Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and DevelopmentMatthews, W. H.
History
Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and Development
Matthews, W. H.
Labyrinths; Maze gardens
In 1843 a Prussian expedition, under K. R. Lepsius, carried out
considerable excavations in the locality and claimed to have
established the actual site of the Labyrinth, attaching great
importance to a series of brick chambers which they unearthed. The data
furnished by this party, however, were not altogether of a convincing
character, and it was felt that further evidence was required before
their conclusions could be accepted.
G. M. Ebers, a pupil of Lepsius, and one who did much to popularise the
study of Egyptology by a series of novels, said that, if one climbed
the pyramid hard by, one could see that the ruins of the Labyrinth had
a horseshoe shape, but that was all.
The actual site of the Egyptian Labyrinth was finally identified by
Professor Flinders Petrie in 1888. He found that the brick chambers
which Lepsius took to be part of the Labyrinth were only remains of
the Roman town built by its destroyers, the Labyrinth itself being so
thoroughly demolished that only a great bed of fragments remained. Even
from this dreary waste of stone chips, however, a few items of interest
were discovered, including scattered bits of foundations, a great well,
two door-jambs--one to the north and one to the south--two granite
shrines and part of another, several fragments of statues and a large
granite seated figure of the king who is now generally recognised to
have been the builder of the Labyrinth, namely Amenemhat (or Amenemhe)
III of the XIIth Dynasty (also known as Lampares), who reigned about
twenty-three centuries B.C. Fig. 2, which, like the diagram shown in
Fig. 4, is reproduced by the kind permission of Professor Petrie from
his book "The Labyrinth, Gerzeh and Mazghuneh" (1912), represents one
of the shrines dedicated to the founder. Sufficient of the original
foundations remained to enable the size and orientation of the building
to be roughly determined.
The Labyrinth must have covered an area of about 1000 feet from east to
west by 800 feet from north to south, and was situated to the east of
Lake Moeris, opposite the ancient town of Arsinoë (Crocodilopolis),
and just to the south of the pyramid of Hawara, in the district known
nowadays as the Fayûm.
The mummified remains of the builder of the Labyrinth, King Amenemhat
III, and of his daughter Sebekneferu, have been discovered in this
pyramid, which is symmetrical about the same N.-S. meridian as the
Labyrinth.
Professor Petrie reviewed all that the classic writers had reported
concerning the Labyrinth, and concluded that, in spite of their
differences, each had contributed some item of value. The discrepancies
between the descriptions of Herodotus and Strabo he attributes to the
probable decay or destruction of the upper storey in the intervening
centuries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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