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The Labyrinth at Hawara
In Egypt, there is an enigmatic labyrinth, greater and more lavish than even the pyramids, attested to by ancient classical sources which has attained almost legendary status in the Western world ever since Herodotus described it in his Histories:
"[T]hey caused to be made a labyrinth, situated a little above the lake of Moiris and nearly opposite to that which is called the City of Crocodiles. This I saw myself, and I found it greater than words can say. For if one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all the great works produced by the Hellenes, they would prove to be inferior in labour and expense to this labyrinth, though it is true that both the temple at Ephesos and that at Samos are works worthy of note. The pyramids also were greater than words can say, and each one of them is equal to many works of the Hellenes, great as they may be; but the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids. It has twelve courts covered in, with gates facing one another, six upon the North side and six upon the South, joining on one to another, and the same wall surrounds them all outside; and there are in it two kinds of chambers, the one kind below the ground and the other above upon these, three thousand in number, of each kind fifteen hundred. The upper set of chambers we ourselves saw, going through them, and we tell of them having looked upon them with our own eyes; but the chambers under ground we heard about only; for the Egyptians who had charge of them were not willing on any account to show them, saying that here were the sepulchres of the kings who had first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles. Accordingly we speak of the chambers below by what we received from hearsay, while those above we saw ourselves and found them to be works of more than human greatness. For the passages through the chambers, and the goings this way and that way through the courts, which were admirably adorned, afforded endless matter for marvel, as we went through from a court to the chambers beyond it, and from the chambers to colonnades, and from the colonnades to other rooms, and then from the chambers again to other courts. Over the whole of these is a roof made of stone like the walls; and the walls are covered with figures carved upon them, each court being surrounded with pillars of white stone fitted together most perfectly; and at the end of the labyrinth, by the corner of it, there is a pyramid of forty fathoms, upon which large figures are carved, and to this there is a way made under ground."
Herodotus describes it as a multi-tiered structure nearby a lake named "Moiris", with one set of chambers above the ground, and yet another set of chambers beneath it which outsiders were forbidden from entering due to housing the sepulchres of its kings. Just the surface level of this labyrinthine mortuary temple seems to have floored him to the extent he declared it superior to the pyramids, and superior to anything built by the Greeks. This labyrinth would also be described by the Greek geographer Strabo in his book Geographica 17, writing that at Lake Moeris there was a Labyrinth "comparable to the pyramids, and, near it, the tomb of the king who built the Labyrinth."
Despite likely never seeing this labyrinth himself, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus would go on to assert that the labyrinth was constructed by a native king named Mendes, who "did not accomplish anything at all, but he did build himself a tomb known as the Labyrinth,48 which was not so remarkable for its size as it was impossible to imitate in respect to its ingenious design; for a man who enters it cannot easily find his way out, unless he gets a guide who is thoroughly acquainted with the structure. 3 And some say that Daedalus, visiting Egypt and admiring the skill shown in the building, also constructed for Minos, the king of Crete, a labyrinth like the one in Egypt, in which was kept, as the myth relates, the beast called Minotaur. 4 However, the labyrinth in Crete has entirely disappeared, whether it be that some ruler razed it to the ground or that time effaced the work, but the one in Egypt has stood intact in its entire structure down to our lifetime." So he even goes as far as to claim that Knossos was inspired by the Egyptian labyrinth.
It seems that the structure has degraded significantly from the time of Diodorus to now, because this mighty labyrinth appears to have been long stripped from the Earth, and barely anything remains. The Jesuit priest Father Claude Sicard identified current-day Hawara as the likely location of the labyrinth, drawing extensively from ancient descriptions of the location. There is a lake at that location, albeit shrunken from the original size of Lake Moeris, and sure enough, there is also a pyramid there - the pyramid of Amenemhat III, which is likely the tomb which Strabo recounts in his description of the location. When archaeologists investigated the location, things seemed to match up satisfactorily - except for the labyrinth itself. There was almost no trace of it, and few archeological remains could be found near the site. Flinders Petrie, upon visiting the site in 1889, found an enormous 300m x 244m artificial stone plateau - apparently the foundation of the labyrinth - and suggested the original labyrinth had been quarried for stone. This was the archaeological consensus up until relatively recently.
