The Promise of New Archaeological Technology

Ben references recent high-profile projects that have captured public and media attention, setting the stage for the main topic.

• The Khafre Scan Project: He highlights the work of Italian scientists using space-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Doppler Tomography to scan deep beneath the Giza Plateau. Their extraordinary claims of vast, undiscovered chambers and tunnels beneath the Khafre Pyramid have generated significant buzz.
• The ScanPyramids Project: Another successful application of modern tech is the long-running ScanPyramids project, which used muon-detection technology to confirm the existence of previously unknown voids in the Great Pyramid, including the "Big Void" and a smaller chamber behind the entrance chevrons. This project serves as proof-of-concept that non-invasive scanning can yield verifiable discoveries.

Ben argues that while these projects are exciting, the world is overlooking an even more significant, already-discovered, and repeatedly confirmed site: the great Labyrinth of Egypt. He posits that this site, unlike the more speculative claims at Giza, has been located and its existence verified by multiple techniques, yet it remains suppressed and unexplored.

The unabridged transcript follows below
You can watch the original video here

The Labyrinth in Antiquity: Accounts of a Lost Wonder

The core of the historical argument rests on the detailed eyewitness accounts of classical authors who visited the Labyrinth when it was still standing. These writers, whose works form the foundation of our understanding of the ancient world, described a structure of unparalleled magnificence.

• Herodotus (5th Century BCE): Considered the "Father of History," Herodotus provides the most famous and astonishing account. He claimed to have seen the Labyrinth himself and declared that it "surpasses even the pyramids" in terms of labor and expense. He described a colossal complex with a single surrounding wall, containing two levels of chambers—1,500 above ground and 1,500 below—for a total of 3,000 rooms. The upper level featured 12 massive, roofed courtyards with intricately winding passages connecting them. He also noted that a pyramid was attached to the structure, accessible via an underground passage.
• Diodorus Siculus (1st Century BCE): This Greek historian confirmed that the famous Cretan Labyrinth of the Minotaur was merely a smaller-scale imitation of the original Egyptian marvel. He visited the site centuries after Herodotus and reported that while the Cretan version had vanished, the Egyptian Labyrinth remained "absolutely perfect in its entire construction." He marveled at its craftsmanship, so perfect that it "left no room for their successors to surpass them," and described vast halls with 40 columns to a side and a roof that appeared to be made of a single, massive stone (interpreted by Ben as a testament to incredibly fine, seamless joinery).
• Strabo (1st Century BCE/CE): The geographer Strabo described the Labyrinth as a building "quite equal to the pyramids," composed of numerous interconnected peristyle courts. He emphasized its bewildering complexity, stating that "no one can enter or leave without a guide." Critically, he compared its construction style directly to the Osirion at Abydos, another mysterious, megalithic structure. This link is significant because it associates the Labyrinth's architecture with the most ancient, precise, and enigmatic stonework in Egypt, which many researchers believe predates the dynastic Egyptians.
• Pliny the Elder (1st Century CE): The Roman author Pliny dismissed any notion that the Labyrinth was imaginary. He provided a stunningly ancient date for its construction, claiming tradition held it was built 3,600 years before his time (c. 3600 BCE), placing its origins well before the accepted timeline for the Egyptian Old Kingdom. He also gave specific details about its materials, noting columns of "Parian marble" (likely white calcite/alabaster) and a structure of "Aswan granite." He mentioned the descent between levels involved stairways of 90 steps, implying immense vertical scale.
• Pomponius Mela (1st Century CE): This geographer echoed the description of 12 palaces within one unbroken wall and a single descending entrance. He vividly described the "perpetual meandering" of the paths designed to cause confusion.

These accounts collectively paint a picture of a structure vaster and more complex than any other in the ancient world, built with the same megalithic, high-precision techniques seen at sites like the Osirion and the Valley Temple, and dating back to a remote period of antiquity.

Sir Flinders Petrie and the First Modern Excavations at Hawara

Based on the clues in historical texts—proximity to a pyramid, a large lake (Lake Moeris), and the city of Crocodilopolis—the site of the Labyrinth has long been identified at Hawara, in the Faiyum oasis. The most significant modern exploration was conducted by the legendary archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• The Pyramid Substructure: Petrie first excavated the mud-brick pyramid at the site, which he attributed to the Middle Kingdom Pharaoh Amenemhat III. His harrowing account details tunneling through the unstable structure to reach what lay beneath: a massive, sealed burial chamber. This chamber was not just a simple tomb but a monolithic marvel—a single, hollowed-out box of yellow quartzite weighing an estimated 110 tons. The complexity of its passages, trapdoors, and sheer scale once again mirrored the construction style of the Osirion, suggesting the pyramid was built atop a much older, more sophisticated structure.
• The Labyrinth Site: South of the pyramid, Petrie investigated the area believed to be the Labyrinth. He uncovered a vast field of stone chips and fragments stretching over an area of 1,000 by 800 feet—large enough to contain all the major temples of Thebes combined. Beneath this debris, he found a uniform, man-made foundation layer of plaster. Petrie concluded that he had found the location of the Labyrinth, but that the structure itself had been completely quarried away, leaving only the foundation. The crucial insight proposed in the video is that Petrie was mistaken; he was not standing on the foundation, but on the roof of the Labyrinth's still-existing lower levels.

