Other mazes

Intro --- Pre-maze --- Cretan --- Roman --- Chartres --- Turf --- Garden --- Other --- Design --- Designer

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learnt to walk. Cyril Connolly (1903-1974)

Ancient and modern mazes and patterns

Cretan coin maze
Book of Kells pattern
Soboba Hemet Maze
Giovanni Fontana's maze
Gonzaga maze
Bristol water maze
Warren Street maze
'A' maze

Ideas about mazes

Bead maze
Couple walking and building

My own mazes

Bathroom maze
Rose maze
Mazes with 4 entrances
Octagonal mazes
Other mazes

Coin from Crete

We have already seen some Cretan coins with Cretan mazes on. This coin also comes from Crete, dated about 500 BC. It shows the minotaur (a man with the head of a bull) on one side, and a branching maze on the other. Unfortunately the details are not clear, but I've tried to work out what the maze might be.

One problem, as with all mazes, is to work out what is a path and what a wall. If you have been following my conventions, you may deduce that my plans is giving what I think are the walls. You may disagree, and you may also disagree with the lines that I have drawn. Also you will see that the proportions are different. I was trying to find some sort of symmetry or pattern (and failed miserably!) There are some interesting elements to this design, which you can also see in the coin.

There seem to be four square rooms in the corners, which you can't get into. There is also one room in the middle, which I think you can. Also, I suspect that the rectangle at the bottom (in the middle) is the door to the labyrinth. In a modern plan, this would merely be a gap in the wall, but ancient maps often gave front views of an object as well as views from above. I think this is a branching maze. I can't make it into a unicursal maze however I look at it. You can't describe it as a beautiful design. However, it is interesting, since it is a very early puzzle maze diagram (in fact, an island maze), and shows that not all Cretan mazes are of the Cretan form.

Book of Kells pattern

The magnificent Book of Kells has many patterns in it. One of the main figure paintings (probably Christ) has two green roundels near its base. It is not a maze, since there is no entrance or exit. However, once you are in it, if you imagine weaving over or under at the centre, you can travel on it forever. You travel one quarter before going onto the next, like Roman mazes. The Book of Kells is dated about 790-830 AD. It is kept in Trinity College, Dublin.

Soboba Hemet Maze

Richard M. Smith has drawn my attention to a maze from California. Here is the Soboba Hemet Maze Stone from Western Riverside county, California. I'm not too sure about his interpretation, so I've added my own - a meander rather than a maze, since there is no start or finish. I'm not sure of its date. It's described as prehistoric, but in America this merely means pre-European.

Soboba maze

Giovanni Fontana's maze

I have picked up references about this maze from internet, so don't know how reliable it is. This is supposed to be the oldest design of a branching maze, drawn in the diary of a Venetian physician named Giovanni Fontana (but see the coin, above). He read the myth of Theseus, and couldn't see how the existing drawn mazes were relevant, since they were unicursal, and so you couldn't get lost, and did not need a thread to find your way out. (I quite agree.) So he invented one! This happened in 1420, or 1395, the sources disagree. If you look at the possible paths to the centre, you can see that this is an island maze. If you take the right path, you ignore most of the maze altogether.

Gonzaga mazes

The maze on the left is from a painting by Bartolommeo Veneto (1502-1546) called Portrait of a Gentleman. The maze is on the front of the gentleman's tunic. It looks as if it's painted on, but it might be embroidered. It is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK). The maze is partly obscured by the gentleman's hand and clothes, so you can only see most of two arms and part of the third. The museum mentions that "the labyrinth is a Gonzaga symbol". The Gonzaga were an Italian family who ruled Mantua from 1328 to 1707. In Hamlet, there is a reference to an Italian king Gonzago.

The maze looks a bit like a Chartres design, but the details that we can see are different. It looks a little like the Gonzaga ceiling maze as well, but again, it's different. Of course, the artist may have made some mistakes!

There is a Gonzaga garden maze as well.

Bristol water maze

Bristol has a modern version of the Chartres maze inspired by the St Mary Redcliff roof boss. This is in Victoria Park and is shown on the right. The pathway is a channel of water from the spring that supplied St Mary's Conduit, an old water supply of Bristol. Since it is a Chartres design, it is a unicursal maze, without choices or branches. This maze is obviously modern, but I'm not sure exactly when it was built.

Modern turf mazes

Please note that modern designs are copyright, and if you wish to use them, you should contact their creator.

Warren Street maze

Warren Street station was opened as Euston Road by the CCE&HR on 22 June 1907. It was renamed less than a year later. Warren Street takes its name from Anne Warren, who was married to Charles Fitzroy, Baron Southampton, who was another landowner in the area. Warren Street itself was built in 1799.

