Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Labyrinth was designed and built by Daedalus, the mythological artificer, on the orders of King Minos of Crete at Knossos. Its purpose was to contain the Minotaur. Daedalus found the structure so cunningly made that he could barely escape it himself after completing the work.
The most prominent candidate is the Bronze Age palace at Knossos, proposed by archaeologist Arthur Evans after his excavations there in the early twentieth century. A competing site is a network of tunnels at Gortyn, which has smooth walls and columns suggesting partial human construction, and is marked with a labyrinth symbol on a sixteenth-century map of Crete held at Christ Church, Oxford. Oxford geographer Nicholas Howarth argued in the 2000s that Evans's Knossos hypothesis should be treated sceptically.
In contemporary specialized usage, a maze is a multicursal puzzle with branching paths, dead ends, and multiple route choices, while a unicursal labyrinth has a single unambiguous path to the center and back with no navigational challenge. In general English, the two terms are synonymous; the distinction arises from the long history of depicting the mythological Labyrinth as a single-path design, a convention that began on Cretan coins as early as 430 BC.
Labyrinth is a word of pre-Greek origin whose exact derivation is uncertain. Maximillian Mayer proposed in 1892 that it derives from labrys, a Lydian word for double-bladed axe, and Arthur Evans connected it to the double-axe carvings at Knossos. That etymology lost support after Linear B was deciphered in the 1950s; scholar Beekes considers the labrys link speculative and instead suggests a connection to the Greek laura, meaning "narrow street."
The great medieval cathedral labyrinths were pavement designs laid into the floors of Gothic cathedrals, most famously at Chartres, Reims, and Amiens in northern France, during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. Their exact purpose is unclear and may have varied; descriptions survive of French clerics performing a ritual Easter dance along the path. The phrase "chemin de Jerusalem," suggesting use as a pilgrimage substitute, is first attested only in the late eighteenth century.
The labyrinth has appeared across modern art and literature from Pablo Picasso's Minotauromachy (1935) to M. C. Escher's Relativity (1953). Jorge Luis Borges used it extensively in his short stories, inspiring Umberto Eco and Mark Z. Danielewski among others. Mark Wallinger created 270 enamel labyrinth plaques, one for each London Underground station, installed over a sixteen-month period in 2013 and 2014 to mark the Underground's hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary.