Author Description

The present volume records the results of excavations carried on in the winter of 1887-8 near the pyramid of Hawara, where Lipsius had fancied he recognized the actual ruins of the Labyrinth. Hawara is an archaeological site of Ancient Egypt, south of the site of Crocodilopolis (Arsinoe) at the entrance to the depression of the Fayyum oasis. The first excavations at the site were made by Karl Lepsius, in 1843. William Flinders Petrie excavated at Hawara, in 1888, finding papyri of the first and second centuries, and, north of the pyramid, a vast necropolis where he found 146 portraits on coffins dating to the Roman period, famous as being among the very few surviving examples of painted portraits from Classical Antiquity, the "Fayoum portraits" illustrated in Roman history textbooks. Amenemhet III was the last powerful ruler of the 12th Dynasty, and the pyramid he built at Hawara (illustration, right) is believed to post-date the so-called "Black Pyramid" built by the same ruler at Dahshur. It is this that is believed to have been Amenemhet's final resting place. At Hawara there was also the intact (pyramid) tomb of Neferu-Ptah, daughter of Amenemhet III. This tomb was found about 2km South of the king's pyramid. In common with the Middle Kingdom pyramids constructed after Amenemhet II, it was built of mudbrick round a core of limestone paassags and burial chambers, and faced with limestone. Most of the facing stone was later pillaged for use in other buildings— a fate common to almost all of Egypt's pyramids— and today the pyramid is little more than an eroded, vaguely pyramidal mountain of mud brick, and of the once magnificent mortuary temple precinct formerly enclosed by a wall there is little left beyond the foundation bed of compacted sand and chips and shards of limestone. The entrance to the pyramid is today flooded to a depth of 6 metres as a result of the waters from a canal built nearby. The huge mortuary temple that originally stood adjacent to this pyra