Minotaur

CREATURE
Minotaur
Location	Labyrinth, Crete (Formerly) Risen Island, Thera

The Minotaur was an ancient creature of legend from the time of the Minoan civilization with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

Biography

The Minotaur was the son the Cretan bull and a queen of the Minoan civilization. Minos, the king of Crete and a child of Zeus, imprisoned the Minotaur in an extensive Labyrinth at Knossos where it fed on humans. Theseus journeyed into the Labyrinth and slayed the Minotaur.

The creature was entombed in a three-meters-long stone sarcophagus in the cave of a small island off the coast of Thera, with a bronze amulet around its neck and golden bull-shaped mask placed on its head. At some point, the Minotaur's burial chamber was decorated with violent red-stained imagery of the Minotaur devouring its victims as well as the lone depiction of a warrior ripping the amulet from the creature inside a representation of the eight stones arranged in a circle which stood at the center of the island.

However, around 1500 BC, the Minotaur's remains were submerged along with the rest of the island during a cataclysmic volcanic eruption at Thera, in the decades just prior to the Minoan civilization itself being wiped out.

Legacy

Eventually a violent cult called the New Dorians appeared in Greece which made human sacrifices to the Minotaur. However, Indiana Jones alerted the authorities to their activities.

Around the 1930s, an earthquake at Thera caused the burial site of the Minotaur to resurface, drawing the attention of scholars and adventurers. A group of adventurers journeyed to the island to catalog the find but Dr. Albert Ortelius, an unethical archaeologist, was also present as he was keen to prove the existence of the Minotaur.

Back from the dead.

When the adventurers visited the sea cave tomb of the Minotaur, they discovered the creature had been revived with the island. While its human form was covered in bandages, beneath the gold mask the flesh from its head had come away leaving nothing but two living eyes in the sockets of a bovine skull. The group managed to stop the hungry creature by recreating the warrior imagery on the cave wall and removed the amulet. However, they were forced to leave the island as it began to sink back under the waves.

During their research of worldwide artifacts for the Smithsonian in the early 1930s, an unknown archaeologist noted that a string of recent disappearances on Crete were being attributed to the Minotaur.

In 1936, Indiana Jones, along with Marion Ravenwood, re-encountered the New Dorians on Crete and sought shelter in a tunnel. There, they found themselves face to face with a hulking Minotaur but during his battle with the creature, Jones discovered that this Minotaur was nothing more than a man in disguise albeit a still formidable opponent.

Three years later, when he had returned to Crete with Sophia Hapgood while chasing clues to Atlantis, Jones dismissed the story of the Minotaur as a nonsensical, primitive fiction.

Behind the scenes

In Greek mythology, the Minotaur is the son of Pasiphaë, Minos' wife, but she is not directly identified as the Minoan queen mentioned in Indiana Jones sources.

In "The Search for Abner", Indiana Jones claims that the Minotaur is the son of Minos himself.

Indiana Jones and the Lands of Adventure leaves the narrative open for players to encounter more than one Minotaur as well as the possibility of the bronze amulet being the source from which the creature was transformed into the Minotaur.

Appearances

•  The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones – "The Search for Abner" (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Eye of the Fates (Mentioned only)
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis comic (Mentioned only)

Sources

• Nepal Nightmare
• Indiana Jones Explores Ancient Greece (Non-fiction source)
• Indiana Jones and the Lands of Adventure
• Indiana Jones Artifacts

External links

• Minotaur on Wikipedia