The 2008 Breakthrough: The Mataha Expedition Finds the Labyrinth

The story takes a dramatic turn in 2008 with the Mataha Expedition, led by Belgian researcher Louis de Cordier. With official permission from the Supreme Council of Antiquities (then led by Dr. Zahi Hawass), the team used modern geophysical survey equipment (Ground-Penetrating Radar, VLF, etc.) to scan the area Petrie had identified.

The results were unambiguous. Below Petrie's "foundation" layer, the scans revealed a massive, artificial grid structure of immense size. They detected thick, high-resistivity walls (suggesting granite) forming a complex network of rooms and passages, confirming that a significant portion of the Labyrinth still exists underground, submerged beneath the local water table. They had found it.

Suppression and Silence: The Cover-Up of a Millennium-Defining Discovery

Despite this monumental discovery, the findings were never officially published or celebrated. Instead, they were actively suppressed.

• Dr. Zahi Hawass's Role: According to the Mataha team, Dr. Hawass forbade them from communicating their results, citing "national security" and intimidating the team members.
• The Water Table Dilemma: The reason for the cover-up appears to be a major political and environmental problem. Since the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, the water table throughout Egypt has been steadily rising. At Hawara, the Labyrinth is now submerged in corrosive groundwater.
• The Political Rock and a Hard Place: The Egyptian government faced an impossible choice. To announce the discovery of the Labyrinth would bring immense international pressure to excavate and preserve it. However, remediating the site—draining a huge area and potentially disrupting the vital agricultural irrigation of the Faiyum—would be an enormously expensive and politically fraught undertaking. The alternative, announcing the find but doing nothing, would invite global condemnation for letting a world wonder decay. The simplest solution was to pretend the discovery never happened.
• Further Confirmation of Suppression: This policy was reinforced when a separate geological mission from Cairo and Polish universities attempting to study the water problem at Hawara was also shut down. Its director, Professor Ala Shaheen, was briefly jailed and removed from his post, sending a clear message that research at Hawara was off-limits.

Peering from the Heavens: Space-Based Scans Reveal Deeper Secrets

While on-the-ground research was halted, the story continued with the application of new, non-invasive satellite scanning technologies, which operate beyond the control of local authorities. Two separate and technologically distinct companies scanned Hawara.

• Geoscan Systems: This group, associated with researcher Klaus Dona, used a proprietary remote-sensing technique based on complex spectral analysis of light. Their scans confirmed the Mataha findings but revealed much more. They detected a network of monumental spaces—including halls 80 meters long—and corridors existing at multiple, distinct levels deep underground, at depths of 40, 60, 80, and 100 meters.
• Merlin Burrows: A UK-based company founded by ex-military satellite imaging expert Tim Akers, Merlin Burrows used a different technique combining high-frequency satellite imagery with the Earth's natural seismic vibrations. Incredibly, their results correlated almost perfectly with the Geoscan survey. They also identified four distinct subterranean levels separated by 20 to 50 meters—a vertical distance that aligns with Pliny's account of 90-step stairways. Furthermore, they suggested the deepest levels were likely hollow and free of the groundwater plaguing the upper layers.

The 'Dippy' Anomaly: A 40-Meter Metallic Object

The most sensational claim came from the Merlin Burrows scan. Tim Akers reported that all the subterranean levels seemed to converge on a vast central atrium. Positioned in the middle of this massive open space, their scans detected a remarkable object.

• Description: Akers described a freestanding, 40-meter-long, metallic, Tic Tac-shaped object. He nicknamed it "Dippy."
• Unusual Material: He stated that the object's material signature was unlike anything he had encountered in his extensive career in military satellite analysis, clarifying that it was not stone or wood.
• Speculation: While acknowledging its mysterious nature, Akers speculated that it could be anything from a colossal ceremonial object to something far more exotic, like a form of "portal" or "Stargate."

Conclusion and the Path Forward: A Call for Renewed Exploration

The presentation concludes by synthesizing the overwhelming body of evidence. The existence of the Labyrinth at Hawara is not a matter of speculation but a fact confirmed by:

1. Consistent historical eyewitness accounts.
2. On-the-ground geophysical surveys (the Mataha Expedition).
3. Two independent, technologically distinct satellite-based scans (Geoscan and Merlin Burrows) that correlate with each other and with the historical data.

The Labyrinth appears to be a genuine relic of the same ancient, megalithic "Builder Culture" responsible for the Osirion and other enigmatic structures. The video serves as a call to action, urging that this suppressed discovery be brought to light. The final, hopeful note is that the Italian team behind the Khafre Scan project has reportedly agreed to turn their own SAR technology towards Hawara, which could provide a third, powerful satellite-based confirmation and finally force the issue of the Labyrinth's exploration into the global spotlight.

