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"In a tomb near the Pyramid of Hawâra in the Egyptian Fayûm was found the sarcophagus of one Menahîm, chief of the Order of the Essenes, who were established near Lake Moeris. Menahîm's period of office dated from the year 18 B.C. to the year of his death in the reign of Caligula, and amid the dust of his bones was found the Golden Chalice of Initiation.
It is uncertain whether the Hawara pyramid or that of Dashûr was the real burial-place of the king, as at neither place is his name found alone. Who King Hor was we do not quite know. His name is not given in the lists, and was unknown until M. de Morgan's discoveries at Dashûr.
Quite close to Hawara, at Illahun, in the ruins of the town which was built by Usertsen's workmen when they were building his pyramid, Prof. Petrie found fragments of pottery of types which we now know well from excavations in Crete and Cyprus, though they were then unknown.
The literary tradition of the Labyrinth of Minos is that it was a place of mazy passages and windings, difficult to traverse without a guide or clue, and the actual remains at Knossos show that the palace must have answered very well to such a description, while the feature of the Hawara temple which struck both Herodotus and Pliny was precisely the same.
The pyramid of Amenemhat III., the greatest King of the great Twelfth Dynasty, and indeed one of the greatest men who ever held the Egyptian sceptre, stood at Hawara, near the mouth of the Fayum. Not far from it Amenemhat erected a huge temple, such as had never been built before, and never was built again, even in that land of gigantic structures.
That the Hawara temple was the Egyptian labyrinth was pointed out by Lepsius in the 'forties of the last century. Within the last two or three years attention has again been drawn to it by Mr. Arthur Evans's discovery of the Cretan labyrinth itself in the shape of the Minoan or early Mycenæan palace of Knossos, near Candia in Crete.
It must be remembered that, in any case, it is probable that the king was not actually buried here, but in the pyramid of Hawara. The pyramid of Amenemhat II, which lies between the two brick pyramids, was built entirely of stone.
An Egyptian etymology was found for it as "Ro-pi-ro-henet," "Temple-mouth-canal," which might be interpreted, with some violence to Egyptian construction, as "The temple at the mouth of the canal," i.e. the Bahr Yusuf, which enters the Fayyûm at Hawara. But unluckily this word would have been pronounced by the natives of the vicinity as "Elphilahune," which is not very much like
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