint the rest themselves. This is a fraught business, yet the researchers are as brash as a bull in a China shop.

The exhibition highlights the pitfalls of such an approach in one memorable example. The researchers found a set of shards from wall art in Knossos. Placing them together, they piece together a purple, slender arm. They add extra pieces, meshing them together: Are those petals at the ends of the fingers? The team’s resident artist fills in the blanks and completes the missing fresco. The arms, he reasons, must belong to a child: he draws a child picking flowers. Later, however, further shards were found…the arms actually belonged to a monkey! Archaeology is miles more objective than mythological recreation, yet Evans and his team are often led astray. Dead ends, solid walls, long periods of backtracking.

The Ashmolean seems keen to point out these ironies, quietly suggesting that much of Knossos remains to be discovered. More fundamentally, they cast doubt onto the process of reconstruction, highlighting that it is susceptible to personal biases, rash conclusions, and misinterpretation.

This notion of reconstruction underpins the exhibition, and haunts Knossos itself. Knossosis reconstructed twice. Firstly, archaeologists try and recreate the site itself. They focus on the culture that developed it, drawing conclusions from its material remains. Secondly, they extrapolate how this site, a historical reality, inspired a mythical labyrinth. They wonder which parts of it became the hallmarks of the Labyrinth myth. Once Knossos is reconstructed, they must imagine how it was imagined. This entails strange, treacherous forays into the minds of long-gone creators and narrators: while the Labyrinth’s walls are the ridges of their thumbprint, their exact relationship with Knossos remains elusive.

For example, researchers unearthed a human sacrifice chamber. This allows them to reconstruct the site and its practices: they learn more about Knossos. Simultaneously, academics study the Labyrinth myth and point out that, in the story, human sacrifices were made to the Minotaur. They then imagine a link between the real sacrifice chambers, and the human sacrifice mentioned in the story. Then come reinterpretations of the myth: did it express the trauma of such practices? Why does the myth express the ache of an entire settlement in thrall to a monstrous influence? This dance of material and mythical reconstruction is enticing, and the Ashmolean lays it bare.

As I studied the relics on display, I was drawn to copy such efforts. The temptation to insert artefacts into the Minotaur myth was overwhelming. Many vases depicted octopi with their matted, inky tentacles splaying across terracotta. These vases grew more abstract over time: anatomical accuracy gave way to loose, simple forms. Ariadne’s thread, lacing through the Labyrinth, guiding Theseus home…a Greek poet discovering a shard in the dark, thumbing the twine-like tendrils on its surface, converting them into the silk of a lover…

The metaphor of the thread runs through the vaulted halls of this exhibition. Theseus followed it homeward: it led him from the maze to the light of day. We picture him standing over the slain Minotaur, in symbolic victory over (depending on who you ask) the bestial, the repressed, the uncivilised. The thread is the physical manifestation of intellect, ingenuity as a means of overcoming the incomprehensible Labyrinth. It allows him to retrace his path and survive. The metaphor must entrance every archaeologist at Knossos: following history’s thread backwards, navigating its looping, uncharted halls by the material guides left by our predecessors. The exhibit’s structure, leading us from initial uncertainty to the find, before pointing to the future of study at Knossos, presents a linear, methodical descent into history—a descent that will somehow lead us forward, allowing us to emerge from it.

With such an easy metaphor in hand, I picture a continuity between archaeologist and mythmaker. The question, then, is how directly does the thread run? Both archaeologist and storyteller delve into Knossos’ raw materials to weave a human narrative. Both extrapolate and interpret, despite modern aspirations to objectivity. Yet it seems difficult to equate archaeological study with mythological retelling. How can we reconcile the primitive energies of mythmaking with the scientific aspects of archaeological study?

I return to the beginning of the exhibition. Though it is mostly chronological, the exhibition begins with a set of contemporary artworks. We see a Picasso self-portrait, in which he depicts himself as a minotaur. He exploits the minotaur’s association with sexual shame, or unchecked desire. I think Picasso wrestles with the minotaur to consider the consequences of his urges, the ways in which they make him ugly or compelling, the unchecked musk of his infamous romantic appetite. There’s a measure of ego in it, sure, a sexual boastfulness…and he’s definitely making a myth (and a mess) of himself. For Picasso it’s all about the beast; the maze is nowhere to be seen, at least not in the work on display here.