Unabridged transcript

Ground-penetrating radar and VLF are just so many different techniques. The Geoscan and Merlin Burrows satellite technologies are vastly different techniques, yet they seem to be aligned. They're telling you the same things. So, they found that there's something down there. What is down there seems to be also quite a mystery. The central object is hard to classify. It appears metallic, not stone or wood. A freestanding, 40-meter-long, metallic, Tic Tac-shaped object, approximately 50-60 meters below the ground in a huge, big, open corridor or an atrium. Come on, this is a remarkable claim.

Welcome back to UnchartedX. This is Ben, and I hope everyone is doing well. Today, I want to share a story with you, a story about what I think is one of the most important ancient sites in the world. It is something that legitimately could represent the discovery of the millennium. Something that, in my opinion, represents the biggest and best opportunity for real archaeology and offers a chance to truly unravel the past and reveal details and the truth of our own far-distant history. Yet, despite this tantalizing opportunity, the site goes mostly unacknowledged or, even worse, seems to have been subjected to a deliberate cover-up, with researchers being threatened and others actually being jailed for their involvement with this place.

However, as you'll see if you stick with me in this video, the truth is beginning to be told. With the advent of new technologies being developed in recent years, including some that have made quite a stir in just relatively recent months, new discoveries have been made surrounding this site that will, I assure you, blow your mind with their claims and implications.

So, strap in, grab a beverage, and let me tell you about one of the greatest historical stories never told.

Before we get started, a quick bit of context. This is a version of the presentation that I shared for the first time at the Cosmic Summit in June 2025. It's something that I've been wanting to talk about at a venue like that for some years now. I chose this year because, as you'll see, this topic is closely related to the main theme of the summit and indeed that of the whole ancient Egyptian news cycle that's been blowing up all the way into mainstream media recently: the space-based synthetic aperture radar and Doppler tomography deep earth scans, particularly of the Middle Pyramid at Giza. I happened to be in Egypt when that news broke, and I had a lot of people reaching out to me about it. In fact, I was even invited to that Piers Morgan kerfuffle with all the other YouTubers and good old Flint Dibble, which was an opportunity that I declined. I really didn't feel like I had a lot to offer on the topic at the time, and I just don't like mainstream media, and I generally want nothing to do with it or with its pundits.

While I'm certainly less skeptical now than I originally was on this new satellite-based tech, I definitely want to believe. I'm certainly no expert on the technical details, and I still think it's a bit of a black box, but it's definitely promising. Here's something that few people interested in this technology really know about: the Italian scientists with their synthetic aperture radar and Doppler approach are certainly not the only ones using space-based tech to scan beneath the ground, and we'll explore some of the other somewhat similar efforts in this video. I do think that the claims from Beyond and May, and particularly all of the media attention that they've received, are opening up some incredible opportunities and possibilities. But as you'll see, I think we're skipping over some of the true potential for groundbreaking exploration and discovery in the field, as it were. It'll all make sense once we get into it. The Italian scientists behind the Khafre scan work were at the Cosmic Summit when I was there, and they were deservingly billed as the headliners. But as I learned after the event, apparently my little related topic—the presentation that we're about to get into—won the award for the most mind-blowing presentation at the summit, as voted by its attendees. So, thank you to everyone for that. I'm glad that the people there enjoyed catching it live. I've never felt much more than dread when it comes to public speaking at those events, but I think it went pretty well. When I got home, I really wanted to share this topic with everybody else out there who might be interested in it. And I wanted to do so in a medium that I'm a bit more comfortable in, which happens to be here on YouTube or Spotify or Rumble or wherever it is that you're watching this.

Before we get started, a quick update on the channel and some upcoming stuff. If you want to skip ahead, use the chapters shown down below. But I'm happy to say that the 2026 UnchartedX Egypt tour is all set and now available for booking if you want to come and see the amazing sites of Egypt with myself as well as my good friends Yousef Awyan and Kyle and Russ Allen in March of next year. The last few years of running these annual trips, it's really been epic. They've always been great groups. In the last couple of years, I think we did 10 special permission private access visits on each tour, which is way more than anybody else touring in Egypt. And I think 2026 is going to be no different. I haven't even announced this publicly until now, and it's already halfway sold out. So, do take a look if you're interested. All of the details are up on my website at unchartedx.com/Egypt2026.

If March doesn't work for you or if the tour's a little bit too long, then I will also be in Egypt this December of 2025 co-hosting with Yousef Awyan on his annual Primordial Egypt tour. It is a few days shorter than the UnchartedX tour. It has less special permissions and as such has a lower price tag. All of the details for the Primordial Tour are also up on my website. It's unchartedx.com/primordial.

