The Minotaur had a real name: Asterion, meaning star
Before he was a monster in a maze, the Minotaur was Asterion, a name tied to the stars and shared with the foster-father of King Minos. A coin from Knossos shows him ringed by little balls that were probably meant as stars, with the Labyrinth stamped on the reverse.
The name Minotaur simply means Bull of Minos, joining the king's name to the Greek word tauros. His origin story is a chain of broken promises. Minos asked Poseidon for a snow-white bull as proof of divine favour, then kept the animal instead of sacrificing it. In revenge Poseidon, with Aphrodite's help, made the queen Pasiphaë desire the bull; the craftsman Daedalus built her a hollow wooden cow, and the child she bore had a bull's head on a human body. Because he fed on people, Minos, advised by the Delphic oracle, had Daedalus design a vast Labyrinth near the palace at Knossos to hold him.
Athens paid the price. Every version agrees that Minos's son Androgeus died through Athenian fault, though accounts disagree on how: jealous rivals after his wins at the Panathenaic Games, or the Cretan Bull at Marathon. Minos won a war of revenge, and seven young men and seven young women were sent to Crete as tribute, every nine years in the common telling, though some sources say every seven years or annually.
Theseus volunteered for the third shipment. Ariadne, the king's daughter, fell for him and gave him thread to trace his way back out; he killed the monster with a sword, a club or his fists, depending on the source. He then left Ariadne on Naxos and forgot to swap his black sail for the promised white one, so his father Aegeus, watching from Cape Sounion, assumed the worst and threw himself into the sea now called the Aegean.
Archaeology found Minos's palace but never a Labyrinth. The idea that the palace's warren of more than 1300 rooms inspired the myth is now largely rejected. Artists also flipped the creature: Ovid never said which half was bull, so medieval images sometimes put a man's torso on a bull's body. Only in twentieth-century fantasy did minotaurs become a whole race rather than one unique being.
Source: Minotaur
