A labyrinth in the strict sense is unicursal, a single, non-branching path that winds to a centre and back, with no dead ends and no choices, which distinguishes it from a maze, multicursal and designed to confuse with forks and false turns; the two are routinely conflated in ordinary speech though the geometry is entirely different. The classical seven-circuit design is remarkably stable and remarkably old, appearing on a clay tablet from Pylos around 1200 BCE, on Cretan coins, in rock carvings and as graffiti at Pompeii, across cultures with no apparent contact with one another. The same essential pattern recurs worldwide as stone Troy Towns in Scandinavia, in the American Southwest among the Tohono O'odham as the Man in the Maze, and in South Indian kolam threshold drawings, under many names and evidently arrived at independently more than once rather than diffused from one source, a point that qualifies any claim of a single unbroken lineage stretching back to the Bronze Age.
The word itself is older than the unicursal figure it now names: Herodotus and later Greek writers used labyrinthos for a real multi-chambered building complex near Hawara in Egypt, a sprawling funerary and administrative structure of many rooms that Herodotus, who claimed to have visited it, judged more impressive than the pyramids, a building whose confusing plan, not the later garden and pavement figure, is the origin sense of the word maze-builders and mythographers alike inherited.