Lastly, and this is something I've been meaning to do for a long while now, but I've got new merch. A bunch of new designs and a whole new merch store that I've set up over on Dasherie. All of the designs that you can see here are available in different apparel—t-shirts, hoodies, hats—also things like mugs, stickers, and other accessories. It's a great way to support the channel, and you get some natty threads or a new coffee cup. I don't really do video sponsorships. I do get tons of offers for that sort of thing, but I'd prefer to focus on the value-for-value model. So, if you do think that my work is worthy of some support, please do check out all of the options over at unchartedx.com/support.

Let's get into the video.

As I said in the intro, this is a topic that I've wanted to get into for several years now. I chose this year at the Cosmic Summit to present and talk about this because I think it is closely related to what has been the major theme of certainly the Cosmic Summit and pretty much of the news cycle surrounding the ancient world, particularly ancient Egypt, and that is the Khafre scan project. The Italian scientists who came out with their claims and their method of using synthetic aperture radar from satellites combined with Doppler tomography and seismic data to peer below the earth at the Giza plateau made these extraordinary claims that there are all of these massive structures and objects deep beneath the ground. These huge, hundreds of meters of shafts and 80-meter-wide cubes and all of these things being connected by tunnels and other subterranean infrastructure. This topic that I'm going to get into is quite closely related to that.

But that's by no means the only use of new technology that's happened in 2025 or indeed in the last several years. There have been a lot of projects that I think are showing that new technology is helping us to uncover hidden details and learn more about these structures and artifacts that come to us throughout history. Another great example of this is, of course, the ScanPyramids project, which has been running for I think 10 years or more now. They were using muon detection or cosmic ray detection techniques to discover and show that there are in fact hidden voids within structures like the Great Pyramid. This has been an experiment that's been ongoing for many years. In fact, pretty much over the last five or six years that I've been going into the Great Pyramid on a fairly regular basis, I've always found a lot of their equipment that's being set up and used as part of this experiment inside the pyramid. Down in the subterranean chamber, you'll find server racks full of gear. The Queen's Chamber at times has been just packed full of workshop equipment as well as server racks and other infrastructure. And then there have been all these detection panels that have been laid up and down the Grand Gallery. I'm happy to say that at the moment, at least the last time I was in there, all of this equipment has since gone because they've spent the time and had the several years of collecting their data.

The data is showing that there are in fact hidden passages and chambers within the Great Pyramid that we really never knew about. In fact, that's one of the ways that we know that this technology really does work because they not only found the big void—the big space that's near the Grand Gallery, about the same size of it—but they also found a smaller chamber that was right behind the chevrons, the chevron-shaped blocks that sit above the main entrance, the descending passageway in the Great Pyramid. Nobody knew there was a chamber there. Nobody even suspected it. But the scan showed that it was there. They drilled a hole, Zahi got up on a press release and talked about how we've discovered a new chamber, and we all got to see pictures of it. So, we know the technology works. They found something that nobody suspected was there, drilled into it, and figured it out.

Now, while this experiment has been going on for a long time, there is new technology now being used to explore the great void. In fact, Matt Bell, a good friend of mine, the guy who owns a lot of these ancient Egyptian hardstone vases that I talk about on this channel, is helping to fund a robotic exploration of that great void that should be happening towards the end of this year, if not early into next year. We are seeing examples of new technology really being used to uncover these hidden mysteries and hidden aspects and characteristics of this architecture from our past.

I have to throw in here also another good example of this, which is really the VaseScan project. All of the new technology—the LIDAR scans, the CT X-ray scans, the use of modern metrology software and modern engineering techniques to deconstruct some of these ancient hardstone artifacts—is only showing us that we're learning more and more about the precision engineering and design that went into these things. I think it's proving to be quite a conundrum for the standard model of history. But again, this is the effect of using new technology and using our ability to its fullest to try and explore these topics. It's been an interesting year for that, and I think we're only going to keep going forward.

However, despite all of the news cycle really focusing on this and the amazing claims that were made by the Khafre scan team about these structures below the Giza plateau, what if I told you that a massive ancient underground structure in Egypt had already been discovered? Discovered but not yet explored. But it has been discovered. Not only that, but this structure has been scanned using several different techniques, including space-based deep earth penetrating techniques, several times, also with other techniques, and it is 100% confirmed through all of these techniques to actually exist.

Not only that, but this is something that I'm talking about that you can't really consider wildly speculative or something new. Now this isn't a criticism of the Khafre scan claims or the claims they made about the Khufu pyramid, but they are speculative and they are new. No one else has really claimed that there are 80-foot cubic rooms and shafts that are dozens of meters wide running down 600 or 700 meters below the Giza Plateau. Nobody's talked about those existing. For sure there are tunnels and passages in the ground at the Giza plateau, but nobody has really talked about them in the context of the scale of the claims that have been made by the Khafre scan team.

