an "Place of the Double-Axe," like La-braunda in
Karia, where Zeus was depicted with a double axe (labrys) in his hand.
The non-Aryan, "Asianic," group of languages, to which certainly Lycian
and probably Karian belong, has been shown by the German philologer
Kretschmer to have spread over Greece into Italy in the period before
the Aryan Greeks entered Hellas, and to have left undoubted traces of
its presence in Greek place-names and in the Greek language itself.
Before the true Hellenes reached Crete, an Asianic dialect must have
been spoken there, and to this language the word "labyrinth" must
originally have belonged. The classical labyrinth was "in the Knossian
territory." The palace of Knossos was emphatically the chief seat of the
worship of a god whose emblem was the double-axe; it was the Knossian
"Place of the Double-Axe," the Cretan "Labyrinth."

It used to be supposed that the Cretan labyrinth had taken its name from
the Egyptian one, and the, word itself was supposed to be of Egyptian
origin. An Egyptian etymology was found for it as "_Ro-pi-ro-henet_,"
"Temple-mouth-canal," which might be interpreted, with some violence to
Egyptian construction, as "The temple at the mouth of the canal," i.e.
the Bahr Yusuf, which enters the Fayyum at Hawara. But unluckily this
word would have been pronounced by the natives of the vicinity as
"Elphilahune," which is not very much like

[Illustration: 126.jpg (Greek word)]

"_Ro-pi-ro-henet_" is, in fact, a mere figment of the philological
imagination, and cannot be proved ever to have existed. The element
_Ro-henet_, "canal-mouth" (according to the local pronunciation of the
Fayyum and Middle Egypt, called _La-hune_), is genuine; it is the
origin of the modern Illahun (_el-Lahun_), which is situated at the
"canal-mouth." However, now that we know that the word labyrinth can be
explained satisfactorily with the help of Karian, as evidently of Greek
(pre-Aryan) origin, and as evidently the original name of the Knossian
labyrinth, it is obvious that there is no need to seek a far-fetched
explanation of the word in Egypt, and to suppose that the Greeks called
the Cretan labyrinth after the Egyptian one.

The contrary is evidently the case. Greek visitors to Egypt found a
resemblance between the great Egyptian building, with its numerous halls
and corridors, vast in extent, and the Knossian palace. Even if very
little of the latter was visible in the classical period, as seem