what was the riddle of the gordian knot? please help:)?

Answer 1

it was an impossible knot to untie. Alexander the great cut it with a knife.

-sometimes you just have to foresake finesse to succeed with force.

Answer 2

It was not a riddle, it was a problem. The problem could only be solved by untying the Gordian knot. Alexander the Great came along and was told of this problem. He looked at the knot, took his sword out and cut the knot in two. One of the earliest examples of "thinking outside the box."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot

Answer 3

Alexander the great solved that problem. The Gordian Knot was surmised by King Midas. As a reminder of his good fortune, to thank the gods for his rule, and to celebrate the end of aimless wandering for the Phrygians, Midas erected a shrine and dedicated his waggon to Zeus. Instead of being yoked to an ox, Midas placed his waggon in the center of the acropolis yoked to a pole with a large knot. Curiously, the knot was an intricate and complex Turkish knot, having no ends exposed. Hundreds of tightly interwoven thongs of cornel-bark made the knot an impressive centerpiece for the shrine. There it remained as an important symbol for the Phrygians.

Month after month the bark hardened, and stories grew up around the shrine. It was eventually moved and housed near the temple of Zeus Basileus in an ancient city called Gordium, ruled by Midas’ father Gordius. Gordius, being the proud father that he was, encouraged the lore about his son’s now famous shrine. People speculated as to its purpose. Most regarded it as a curious puzzle. Eventually, an oracle foretold that whoever loosed the Gordian Knot would lord over the whole of Asia. The lore grew and grew.

Over the years people living near Gordium looked upon their puzzle relic with great pride. It became quite a tourist attraction and generated lots of revenue for local business. Residents considered it the duty of every wanderer to visit their shrine and attempt to solve their puzzle. They regarded it as extremely unlucky for visitors to leave their city without trying to loose the knot.

It was eventually solved by Alexander the Great- he cut through it wtih his sword. The moral being one of two things..1. You have to cheat to win, or 2. sometimes the most complicated problem is solved with a simple answer.

Answer 4

The Gordian Knot is a legend associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem, solved by a bold stroke ("cutting the Gordian knot").

The legend
According to a Phrygian tradition, an oracle at Telmissus, the ancient capital of Phrygia, decreed to the Phrygians, who found themselves temporarily without a legitimate king, that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king. Midas, a poor peasant, happened to drive into town with his father Gordias and his mother, riding on his father's ox-cart. Before Midas' birth, an eagle had once landed on that ox-cart, and this was explained as a sign from the gods. Midas was declared a king by the priests. In gratitude, he dedicated his father's ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios, whom the Greeks identified with Zeus, and either tied it to a post or tied its shaft with an intricate knot of cornel (Cornus mas) bark. It was further prophesied by an oracle that the one to untie the knot would become the king of Asia.

The ox-cart, often depicted as a chariot, was an emblem of power and constant military readiness. It still stood in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia at Gordium in the 4th century BC when Alexander arrived, at which point Phrygia had been reduced to a satrapy of the Persian Empire.

In 333 BC, wintering at Gordium, Alexander attempted to untie the knot. When he could find no end to the knot, to unbind it, he sliced it in half with a stroke of his sword, producing the required ends (the so-called "Alexandrian solution"). Some traditions dispute this, and say that he pulled the knot out of its pole pin, rather than cutting it. Either way, Alexander did go on to conquer parts of Asia.

The knot may in fact have been a religious knot-cipher guarded by Gordium's priests and priestesses. Robert Graves suggested that it may have symbolized the ineffable name of Dionysus that, enknotted like a cipher, would have been passed on through generations of priests and revealed only to the kings of Phrygia.

Unlike fable, true myth has few completely arbitrary elements. This myth taken as a whole seems designed to confer legitimacy upon a dynastic change in this central Anatolian kingdom. To judge from the myth, apparently the new dynasty was not immemorially ancient, but had widely remembered origins in a local, but non-priestly "outsider" class, represented by the peasant Gordias in his oxcart. Other Greek myths legitimize dynasties by right of conquest (compare Cadmus), but the legitimizing oracle in this myth suggests that the previous dynasty had been a race of priest-kings allied to the oracle deity.

Answer 5

No one could untie it, so the hero cut it with his sword to undo it.

Answer 6

Go on the internet and search for the answer...http://gknot.doom9.org/

Answer 7

Huh? I unno

Answer 8

no