It has been documented not only in fairly recent times but also throughout antiquity. There are a few people in our modern era who know about this, who are actively trying to pursue this and find out more and to push the exploration of this site further forward. The claims that have been made about it and the way that this structure has been talked about in antiquity is also quite amazing, and we're going to get into some of those examples. It's said to exceed in grandeur all of the wonders of the ancient world, and that includes the pyramids. In fact, specifically, it is said to exceed the grandeur of the pyramids of Egypt. If that's true, then the uncovering, the discovery, and the exploration of a site like that, which is said to exceed in grandeur and spectacle the pyramids of Egypt, really should represent the discovery of the 21st century, probably of the entire millennium in the field of archaeology.

However, what's really crazy about this is that the discovery has quite honestly been suppressed. There has actually been a cover-up, and we're going to get into some of the details of that. But I think one of the great things about this new technology, particularly the fact that a lot of this stuff is in space, is that it is difficult for one particular government or entity or person to control. They can't control it; it's in space. So there are opportunities here to explore this site and to get this information out and hopefully to move forward with its exploration.

I'm sure some of you know exactly what I'm talking about. Some of you may not have heard of this, but I am of course talking about the great Labyrinth of ancient Egypt.

Now, when I say the word "labyrinth," I don't think the great lost labyrinth of ancient Egypt is the one that comes to mind. If you're of my age, and I might be dating myself a little bit here, when I talk about "Labyrinth," the first thing you might think about is the David Bowie movie with all the Henson puppets with Jennifer Connelly. A fantastic movie from back in the day, it's one from childhood that probably sticks in a lot of people's brains.

The ancient Egyptian labyrinth might still not be the one that you think about when you think of real labyrinths. In fact, most people I suspect when you say "labyrinth" think that it probably originated from the ancient Greek labyrinth, the one on the island of Crete. This is one of those ancient Greek myths or legends that's part of their mythology. Most people probably have a passing awareness of this with the Minotaur. It was built for King Minos by a guy named Daedalus, who was the father of Icarus. Icarus being the guy who flew a little too close to the sun, and the wax on his wings melted, and he fell to his death. You also have Theseus, who went into the labyrinth. There's a whole story of him following and unraveling his cotton thread so he wouldn't get lost. He was going down there to save the maiden because they were sacrificing maidens to this beast that lived in the labyrinth, the Minotaur, who was a half-bull, half-man creature, and the Minotaur was killed by Theseus. This whole story is kind of a funny one if you want to look into its origins, particularly the origins of the Minotaur. If you want to find out how twisted some of the ancient Greek myths and stories can get, you can look into where the Minotaur came from. It has to do with Poseidon and King Minos and King Minos's wife and a big white bull.

However, this whole story and this whole legend, even though the word "labyrinth" does come from the Greek "labyrinthos," the whole idea of the labyrinth, it's said that this whole concept was inspired and built because the Greeks knew about the ancient Egyptian labyrinth. We can go back to early Greek writers during the period to find out that this is the case. In fact, let's look at a guy called Diodorus Siculus, who was an ancient Greek historian who originated from Sicily. In his Histories, Volume 1, in around the 1st century BCE, he wrote this about the Cretan labyrinth:

"It is even said by some that Daedalus crossed over to Egypt and in wonder at the skill shown in the building, built for Minos, king of Crete, a labyrinth like that in Egypt, in which, so the tales go, the creature called the Minotaur was kept."

He goes on to explain a little further that "be that as it may, the Cretan labyrinth has completely disappeared, either through the destruction wrought by some ruler or through the ravages of time. But the Egyptian labyrinth remains absolutely perfect in its entire construction down to my time." Now, Diodorus Siculus lived and obviously visited Egypt in the 1st century BC. So, he's talking about the Cretan labyrinth at that point seems to have been destroyed. It was a figure from his own history, but he evidently visited the labyrinth and he wrote more about it. One of the other things he talked about was this complex and crazy, undulating set of passages and chambers. He says that, "For once in, it is impossible to find one's way out again without difficulty, unless one lights upon a guide who is perfectly acquainted with it." So, Diodorus actually visited this ancient Egyptian labyrinth, and he certainly wasn't the only one.

Probably the earliest historical figure that we know of who wrote about his account of visiting the labyrinth, and probably one of the most famous people to have ever visited it, was of course Herodotus. Now, Herodotus lived several centuries before Diodorus Siculus. He lived around the 5th century BC (484 to 430 BC) and he wrote extensively about the mysteries and wonders of Egypt, including the labyrinth. What he wrote about the labyrinth is quite revealing in terms of its grandeur and its scale. Quoting Herodotus:

"This I saw myself, and I found it greater than words can say. For if one should put together and reckon up all of the buildings and all of the great works produced by the Hellenes, they would prove to be inferior in labor and expense to this labyrinth. Though it is true that both the temple at Ephesus and that at Samos are works worthy of note."

He's explaining that the work of all of the Greeks, the Hellenes, his own civilization—of course, Herodotus was a Greek historian as well—paled in comparison to simply the labyrinth. The amount of labor it would take to do everything that the ancient Greek civilization did would be less than that required to build the labyrinth. He also compared the labyrinth to the other parts of Egypt. Quoting Herodotus:

"The pyramids were also greater than words can say, and each one of them is equal to many works of the Hellenes, great as they may be, but the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids."

