[issybird]

Minos, a bronze-age king who ruled over the city-state Knossos in Crete, wasn't one for winning hearts and minds. According to Greek mythology, he'd regularly (possibly as often as every year – accounts differ) throw 14 kids to the minotaur in his labyrinth, built by Daedalus, whom he also locked up. He had a mechanical giant who patrolled the shore outside his palace.

He was also real, according to Arthur Evans, an English archaeologist who unearthed an ancient palace with a maze of interconnected rooms at Knossos in 1900. Inside the palace were hundreds of clay tablets written in a script that had never been seen before. The tablets dated to about 1450BC – seven centuries before the Greek alphabet existed – making them the earliest examples of writing ever found in Europe. But if there were revelations in these texts about Minos, they were locked away.