A wonder beyond the pyramids
In the 5th century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and described a building that he claimed surpassed the pyramids in its ambition and scale. He wrote of a structure with twelve roofed courts and three thousand chambers—1,500 above ground and 1,500 below. The maze of passages connecting courts, apartments, and colonnades was, in his words, an "unending marvel." He was not alone in his admiration. Other classical writers, including Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Pliny the Elder, also documented the colossal structure, which they called the "Labyrinth". Strabo, writing in the 1st century BCE, noted its location near the "City of Crocodiles," while Pliny the Elder later attributed its construction to the Pharaoh Amenemhat III around 1800 BCE. Pliny also suggested this Egyptian original was the model for the much smaller labyrinth Daedalus built in Crete.
From ancient text to modern discovery
For centuries, the Labyrinth was known only from these classical texts. The breakthrough in locating it came in the 19th century. In 1888, the British archaeologist William Flinders Petrie began excavations at Hawara, near the mudbrick pyramid of the 12th Dynasty Pharaoh Amenemhat III (reigned c. 1860–1814 BCE). South of the pyramid, Petrie uncovered an enormous stone foundation measuring approximately 305 by 244 meters, an area large enough to hold the great temples of Karnak and Luxor combined. The site was covered in a deep layer of limestone and granite chips, the remnants of a superstructure that had been quarried for other buildings since the Roman period. Petrie concluded this was the mortuary temple of Amenemhat III, the very structure described by Herodotus. Recent investigations have supported this. In 2008, a geophysical survey by the Mataha Expedition used ground-penetrating radar to scan the area. The scans revealed a massive, grid-like structure of thick walls and chambers lying several meters below the surface, suggesting that a significant portion of the Labyrinth—perhaps Herodotus's underground level—survives intact.