This is an incredible claim. If you're like me and you've ever been to the Giza Plateau, you've been to Egypt, you marvel at their size and scale. It's really hard to comprehend until you're actually there and you see them in person. It's phenomenal and it never gets old. Every time you go there and see them, you're like, "Oh my god, they're so massive, so impressive." And the more you learn about them—their attributes, the precision, everything that goes into them—that makes them incredibly impressive. For somebody like Herodotus to say that this labyrinth exceeds the pyramids in grandeur, that is an astonishing claim.

But that's not all we have to go on for the labyrinth either. We have a number of historical authors who actually got pretty specific about how it was built and what it was made up of. Let's continue with Herodotus and learn a little bit more about the structure of the labyrinth. This is what he wrote about that:

"It has 12 courts covered in, with gates facing one another, six upon the north side and six upon the south, joining on one to another, and the same wall surrounds them all outside. And there are in it two kinds of chambers: the one kind below the ground and the other kind above these, 3,000 in number, of each kind 1,500."

Herodotus here is telling us a little bit about the structure of the labyrinth. He's talking about the fact that there are 12 great courts that have gates that face each other. So there are at least 12 large courtyards as part of this structure. There is one single wall surrounding the entire thing and at least two levels that he knows of with something like 1,500 rooms, I assume in addition to these great courts.

Herodotus was also being quite honest with us in the next passage, in that he never visited the lower layers. He only heard about them. What he wrote about them was:

"Accordingly, we speak of the chambers below by what we received from hearsay, while those above we saw ourselves and found them to be works of more than human greatness. For the passages through the chambers, and the goings this way and that through the courts, which were admirably adorned, afforded endless matter for marvel, as we went through from a court to the chambers beyond it, and from the chambers to colonnades, and from the colonnades to other rooms, and then from the chambers again to other courts."

Herodotus didn't see the lower layers; he was told about them. He's talking about there being chambers below the ground, but within that whole structure, there are massive courts, and he's here describing the winding passages and the labyrinthian nature of the labyrinth. Herodotus also gives us more clues about what the labyrinth was made of and his impressions of the stonework and the actual workmanship. Continuing with Herodotus:

"Over the whole of these is a roof made of stone like the walls, and the walls are covered with figures carved upon them. Each court being surrounded with pillars of white stone fitted together most perfectly. And at the end of the labyrinth, by the corner of it, there is a pyramid of 40 fathoms upon which large figures are carved. And to this, there is a way made underground."

These are really important aspects of the labyrinth that Herodotus is describing, things we should keep in mind as we go forward. He's talking about white columns that are fitted together most perfectly, the fact that the roof is made of stone—the same stone as the walls. And at the end of the labyrinth or attached to it somehow, probably via an underground passage, there's a pyramid. At that time, the pyramid sounds like it was cased and it actually had inscriptions on the outside of the casing with these large figures.

Herodotus isn't the only one who's talked about these different aspects of the labyrinth and these different characteristics of it. So, let's return to Diodorus Siculus, who wrote a little bit more about the specifics of what's in the labyrinth. Quoting Diodorus Siculus:

"While in respect of carving and other works of craftsmanship, they left no room for their successors to surpass them. For when one had entered the sacred enclosure, one found a temple surrounded by columns, 40 to each side. And this building had a roof made of a single stone carved with panels and richly adorned with excellent paintings."

First of all, Diodorus here is saying that it's perfection. He's saying that there was no room left to succeed the craftsmanship of how this thing was built. He's also describing the fact that in these columned halls—remember Herodotus talked about 12 of them—he's talking about entering one of these temples, one of these columned halls that was surrounded by these columns that Herodotus describes as these white stone columns, but there were 40 of them to each side. And that this entire building had a roof made of a single stone. Now, I am actually quite skeptical about this claim that it was a single stone. However, I think what he's describing is something that we can see on other ancient megalithic sites, places like the Valley Temple in Giza, the Sphinx Temple, probably the best example being the Osirion. When you visit the Valley Temple in Giza today, you're looking at these massive granite walls. There was a granite roof on this thing. When this thing was finished and these walls were polished, you probably couldn't see the joints in the stone. There are only a few spots in the Valley Temple where you can see the original facing, the original surface of the stone, how finely wrought and polished it was. The surface has since spalled off, the actual outer surface of the granite. This has happened over thousands, maybe many thousands of years of erosion. When the surface spalls off on these blocks, it obviously spalls off a little more on the joins between the blocks because you have that corner there, so a bit more of the corner comes off and the lines between the blocks become pronounced. However, when this thing was flat and polished, you probably couldn't have even been able to determine or see the joins between the blocks. There are a few examples where you literally can't even determine and see the line between the blocks because the joinery is so fine, and when the whole surface was polished, that same effect would have been in place. Indeed, that's what it sounds like to me is happening with the roof that he's describing as a single stone. It is probably the same type of building, the same type of architecture that we see in places like the Valley Temple, which are the most mysterious, the most ancient, the most megalithic of all of the sites in ancient Egypt.

