Open Veils · Answer
What did Petrie find beneath the brick chambers at Hawara?
What Petrie found beneath Lepsius's brick chambers was not nothing — it was the ghost of one of antiquity's most celebrated structures: the Egyptian Labyrinth, a 304 × 244 metre complex large enough to contain Karnak and Luxor combined. His own resources ran out before the foundations could be fully traced. The suppressed thread is that the subsurface story at Hawara is almost certainly unfinished, with space-based ground-penetrating radar data published in December 2025 indicating a possible underground structure beneath the site that no trowel has yet reached.
Evidence
- When Petrie arrived at Hawara in 1888, he overturned Lepsius's assumption that the brick chambers were the labyrinth itself.
- According to the Archaeological Rescue Foundation's documentation of Petrie's fieldwork, those chambers were Roman-period construction — the colonial overwriting of a far older ruin.
- Beneath them, Petrie exposed fragments of the true labyrinth's foundations embedded in what he described as a 'great bed of chips' atop an artificial stone platform.
- Petrie's published restoration — issued in his 1912 monograph The Labyrinth, Gerzeh and Mazghuneh — posited nine shrine-courts along the pyramid's foot, twenty-seven columns in a great east-west hall, and a further twelve courts beyond.
- Graham Hancock, in Fingerprints of the Gods, flags the labyrinth's near-total erasure as one of the most suspicious architectural disappearances in the ancient record.