Hawara and the Labyrinth
Faiyum, Egypt
Herodotus said it surpassed the pyramids. Petrie found its foundations and little else. In May 2026, Egypt started digging again.
- Latitude
- 29.2742° N
- Longitude
- 30.8992° E
- Pyramid
- Amenemhat III, c. 1850 BCE
- Fieldwork
- reopened 7 May 2026
- Open questions
- 5 logged
Why this is the most interesting site in Egypt right now
Most of the arguments in this archive are about things that were settled long ago and are being re-argued. Hawara is different. Something is actually happening, this year, with spades in the ground, and nobody yet knows what it will turn up.
On 7 May 2026, Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, through the Fayoum Antiquities Area, confirmed the launch of new fieldwork at Hawara. A team is digging beside the mud brick pyramid of Amenemhat III, in the area where the ancient sources place a structure that several classical writers considered more impressive than the pyramids at Giza.
That is the story. Everything else on this page is context for why it matters and why you should be careful about what you read in the meantime.
What the ancient sources said
Herodotus visited in the fifth century BCE and described a labyrinth of three thousand chambers, half above ground and half below. He wrote that he was shown the upper rooms himself but was refused access to the lower ones, which he was told held the burial vaults of the kings who built the place, and of the sacred crocodiles.
Strabo, Diodorus and Pliny all describe it too. That is unusual. Classical writers repeated each other constantly, but the level of independent detail here suggests several of them actually went.
A structure that four ancient authors thought was worth crossing the Mediterranean to see, and which then vanished almost entirely.
What has actually been found
Flinders Petrie excavated at Hawara in 1888 and again later. He located an enormous platform of foundation material south of the pyramid, roughly three hundred by two hundred and fifty metres, which he identified as the base of the labyrinth. What he did not find was the building itself. The consensus explanation is that it was quarried away for stone in the Roman period and after, which is what happened to a great deal of Egyptian architecture.
In 2008 the Mataha Expedition, a collaboration between Ghent University in Belgium, Egypt's National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, and the artist Louis De Cordier, ran ground penetrating radar and very low frequency electromagnetic surveys south of the pyramid. They reported a grid of vertical walls several metres thick, forming closed room-like spaces at depths of roughly eight to twelve metres, spread across hectares.
In 2025 Mark Carlotto published an analysis of space-based synthetic aperture radar over the area, reporting unusual returns on both sides of the Abdul Wahbi canal south of the pyramid, which he interprets as potentially consistent with large buried structures.
What has been reported since May
The official side is thin. On 7 May 2026 the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, through the Fayoum Antiquities Area, confirmed the new fieldwork. A report on an alternative-history site, which I treat cautiously, names Ashraf Sobhi, Director General of Fayoum Antiquities, as overseeing the mission, gives its stated aim as locating and documenting any surviving remains of the labyrinth, and names groundwater from the Bahr Wahbi canal as the main obstacle. I have not found a published report from the mission itself.
The advocacy side is louder. The Archaeological Rescue Foundation, whose Master Preservation Plan (released 9 February 2026) was written by Louis De Cordier of the 2008 Mataha team, says on its project page that a megalithic stone wall has been unearthed in the central labyrinth area, and in July it posted video of the wall. It says the excavation began in March. It also says rerouting the canal and draining the site will cost well into the millions and take years. This is a campaigning organisation that is party to the story, not the excavators, so I treat the wall as reported and not confirmed. I could not find a section drawing, a depth or a context for it.
Status on 16 October 2026
I checked again on 16 October. I found no new statement from the ministry or the excavators since 7 May, no section drawing, depth or context for the reported wall, and no published report from the mission. The foundation’s own page lists nothing dated September or October. In practice the situation is unchanged from my last review, except for what the advocacy side has added.
That includes a July video, with on-site footage from March and photos of the wall, and an invitation to a Hawara tour from 1 to 4 February 2027. In August Louis De Cordier proposed a mobile “Hawara Field Research Station”. The foundation’s page says the images of it are conceptual and are not photographs of an existing building. It is a proposal, not a facility.
The foundation also says Filippo Biondi has agreed to scan Hawara with his radar tomography method once his Giza work is done. I found no report that this scan has happened. It matters for how you read any result: the 2022 paper that introduced Biondi’s method on the Great Pyramid, with Corrado Malanga, was retracted on 10 August 2026 (see the Giza dossier), and the foundation’s own page cites no peer-reviewed results from the project. A Hawara scan from this method would arrive as a claim to be tested, not as a finding.
The claim you have probably heard
If you found this page after watching a video, you have likely encountered a metallic object at the centre of the complex. It is worth being precise, because the claim is unstable in a way that tells you something.
Depending on the source, the object is two metres across, or thirty to forty metres, or a hundred and thirty feet. It is a sphere, or a disc, or simply an object. It sits at the centre, or on the fourth underground level. No two accounts agree, and none of them traces back to a published survey with methodology you can inspect.