The other part that Diodorus talks about are these huge columned halls with 40 columns to each side. When he says that, I'm reminded of places like the great columned hall of the Luxor Temple at Luxor in upper Egypt. There might be 40 columns in this picture or in this courtyard, something like that. I've never actually taken the time to count them, but remember Diodorus actually said there were 40 to each side. So each hall had at least 80 columns, and there were something like 12 of them. Twelve in and of itself is quite an interesting number from a precessional perspective. This gives you an idea of the kind of scale we might be talking about in this building when one of these halls contains twice as many columns as the hall that we're seeing here at Luxor.

Let's look at some more of these ancient accounts and some of these other clues that are left to us from these other authors. Let's talk about Strabo. Strabo was an ancient Greek geographer who lived essentially across year zero. He was around the same time as Jesus Christ was said to exist, from 64 BC to around 19 of the common era. He's best known for his work Geographica, and he talked about visiting the labyrinth as well in his work. This is what he wrote about it:

"In addition to these things, there is the edifice of the labyrinth which is a building quite equal to the pyramids."

Maybe he's not being quite as generous as Herodotus in saying that it exceeds the pyramids, but he's saying it's quite equal to the pyramids, which is still a hell of a claim.

"It is a great palace made up of many palaces. For such is the number of peristyle courts which lie contiguous with one another."

He's again reinforcing that there are many palaces or many of these courtyards with all of these peristyle courts that have all of these columns in them. Again, we are seeing more eyewitness accounts of the same thing.

"Before the entrances, there lie what might be called hidden chambers, which are long and many in number and have paths running through one another which twist and turn so that no one can enter or leave without a guide."

Again, this is the labyrinthian nature of the structure. He's talking about passages that, as Herodotus talked about too, you go from this way to that, from this room to that, through different passages that you need a guide to get in here, that you can actually get lost and presumably get into some trouble. This reminds me of the chinkanas in South America, the labyrinths that are said to exist under the ground on many of these sites. There have actually been stories of people getting into them and getting lost and dying.

Probably the most interesting part is the connection Strabo makes. He gives us another clue here about a building that I think might be similar in construction style to the labyrinth because he says something interesting here. He says:

"And above this city stands Abydos, in which there is the Memnonium, a palace wonderfully constructed of massive stonework. In the same way as we have said the labyrinth was built, though the Memnonium differs in being simple in structure."

Isn't that interesting? The Memnonium, something he's calling the Memnonium. He says it is in Abydos. If you know much about ancient Egypt or if you know much about what's at Abydos, and this is a place that Strabo is also known to have visited in those ancient times, I think he's talking about this structure. I think he's talking about the Osirion. In the Osirion, you have these massive stone beams, like 80-90 ton stone beams that are spanning the roof. There are also the big columns that are in here, these big granite beams. The outside is all quartzite, but they span the roof. He's talking about the fact that these things are spanning the roof in the same manner as this building. However, this building here, the Osirion, differs from the labyrinth in that it's simple. He's calling the Osirion simple, and it's anything but simple, at least to my way of thinking. The Osirion is essentially a constructed island. We know there's like 20-plus meters of depth on either end of this thing. It's essentially a big stone structure that you are standing on top of when you go into it today. There are chambers, there are multiple blocks going down below it. You can see in older photographs, when a lot more water was pumped out of there, that the layers keep on going down. It's just mind-blowing to me that the labyrinth is described as being so superior and way more complex than the Osirion. But the real key here is that it's being described as being built in the same way as these mysterious megalithic structures from ancient Egypt: the Valley Temple, the Osirion, the Mortuary Temple up on the second pyramid—the stuff that's the most mysterious, the most precise, and I think the most eroded and the most likely to be much older than the dynastic Egyptian civilization.

Continuing on with historical accounts, who else has visited and written about the labyrinth? Well, there was Pliny the Elder, who was a Roman author, a naturalist. He was a naval and army commander, Gaius Plinius Secundus, lived in the first century AD (23 to 79 AD). He also talked about the labyrinth in his Natural Histories. Quoting Pliny the Elder:

"Let us speak also of labyrinths, quite the most extraordinary works on which men have spent their money, but not, as may be thought, of the imagination. There still exists even now in Egypt the one which was built first, according to tradition, 3,600 years ago. At any rate, that Daedalus used this as the model for the labyrinth which he built in Crete is beyond doubt. It is equally clear that he imitated only a hundredth part of it."