The Mataha Expedition, a geophysical study conducted by the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, was carried out in March of 2008. It was done with the permission of Zahi Hawass, president of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and carried out with the support of Ghent University. They used ground-penetrating radar to examine the site at Hawara, and their research "confirms the presence of archaeological features at the labyrinth area south of the Hawara pyramid of Amenemhet III. These features covering an underground area of several hectares, have the prominent signature of vertical walls on the geophysical results. The vertical walls with an average thickness of several meters, are connected to shape nearly closed rooms, which are interpreted to be huge in number." This nexus of rooms and walls that they interpret as a labyrinth is completely submerged below the water table at this point, and above it there is a much more haphazard set of observations which appear to be decayed mudbrick features - likely the remains of a Roman settlement. In between the two layers of this underground structure there is the large stone slab identified by Petrie, and the authors posit that this was not the foundation of the structure, but its roof instead. Upon presentation of the scan results at the Ghent University public lecture, Hawass requested that the team stop communicating their results, "intimidating the Mataha Expedition team members with Egyptian National Security sanctions."
In other words, the Labyrinth of Hawara may have been quietly rediscovered over 17 years ago, and this find seems to have been buried in a way where it has gotten almost no mainstream attention. As far as I can tell the original study that located the labyrinth released to nothing but deafening silence, with only a small handful of obscure tabloids covering it. The most mainstream it's ever been was when Joe Rogan hosted a content creator in his podcast who brought attention to the possible discovery, and that's pretty much the most high-profile coverage it's ever gotten. No proper front-page coverage in mainstream media outlets. Nothing that would bring it to the attention of your average Joe on the street.
Meanwhile, the results of the Mataha Expedition have been independently reconfirmed multiple times now. In 2010, the authors of a study named "VLF-EM study for archaeological investigation of the labyrinth mortuary temple complex at Hawara area, Egypt" applied VLF-EM (very low frequency electromagnetic method) techniques to the site at Hawara, and found subsurface features consistent with descriptions by Herodotus. "[S]omewhat elongated and square filtered in-phase VLF-EM anomalies can be observed. They are approximately oriented in the SE-NW and NE-SW directions. These anomalies are produced from alternative positive (good conductors) and negative (bad conductors) peaks. These linear features may be interpreted as the remains of the labyrinth, which was described by Herodotus (II, 148–9): the visitor was guided from courtyards into rooms into galleries into more rooms and from there into more courtyards. Strabo (ca. 64 BC–19 AD) also described the labyrinth as hidden chambers, which are long and large in number and have paths running through one another that twist and turn." The location map they provide confirms this to be the very same structure the Mataha expedition analysed.
In 2023, yet another paper was written about it summarising the results of both the Mataha expedition and the VLF-EM studies, and supplementing that with further evidence. According to this author, there was even a 3d reconstruction of the subsurface features at some point, revealing at least two levels to the structure, but no accompanying scientific paper detailing their methodology was ever published, making it difficult to substantiate or check their findings. The author presents results from his studies of the site with Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar, where he finds the following: "Below the pyramid in what is believed to be a mortuary complex are at least three returns that are rectangular in shape. One of the delineated regions (B) is about 275,000 sq. feet – almost the estimated size as the rectangular area excavated by Petrie. Another region (C) may be the continuation of the above structure. A second rectangular area (D) west of the Abdul Wahbi canal is also evident in the SAR image. The lack of visible structures in Google Earth imagery over these areas suggests the possibility that these returns could be subsurface features." Note though that this specific study is using SAR, which is cost-effective but has extremely low subsurface penetration and is far from the best tool to detect extensive underground structures, so this must be taken alongside all the other evidence and not in isolation.
A more thorough study with a better setup for the task was conducted in 2024 using electrical resistivity tomography, which is a non-invasive geophysical technique that creates images of the subsurface using the spatial distribution of electrical resistivity within the ground. They found that "Based on the resultant ERT profiles conducted at the area and its surroundings and the extracted resistivity values across different profiles, it has been realized that the ERT profiles that cross the labyrinth area south of the pyramid show areas of very high resistivity values that appear in purple color and high resistivity values that appear in orange and yellow colors. These values could indicate an empty volume (Open cavity, Shafts, Halls, Rooms,…etc) that may reflect the presence of possible subsurface archaeological remains, as pointed by arrows in Figs (4 to 7)."
