Labyrinth of Egypt

The Labyrinth of Egypt was built at Hawara by Amenemhat III, who ruled c. 1800 BC as the sixth pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty.

[1][2] Karl Richard Lepsius also discovered cartouches bearing the name of Amenemhat's daughter, Sobekneferu,[2] suggesting that she made additions to the complex's decorations during her reign as king of Egypt.

Near the corner where the labyrinth ends stands a pyramid two hundred and forty feet high, on which great figures are cut.

[This king] built [the labyrinth with] this number of aulae, because it was the custom for all the nomes to assemble there together according to their rank, with their own priests and priestesses, for the purpose of performing sacrifices and making offerings to the gods, and of administering justice in matters of great importance.

[11] In the first part of the first century AD, the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela discussed the Labyrinth in his work Chorographia,[12][8] and later that century, Pliny the Elder described the structure in his Naturalis Historia, writing: There is still in Egypt ... a labyrinth, which was the first constructed, three thousand six hundred years ago, they say, by King Petesuchis or Tithöes: although, according to Herodotus, the entire work was the production of no less than twelve kings, the last of whom was Psammetichus.

With such solidity is this huge mass constructed, that the lapse of ages has been totally unable to destroy it, seconded as it has been by the people of Heracleopolites, who have marvelously ravaged a work which they have always held in abhorrence.

[22] Two centuries later, in a volume of Description de l'Égypte (1821), Philippe Joseph Marie Caristie [fr] and Edme-François Jomard discussed the location of the Labyrinth in an extended consideration of the Hawara site; Eric P. Uphill has thus argued that Jomard and Caristie's chapter was consequently "the first published description of ... the Labyrinth site [that] distinguish[ed] the salient features [of the structure] correctly".

In 1843, the Prussian Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius excavated the area around the Pyramid of Amenemhat III at Hawara and, after uncovering the remnants of a series of brick chambers, argued that he had positively identified the location of the famed labyrinth.

However, as W. H. Matthews notes:The data furnished by [Lepsius and his associates] were not altogether of a convincing character, and it was felt that further evidence was required before their conclusions could be accepted.

[27]In 1888, the British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie examined the brick chambers that Lepsius had uncovered and determined that they were the remnants of a Greco-Roman town that had been constructed on top of the labyrinth's ruins.

A reconstruction of the Labyrinth of Egypt's western portion ( center ). The structure itself was formerly located at the foot of the Pyramid of Amenemhat III at Hawara ( right ).
The Labyrinth of Egypt was notably described by the Ancient Greek author Herodotus , who claimed in Book II of his Histories that the structure's greatness surpassed that of the Egyptian pyramids .
A drawing of the Pyramid of Amenemhat III at Hawara and the surrounding ruins, made by Karl Richard Lepsius c. 1850. Note the Bahr Sharqiyyah canal running through the site.