The Victoria line was built in 1967 as an extention to the London Underground, usually called the Tube. Most of the stations on the line already existed, but new platforms were built. These included mosaics. This maze design is an island maze.

The Warren Street mosaic is by Alan Fletcher of Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes (forerunner of Pentagram Design Ltd), who chose a maze for passengers to while away the name until the next train. The artist noted that the average train interval was 3 minutes, and he tried to create a labyrinth which would be difficult to do in under 4 minutes. The maze is a visual pun of the station name. A warren was originally where rabbits were kept, but has come to mean a collection of confusing paths, like rabbit burrows.
(My thanks to London Transport Museum for this information and to Walter Pullen for a more accurate design above than mine!)

'A' Maze

Alice Garrard of Connecticut, USA designed this maze for her quilt group's annual challenge in 2006. The challenge was Amazement. Naturally, she thought of mazes, and then of this, an 'A' maze. She designed a maze out of the letter A and superimposed it on a circular maze. The quilt is 28 inches by 41 inches. She says that it was great fun to do! The 'A' is an island maze.

Ideas about mazes

A bead maze

Karen Robinson has evolved a wonderful way of walking a maze without even having the maze there. She is interested in rosaries and prayer beads, and suggests making up a string of beads which represent a maze, You then walk as directed by the beads. Her beads for the Chartres maze are given on her labyrinth webpage. Her webpage on prayer beads is also interesting.

Couple walking and building

Margaret Calderon has come up with two interesting ideas. She suggests walking through a unicursal maze as a pair, hand-in-hand. The clasped hands are over the 'path' of the maze at all times, so the people will really be walking on top of the 'walls' - best done on a flat maze, like a turf maze! At some points, one partner will stand still as the other walks round the edge of a 'double-back'.

The other idea was to base a maze round a building. She has based two mazes around the Wisconsin Capitol, a cruciform building with a dome. By choosing her path around the various features carefully, she can walk the maze. Here is a 3-circuit 'baby' Chartres. She says that since the paths aren't marked, it's easy to get lost, and a well-designed string of beads may help.

My own mazes

Bathroom Maze

I decided to paint a maze on my bathroom tiles. I wanted the maze to be a unicursal one, and interesting to look at rather than complicated. I came up with the design on the left, which is the path of the maze. The tiles were 6 inches square (15 cms). First I painted them with tile paint. I decided that the paths and walls should be 1.5 inches wide, so four fitted inside a tile. I managed to find some masking tape which was exactly the right width. Using the edges of the tiles as a guide, I masked the walls of the maze (on the right above) with the tape, and then it was easy to paint the paths. The result is on the right.

Mazes with four entrances

Someone asked me for a labyrinth with 4 entrances. While I don't know of any traditional mazes like this, it was fun to invent a few.

The simplest maze of all with four entrances is a four way spiral, which is attractive, but perhaps people would not think it complicated enough for a maze. It has the feel of a mandala. If you joined up pairs of paths in the centre, you create a maze with two entrances and two exits. Spirals have been used since before history began.

For a more complicated maze, the obvious place to start is the Roman maze, since it is already designed in 4 quarters. The maze on the left takes a standard pattern, and makes each quarter into its own maze. This leads to a more symmetrical and pleasing pattern. You could use any other Roman pattern, and perhaps even have different patterns in each quarter. You could also smooth out the corners to make a circular maze. The draw-back is that it is rather boring to walk, since each walker does not go outside his quarter of the maze.

Below is an attempt to interleave the different paths. I call it the Rose pattern, because it reminds me of the way rose petals fold into each other. This would be more obvious if I could draw it smoother.

The red pattern on the left shows the paths, the blue pattern in the middle, the walls. The colouring on the right shows the different paths.

This is a pattern based on a Greek key, so I call it the Key pattern. The paths interlock more. Again, the coloured pattern, on the left, show the four paths. The square shape makes it look completely different from the Rose pattern.

Rose maze

After making the rose maze above, I tried a pattern which looked more like a rose (see left). The red lines give the path. There are gaps, which makes it a branching maze with only one route to the centre. On the right, I have shown the dead-ends in green. There are a lot of them, but they are all quite short. You could join up the gaps and put them elsewhere to make a different maze.

Octagonal Maze

Someone asked me for a design of an octagon maze. You can make square mazes (like the Roman mazes) into an octagonal design by cutting off the corners and joining up the ends. Or you can repeat the quarter design eight times. On the left I have adapted the simplest Roman design to make a medallion pattern. There is a real mosaic very like this but round rather than octagonal. On the right is a Roman octagonal maze with four different paths.

Chartres octagonal mazes exist, but with as ordinary Chartres mazes made into a square, and then with the four corners chopped off. You could make a true 8-fold patter, with 7 arms the same and just the entrance arm different.