It really strikes me just how possibly staggering these findings are, yet they're completely unknown by your average member of the public - at least one that isn't highly interested in archaeology or Egyptology. If it's actually the site attested to by the ancient Greeks, this might well be one of the most interesting unexcavated sites from antiquity I've seen (second only to Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum), and hopefully more work will be done to preserve and investigate it in the future. And hopefully it gets opened to the public within my lifetime. I for one would like to be able to follow in the footsteps of Herodotus and see the remains of this massive mortuary temple with my own eyes.
EDIT: added more studies, clarified certain methodological points
More content like this please.
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I mean, this is one of those things thats easy to write off as ‘yeah, Herodotus says a lot of things’. And that raises the question of how much stuff gets dismissed by mainstream academia out of laziness and egos. Not big stuff, I’m sure- timecube is almost certainly false- but stuff like this.
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Fascinating. I don't really have a hot take on this, but thanks for bringing it up.
Of course it's worth bearing in mind that Heroditus was called "the father of lies" since he's not the most reliable source. Also it kind of stretches belief there could be something there much larger than even the pyramids, and then disappear without a trace. but it seems like other classical writers also visited there and wrote about it. So maybe there is something there, just smaller than Heroditus wrote, and it sank below the water line to where no one could access it?
why would they even build such a giant labyrinth? I've been in hedge mazes before and they were genuinely confusing, at least for someone without a phone or a compass. They're talking about one hundreds of meters long, with very tall thick walls... you could get completely lost and die in something like that.
a shame that Egypt can't do a better job allowing academic research to these places. But I can appreciate the bind they're in... a very poor nation, with a history of foreign archaeologists destroying their monuments, and also a hotbed of religious strife that might react poorly to sudden discoveries of ancient relics from a heretical religion.
My impression is that description is unfair, and that he's been vindicated on many of his most outlandish-seeming claims
https://www.historiascripta.org/classical-antiquity/when-herodotus-was-right-archaeology-vindicates-the-father-of-history/
Sure, it's an exaggeration, and he's definitely still a useful source. He's just a source who liked to exagerate a lot, even by the standards of ancient historians. He could be right about the existance of it but exagerate how big it was. Like he described Xerxes' army as numbering in the millions, so big it it drank an entire river dry in one day... probably not the real number there.
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I thought it wasn't so much that as Zahi Hawass ego standing in the way.
Well, there's probably a lot of that that too. But I can see why anyone who's in charge of Egypt's ministry of antiquities would want the work done by their own people, instead of handing it all off to foreigners. And they would probably want a very slow, careful approach (what's a few more decades when these things have been around for thousands of years) rather than trying to build the career of whatever young hotshot wants to go digging right now.
Perhaps the buried lede is that Egypt wants to do it themselves but don’t currently have the technical chops or funding to pull it off - especially if it would require pumping out water without making the whole thing collapse?
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So why the opposition to non-invasive research?
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I followed youtuber Metatron who spoke about that couple of months ago. As for "average member of public", they may be more aware than you think - except they maybe know more about it Ancient Aliens style.
Watching the video, he's talking about a completely different thing - he's addressing the recent sensationalised claims of megastructures under the pyramid of Giza using SAR, where skepticism is absolutely warranted. As Metatron notes, the original study does not even really talk about any of the supposed "thousands of metres" deep structures and there are many reasons to doubt that their methodology could detect anything that deep - nevertheless, everyone has publicised these claims in spite of their questionable nature and a lack of historical documentation attesting to any of these structures.
OTOH the proposed location of the labyrinth is nowhere near Giza, it was a much older find, and is completely unrelated to this controversy.
Okay, I stand corrected and embarrassed. I will leave the comment as mark of my shame :D
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Fascinating. Thanks for posting this.
Do you think the Egyptians are trying to keep this buried in order to protect the world from a cursed undead Mummy?
I think it's more likely that Zahi Hawass is throwing his weight around until he gets some credit for the find.
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