United States or Mozambique ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The first palace at Knossos dates from a period certainly as early as, probably somewhat earlier than, the Hawara temple; and since the derivation of the word 'labyrinth' from the Labrys or Double Axe, making the palace the House or Place of the Double Axe, seems quite satisfactory, the Egyptian Labyrinth in all likelihood derived its name from the House of Minos at Knossos.

The stone pyramids of that group, which may be older, furnish a curious variation from the usual type. The sloping passage ends in a vertical shaft, at the bottom of which open chambers now filled by the infiltration of the Nile. The pyramids of Illahûn and Hawara, which contained the remains of Ûsertesen II. and Amenemhat III., are of the same type as those at Lisht.

The fine white limestone of Hawara must have closely resembled the shining white gypsum of Knossos, and though the Egyptian Labyrinth has passed away too completely for us to be able to judge of its masonry, yet the splendid building work of the Eleventh Dynasty temple of Mentuhotep Neb-hapet-Ra at Deir-el-Bahri, with its great blocks of limestone beautifully fitted and laid, affords a good Middle Kingdom parallel to the great gypsum blocks of the Knossian palace.

The massive lintel of the door is 29 feet 6 inches long, 16 feet 6 inches deep, and 3 feet 4 inches high, with a weight of about 120 tons a mass of stone fairly comparable with some of the gigantic blocks in which Egyptian architects delighted. It is, for instance, about ten tons heavier than the quartzite block which forms the sepulchral chamber in the pyramid of Amenemhat III. at Hawara.

The Temple of the Sphinx at Gîza may also be compared with those of Hawara and Knossos. It seems most probable that the Temple of the Sphinx is a XIIth Dynasty building.

Petrie's finds of late Mycenaean objects and foreign graves at Medinet Gurob.* * One man who was buried here bore the name An-Tursha, "Pillar of the Tursha." The Tursha were a people of the Mediterranean, possibly Tylissians of Crete. These excavations at Hawara, Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob were carried out in the years 1887-9. Since then Prof.

It used to be believed that the Hawara Labyrinth gave its name to the Cretan one, and an Egyptian etymology was arranged for the word 'labyrinth, according to which it would have meant 'the temple at the mouth of the canal. The Egyptian form of the title, however, is 'a mere figment of the philological imagination. Probably originality lies in the other direction.

The roofs of all these are of stone, as also are the walls; but the walls are full of sculptured figures. Pliny the elder, judging from his description, evidently saw much the same thing at Hawara as Herodotus had seen, though time must have somewhat diminished the splendour of the building. Now, to this temple there was already applied in the time of Herodotus the name Labyrinth.

Abulfeda alludes to the large mirror which enabled the lighthouse keepers to detect from a great distance the approach of the enemy. In our text, through the ignorance of the scribe, who had no gazetteer or map to turn to, some palpable errors have crept in. It is reached in two hours from the bitter spring in the Wadi Hawara, believed to be the Marah of the Bible.

And with the sepulchres of the "Old Kingdom," in the Memphite necropolis proper, we have naturally grouped those of the "Middle Kingdom" at Dashûr, Lisht, Illahun, and Hawara. Some of these modern discoveries have been commented on and illustrated by Prof. Maspero in his great history.