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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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