Minos. In Greek mythology, Minos was the first King of Crete, son of Zeus and Europa. Every nine years, he made King Aegeus pick seven young boys and seven young girls to be sent to Daedalus's creation, the labyrinth, to be eaten by the Minotaur. After his death, Minos became a judge of the dead in the underworld. The Minoan civilization of Crete has been named after him by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. Minos is often interpreted as the Cretan word for king, or, by a euhemerist interpretation, the name of a particular king that was subsequently used as a title. There is a name in Minoan Linear A mi-nu-te that may be related to Minos. According to La Marle's reading of Linear A, which has been heavily criticised as arbitrary, we should read mwi-nu ro-ja on a Linear A tablet. The royal title ro-ja is read on several documents, including on stone libation tables from the sanctuaries, where it follows the name of the main god, Asirai. La Marle suggests that the name mwi-nu is expected to mean ascetic as Sanskrit muni, and fits this explanation to the legend about Minos sometimes living in caves on Crete. If royal succession in Minoan Crete descended matrilinearly, from the queen to her firstborn daughter, the queen's husband would have become the Minos, or war chief. Some scholars see a connection between Minos and the names of other ancient founder-kings, such as Menes of Egypt, Mannus of Germany, and Manu of India, and even with Meon of Phrygia and Lydia, Mizraim of Egypt in the Book of Genesis and the Canaanite deity Baal. Minos appears in Greek literature as the king of Knossos as early as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Thucydides tells us Minos was the most ancient man known to build a navy. He reigned over Crete and the islands of the Aegean Sea three generations before the Trojan War. He lived at Knossos for periods of nine years, where he received instruction from Zeus in the legislation which he gave to the island. He was the author of the Cretan constitution and the founder of its naval supremacy. On the Athenian stage Minos is a cruel tyrant, the heartless exactor of the tribute of Athenian youths to feed to the Minotaur; in revenge for the death of his son Androgeus during a riot. To reconcile the contradictory aspects of his character, as well as to explain how Minos governed Crete over a period spanning so many generations, two kings of the name of Minos were assumed by later poets and rationalizing mythologists, such as Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch, putting aside the mythological element, as he claims, in his life of Theseus. According to this view, the first King Minos was the son of Zeus and Europa and brother of Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon. This was the 'good' king Minos, and he was held in such esteem by the Olympian gods that, after he died, he was made one of the three 'Judges of the Dead', alongside his brother Rhadamanthys and half-brother Aeacus. The wife of this 'Minos I' was said to be Itone or Crete, and he had a single son named Lycastus, his successor as King of Crete. Lycastus had a son named Minos, after his grandfather, born by Lycastus' wife, Ida, daughter of Corybas. This 'Minos II', the 'bad' king Minos, is the son of this Lycastus, and was a far more colorful character than his father and grandfather. It would be to this Minos that we owe the myths of Theseus, Pasiphaë, the Minotaur, Daedalus, Glaucus, and Nisus. Unlike Minos I, Minos II fathered numerous children, including Androgeus, Catreus, Deucalion, Ariadne, Phaedra, and Glaucus, all born to him by his wife Pasiphaë. Through Deucalion, he was the grandfather of King Idomeneus, who led the Cretans to the Trojan War. Doubtless there is a considerable historical element in the legend, perhaps in the Phoenician origin of Europa; it is possible that not only Athens, but Mycenae itself, were once culturally bound to the kings of Knossos, as Minoan objects appear at Mycenaean sites. Minos himself is said to have died at Camicus in Sicily, where he had gone in pursuit of Daedalus, who had given Ariadne the clue by which she guided Theseus through the labyrinth. He was killed by the daughter of Cocalus, king of Agrigentum, who poured boiling water over him while he was taking a bath. Subsequently his remains were sent back to the Cretans, who placed them in a sarcophagus, on which was inscribed: The tomb of Minos, the son of Zeus. The earlier legend knows Minos as a beneficent ruler, legislator, and suppressor of piracy. His constitution was said to have formed the basis of that of Lycurgus for Sparta.