There is also a marble sculpture of the minotaur, whose human proportions make the beast seem more pitiful than monstrous. The white marble is candle-flame yellow every time the adjacent animation loops. It retells the tale of the Labyrinth, a primer for unfamiliar audiences. Ayrton’s Minotaur is a tortured, contorted beast, glancing at its hand in what reads as a moment of dreadful sentience. Mark Wallinger’s artworks, created for London’s tube system, make the Labyrinth as abstract as those late-era Cretan octopi: we picture a writhing, complex maze beneath London’s high-rises. These works, ranging from the ancient to the modern, testify to the myth’s versatility and endurance. It is compelling to see the same figures reinvented time and again, since each artist finds new nooks of originality within the confines of an established myth.

These works highlight the myth’s persistence in the collective imagination. It continues to inspire works of art, literature and film. Even as Knossos is unveiled, it is the Labyrinth which continues to inspire reinvention: new myths, new works, new media. Archaeology has no monopoly on the maze.

These works testify to how art is, itself, a means of preservation. Would archaeologists have sought the ruins if not for the Minotaur myth’s enduring cultural prevalence? Myths function as the first mode of conservation, passing down the fictitious heritage that eventually led us to Knossos’ physical reality. Before the luxuries of modern archaeological technology, storytelling is one of our only ways to keep things alive. It is a precursor to archaeology and history: without it, the halls of that palace may have been lost for good.

Artistic methods of preservation bleed over into archaeology. Evans’ team leaned on sketches, portraits, and jigsaw-like mosaics of pottery shards. They were painters and assemblers, interpreters and narrators. Knowledge of this reminds us of the other narrator presiding over these artefacts—the museum itself. An exhibition is a narrative. It is sequential even as we explore it in non-linear fashion. It creates harmonies and contrasts, places emphases, and filters our perceptions with context and omissions. The storyteller is no longer a face over a fire but an amorphous web of placards, plexiglass and projections. The thread is continuous: myths preserve sites, guiding archaeologists to them, and then museums frame that archaeological inquiry in new narrative terms. In time, artists (including, perhaps, your humble reviewer) sift through the material—physical and mythical—for whatever suits their whims and kinks. I leave the exhibition finding no clashes between the ancient storytellers and the modern curator or archaeologist.

Enticing as the tale of Knossos is, the exhibition makes a few missteps. It should linger longer on its critique of Evans, especially when it comes to the heartbreaking tale of Minos Kalokairinos. Kalokairinos, a local, amateur archaeologist, pioneered the research in Knossos; yet he was shouldered out, and it was Evans who led the digs. This controversy is touched on far too fleetingly. As we interrogate the legacy of colonialism, stories like that of Evans and Kalokairinos deserve proper attention. The Ashmolean is perfectly positioned to study Sir Arthur Evans’ legacy: he was a former director of the museum. Sadly, the curators’ efforts to reckon with this legacy are more apparent in their tours of the press circuit than in the exhibition’s structure. In the exhibition itself, Kalokairinos fades after the second room, restaging his historic marginalisation.

Kalokairinos is described in the exhibition’s official catalogue as the first to find Knossos. He openly showed his findings to English visitors, including Evans, but was ultimately excluded from subsequent excavations. One wonders whether the conclusions reached by Kalokairinos and his fellow Cretans would be the same as those reached by Evans and his company. Knossos’ reconstruction was coloured by political and economic factors that may warp our understanding of the site itself. Unfortunately, those interested in these injustices will learn more from the exhibition catalogue than the displays at the Ashmolean.

The 16-minute projection at the end of the exhibition claims to study the role of curators critically, through a post-colonial lens, but its attacks are mainly levelled against the perceived sterility of exhibitions in general. It argues for tactile, sonorous reclamation of the artefacts, bringing them sonic force: pottery bursts on screen as an electronic voice reads a ghostly prose-poem. This is joyful, but does little to overtly criticise the colonial nature of England’s museum hordes. On my viewing, I struggled to see what the projection offered—beyond an amusing enough aesthetic exercise. The projection was not produced specifically for the Knossos exhibition, and doesn’t mesh organically with the rest of the displays.

I was also unconvinced by the inclusion of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, in a short video loop depicting the game’s version of the Labyrinth. Perhaps a bid to entice younger visitors, the clip is not interactive and therefore loses much of its value. Unable to explore the virtual maze, we are left with what amounts to a teaser trailer on repeat. This felt strangely advertorial, as though Ubisoft slipped the curators a wad of cash or a few Neolithic arrowheads. While it again testifies to the myth’s endurance, there’s scant insight into how the developers recreated the Labyrinth nor how they handle the myth. The developers’ passion is channelled more into faithful, meticulous reproduction of Knossos’ iconography and architecture than it is into thematic innovation. There’s no reinvention of the minotaur’s symbolic role as we see in the first gallery. Whether this matters to you or not depends on how you value their faithful reproductions, which are, for what it’s worth, completely commendable.