Is There Really A Huge Underground Labyrinth at Hawara In Egypt?
Following on from the recent claims of vast underground structures allegedly discovered beneath the three main pyramids at Giza, which are undoubtedly bogus, there has been renewed interest in an underground labyrinth claimed to exist next to the ruined pyramid of Amenemhat III, right at the southern extent of the Giza plateau
While the structures beneath the three main pyramids are either misunderstandings of ground penetrating radar images, or possibly more likely a complete fabrication, the labyrinth beneath Hawara did actually exist.
The Greek historians Herodotus in the fifth Century BC, and Strabo around the year zero, both claimed to have visited the labyrinth and left descriptions in their surviving manuscripts.
Herodotus was in Egypt around 450 BC and wrote about the labyrinth in his Histories. He described it as having two levels, one above ground and one below, with three thousand rooms in total.
He was allowed to tour the upper level. He saw chambers, corridors and courtyards. He described passages winding through rooms, rooms leading into more rooms, confusion and complexity beyond anything he’d seen in Greece.
But he states the Egyptians wouldn’t let him see the lower level, writing:
“The upper chambers I myself passed through and examined in detail, but the underground ones I only know from report, for the Egyptians who had charge of them refused absolutely to show me them, saying that there were the burial places of the kings who originally built this Labyrinth, and also of the sacred crocodiles.”
Strabo, writing around 24 AD, also described the labyrinth. He said it had as many palaces as there were provinces in Egypt. He described a structure so complex that strangers couldn’t find their way out without guides.
Pliny the Elder and Diodorus Siculus both mentioned it in the 1st Century AD. Four independent sources over several centuries described the same massive structure, but after that there were no further historic mentions that have so far been found, and it gradually faded into myth and legend.
Into modern times, the labyrinth site was identified by the German explorer Richard Lepsius in 1840, and in 1888, one of the pioneers of modern archaeology, or antiquarians as they were known at the time; William Matthew Flinders Petrie, more commonly known as Flinders Petrie, visited the site.
Petrie, now acknowledged as a pioneer of systematic excavation methodology and the preservation of artefacts, and who has been called the “father of Egyptian archaeology”, spent some years recording sites in and around the Giza plateau, and is credited with discovering the Proto-Sinaitic script in 1904, which turned out to be the ancestor of almost all alphabetic scripts.
Petrie excavated at Hawara, identified Amenemhat III’s pyramid, and a mortuary temple. He found ruins on the ground that he identified as possibly being remnants of the Labyrinth, but what he found didn’t match the ancient descriptions.
The image below shows Petrie’s illustration of what he found, with a computer-generated model from his descriptions of what he thought was the arrangement of the surface buildings.
Image: Narushige Shiode & Wolfram Grajetzki
The ruins were too small, and not remotely on the scale that Herodotus had described, or perhaps the old writers had vastly over-estimated its original size. Petrie concluded that the Labyrinth must have been quarried away over the centuries, its stone blocks reused for other construction.
And he was undoubtedly correct, as it is known the pyramid at Abu Ruwash, just north of the three main pyramids, was used as a source of building stone as far back as the Roman period, as they mention seeing blocks being removed and carried away into Cairo.
Indeed, many of the old buildings in Cairo have huge blocks of stone in the walls, some with hieroglyphics still visible today. Theft of blocks from the pyramids continues, albeit on a very small scale, as some blocks seen in photographs from a century ago are now missing.
It seemed the Hawara labyrinth had existed once, but was now gone, or its location could not be found with the equipment available in the 19th Century.
Nothing of importance was reported for another 120 years. Then, in 2008, a Belgian Egyptian team called the Mataha Expedition were allowed to conduct ground penetrating radar surveys south of the Hawara pyramid using very low frequency electromagnetic sounding.
They detected ‘subsurface anomalies’, described as ‘elongated and square shaped structures arranged in patterns suggesting rooms, walls, corridors’. The data suggested a large underground complex covering several hectares.
The Mataha team interpreted the findings as evidence of a labyrinth style structure beneath the surface, potentially the underground levels Herodotus wasn’t allowed to see.
They asked the Egyptian government for permission to conduct a large excavation to see if what their data showed was indeed man-made or just geology, but the Egyptians refused permission, and that was the end of that.
In 2015, another team used satellite based synthetic aperture radar and ground penetrating radar style imaging to the Hawara site. Their scans detected what they described as ‘a sprawling underground network, possibly spanning an area equivalent to ten football fields’.
They also detected two chambers beneath the Hawara pyramid itself, one matching the known burial chamber Filnders Petrie had located in 1888, and a second, beyond what Petrie had called the “blind passage”, a corridor that appeared to lead nowhere but that the scans suggested a second chamber, which they speculated could link the pyramid to the larger labyrinth complex beneath, though no evidence for that was found.
The scans also detected what analysts described as a shallow omega shaped or ring like feature around the site, interpreted as a symbolic boundary. They then made a very contentious claim, that their scans had found a two-metre diameter ball of a metallic substance at the centre of the labyrinth.
They didn’t elaborate on this supposed discovery, and most Egyptologists dismiss it as nothing more than an artifact of the imaging process.
Eight years later, another synthetic aperture radar study was conducted. They corroborated the near surface rectangular anomalies suggesting chambers and corridors, but, perhaps deliberately, did not mention the metallic sphere.
Multiple independent scanning efforts, using different technologies over fifteen years, keep finding the same thing, what appears to be confirmation of a significant underground structure.
Depite all this evidence, both historic and recent, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has consistently refused to allow formal excavations of the labyrinth site. All that has been allowed is geophysical surveys, conserving the visible remains, and small scale excavation in the Hawara necropolis.
The reason given for not allowing large-scale excavations is because of concerns about the high water table around Hawara, due to a major irrigation canal running close by to the immediate south-west, right where the labyrinth is supposed to be, which would probably mean any structures below ground would be almost permanently flooded, and potentially dangerous to excavate.
Egypt’s antiquities authorities prefer non-invasive survey methods and virtual reconstruction before committing to aggressive digging that might destroy what they’re trying to preserve, which is understandable.
Then there are claims that the scanning teams were made to sign non-disclosure agreements, because the Egyptian authorities know what is in the labyrinth and don’t want the public to find out about it and the mysterious metallic sphere.
The Egyptian government denies these claims of course, and in my view they are right to do so, but it doesn’t stop people coming up with what I call ridiculous conspiracy theories.
The site today
The image below is from Google Maps, and shows the ruinous state of the pyramid, and a convenient pin someone added for the labyrinth. There are clearly structures visible around the pin, which are probably Petrie’s excavations, and part of the necropolis is visible to the east of the pyramid, but there’s nothing else obvious that suggests large-scale surface buildings like the ancient Greeks claimed.
The modern irrigation canal runs through where Petrie had drawn the surface buildings of the labyrinth, and had any parts of the underground structure been found when the canal was dug, it would have made global news, so we can infer it was probably not as extensive as had been claimed.
So what can we conclude about the Hawara labyrinth? It did exist, that much is clear, but can we take Herodotus’ claim of 3000 rooms seriously? Probably not, and as for the two-metre metallic sphere, the less said the better methinks.
To believe that you’re getting into the realms of Erich von Daniken’s Ancient Aliens.
Until the Egyptians allow large-scale excavations at the site, which may never happen, the extent of the labyrinth will remain a mystery.
Header image: Youtube
About the author: Andy Rowlands is a British university graduate in space science and Principia Scientific International researcher, writer and editor who co-edited the 2019 climate science book ‘The Sky Dragon Slayers: Victory Lap‘