The nearest thing to a source is a 2015 satellite scan by Merlin Burrows, described by Timothy Akers. The foundation's page attributes to it a large domed structure, a central gallery, two assembled wooden boats and a 40-metre metallic object, and adds that the scan's details were placed under a ten-year non-disclosure agreement and are known through Akers' own explanations. Over two hours of his 2015 briefing, the “Harrogate Recordings”, were released in August 2026. A recording of a briefing is not a dataset. I could not find a method, raw data or independent analysis, and summaries of the site's status describe these reports as unverified and not supported by mainstream Egyptology. The number also grows with each retelling, which is the signature of a claim travelling through the internet and not through instruments.
That does not prove there is nothing there. It means there is currently nothing to examine, and that a specific measured claim, with a method attached, would be a completely different thing from what is circulating.
What is still open
How much survives below the water table?
This is the real question and it is urgent. The site is partially flooded by water from a nearby canal, and rising groundwater is actively destroying whatever organic and structural material remains. Every year of delay costs evidence. International proposals to dewater the site exist and are welcomed by mainstream researchers regardless of what they expect to find.
Will digging down without draining first destroy the answer?
This is the sharpest criticism of the current work, and it comes from people who want the site excavated. The argument is that excavating vertically into waterlogged ground, without first protecting and draining the submerged structures, risks collapsing exactly what you are trying to record. I am not qualified to adjudicate an excavation strategy. I am flagging that the objection is being made by people on the pro-excavation side, not by sceptics.
Was Herodotus exaggerating?
Three thousand rooms is a large number and ancient writers were not always careful with them. But the structure clearly existed, and the foundation platform Petrie found is genuinely enormous. The question is not whether there was something remarkable here. It is how much of the classical description was architecture and how much was awe.
How does the Ptolemaic and Roman cemetery layer complicate this?
Hawara is also where the Fayum mummy portraits came from, some of the most startlingly modern-looking faces to survive from antiquity. Those burials sit on top of whatever Middle Kingdom material remains, which means excavation has to work through one important site to reach another.
What counts as confirmation?
Worth deciding in advance, before results arrive and everyone reads them the way they prefer. A photographed wall in situ, with recorded depth and stratigraphy, published with its context, would confirm the 2008 anomalies as architecture. A press statement would not.
Here is the part I find hard to put down. Herodotus says he walked the upper chambers and was refused the lower ones. He does not say they were sealed, or ruined, or mythical. He says he was not allowed in, and that the reason given was that the kings who first built the place were buried there.
That is a very specific kind of refusal. Not "there is nothing down there" but "you may not see it".
What if the most interesting sentence in the whole classical account is not the three thousand rooms, but the fact that a priest in the fifth century BCE had a rule about who could go downstairs? I have no evidence for anything beyond that, and I am not claiming any. But whatever the spades find this year, somebody was guarding something, and they told a Greek tourist so to his face.
Why it is worth asking: because the refusal is specific, and four ancient authors describe the building. What speaks against it: a guide barring a visitor from the lower rooms can mean a priestly secret, a safety rule or a way to manage a tourist, and Herodotus often reported what he was told. What would tell the readings apart: dated architecture below the water table, in context. What stays unknown is what was down there, if anything survived the Roman quarrying.
What to watch for
This page will be updated as the excavation reports. The things worth waiting for, in order of how much they would actually tell us: published depth and stratigraphy of anything found, photographs in situ rather than renders, independent confirmation from someone not on the excavation team, and a decision on whether the site gets dewatered before more vertical digging happens. If the Biondi scan is carried out, watch whether the raw data and method are released so that someone outside the project can reproduce it.
Sources
- Egypt Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, Fayoum Antiquities Area, announcement of renewed fieldwork at Hawara, 7 May 2026.
- Petrie, W.M.F., excavation reports on Hawara, Biahmu and Arsinoe, 1889, and subsequent seasons.
- Mataha Expedition 2008, Ghent University with Egypt's National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, ground penetrating radar and VLF electromagnetic survey south of the pyramid.
- Carlotto, M.J., 2025 analysis of space-based synthetic aperture radar observations at Hawara.
- Herodotus, The Histories, Book II, on the labyrinth. Strabo, Diodorus Siculus and Pliny the Elder also describe it.
- Archaeological Rescue Foundation, Hawara project page, for the Master Preservation Plan, the reported wall and the 2015 scan claims. An advocacy source, used for what it reports, not as confirmation.
- Archaeological Rescue Foundation, ArchaeoSAR project page (article dated 2 May 2026), for the planned Hawara scan and the status of the project. Also an advocacy source; it lists no peer-reviewed results from the project itself.
- AncientHistoryX, 12 May 2026, a report on the start of the 2026 fieldwork. An alternative-history site, used only for the date of the ministry confirmation and the name of the supervising official.
Not visited in person. Written from published survey material and the ministry announcement. Last reviewed 16 October 2026. On 16 October I added the status check and the planned Biondi scan. This is an active excavation, so this page will go out of date faster than any other on the site. If you see a published result before I do, tell me.