The Minotaur belongs to a single Cretan story. Minos withheld from Poseidon a bull owed in sacrifice; the god caused Minos's wife Pasiphae to conceive by the animal, and the bull-headed child, named Asterion, was shut in the Labyrinth built by Daedalus and fed on youths and maidens sent as tribute from Athens. Theseus kills it and escapes the maze by the thread of Ariadne. Apollodorus and Ovid transmit the tale, and Plutarch preserves rationalising ancient attempts to explain it away.
From 1900 the archaeologist Arthur Evans excavated the Bronze Age palace at Knossos, whose scale, complexity and pervasive bull imagery, the sport of bull-leaping appears in its frescoes, he connected to the labyrinth legend and to a civilisation he named "Minoan" after Minos. The relationship is one of resonance rather than proof: the myth is not a memory of the palace, but the palace shows the bull-culture out of which such a myth could grow.