Pliny here is telling us that these are not figments of the imagination. It's massive; the one that we talk about in Crete that was built for King Minos was only barely a hundredth part of the size and scale of the Egyptian labyrinth. He's also saying something else that is very interesting here to me. He says it was built first, according to tradition, 3,600 years ago. That would be 3600 BC, roughly, because Pliny is around in the 1st century AD. Now, the ancient Egyptian civilization is not even supposed to have started until roughly 3000 BC, and that's the first two dynasties, the archaic period. The Old Kingdom, where they actually supposedly did this megalithic building, things like the Valley Temple, wasn't until 2700 BC. He's talking about a structure that supposedly has been around for damn near a thousand years earlier than that. You're going back into different climatic periods. I'm interested in what tradition he's talking about because the modern accounting, or the standard model version of the labyrinth, is very minimal. They certainly don't attribute it to being Old Kingdom. In fact, if you go and look at the Wikipedia page for the labyrinth, it's pretty weak. It says it's been destroyed, carried away, a lot of its stone was taken, and there's nothing there anymore. They suggest it was all Middle Kingdom potentially. All of this data is typically just ignored by the standard model. It should be taken seriously because these guys are giving us firsthand accounts of them actually visiting and exploring these sites.

Continuing with Pliny, he tells us a little bit more again about how the labyrinth was made and the type of stone that was used in it. He says:

"The Egyptian specimen, to my considerable astonishment, has its entrance and columns made of Parian marble, while the rest of it is of Aswan granite. Such masses being put together as time itself cannot dissolve, even with the help of the Heracleopolitans, for they have regarded the building with extraordinary hatred."

Let's unpack what he's saying. When he's talking about Parian marble or marble, he's talking about calcite. He's talking about white calcite, and he's saying the columns are made of white calcite. That's an important point. The other stone that he's calling out here is of course Aswan granite. It's the granite that comes from Aswan. Most commonly it's the pink granite, but there are other types of granite that do come from Aswan. The quarry there where the unfinished obelisk is is not the only quarry; there were dozens of quarries. In that part of upper Egypt, the igneous rock has actually been pushed up and doesn't have sedimentary layers of rock on top of it, so they could mine it. It is obviously of high quality to be used in building sites. Tens of thousands, probably millions of tons of that stuff were pulled out by whoever was building all of these structures at some point. And he's saying that there's such a mass of it at this place that even the quarrying that's happened there, the destruction that's happening by the Heracleopolitans, cannot diminish it. Evidently, he's talking about the fact that there are people that are just using it as a quarry, which is also reinforced later on, as we'll get into. He's just saying there's so much of it here that these guys can't destroy it because they hate it or they're just quarrying it. I suspect this is a description of them quarrying and taking the stone to be used in other projects, which is for time immemorial a habit that humans like to do. We do it everywhere. We do it to the pyramids of Giza. We do it at Tiwanaku in South America. We love to just take stone if it's already been cut and use it for something else. No one cares about restoring or preserving ancient buildings until today. At least we can thank our modern society for that, that we're actually preserving and stopping the destruction of ancient sites because we've been destroying them for literally thousands of years at this point.

The thing I want to drill in on a little bit here is what Pliny is saying: that the columns are made of Parian marble, which is of course calcite. Marble is a form of calcite, also called alabaster, also called travertine. They're all different flavors of the same sort of sedimentary rock. Here's an example of this sort of white calcite. This would easily be described as marble by somebody like Pliny. What's interesting about this one is that again we see things like calcite or marble or alabaster columns and column bases associated with the very earliest times in ancient Egypt. In fact, those times that I think stretch way back into pre-dynastic times.

The same materials are being discussed, and it's quite interesting. Pliny gives us some more clues about the specific attributes of the labyrinth. All of these little things are quite important because I'm going to return to them and show that they've been reaffirmed by modern technology and some of the modern discoveries made of this place. So Pliny again, continuing on about the labyrinth:

"Men are already weary with traveling when they reach that bewildering maze of paths. Indeed, there are also lofty upper rooms reached by ramps and porticos from which one descends on stairways which have 90 steps each. Inside are columns of imperial porphyry, images of the gods, statues of kings, and representations of monsters."

Ninety steps? My house, I think it's like 16 steps to go from one level to the next. That's a story. How many stories do you think is 90 steps? That's a long way. If he's talking about the difference between the levels in the labyrinth, that's a long way. It's nearly a hundred steps descending to get to the next level. That's quite remarkable; that's deep. You can imagine maybe that's because these halls in one level are actually very tall that you have to go down that deep. Just keep that in mind. Put that in the back of your mind for now, that there are 90 steps he's describing as a difference between at least two of the levels in the labyrinth.

Looking at more historical authors, let's go to Pomponius Mela, who was another Roman geographer. He was born in the 1st century BC and lived until about 45 of the common era. His work, which was De situ orbis libri III, remained in use nearly up until the year 1500. So he's quite a well-known geographer. But he also visited and wrote about the labyrinth. It's funny, isn't it? All of the Greeks and Romans who we attribute a lot of ancient knowledge to—mathematics and all these other things—a lot of these guys, they all visited Egypt. Even the story of Atlantis comes from Egypt. Even though Plato gives it to us in Timaeus and Critias, he talks about his ancestor Solon telling the story, but in that story, Solon goes to Egypt and gets the story from an Egyptian priest. Pomponius Mela, who wrote about the labyrinth, wrote:

"The building of Psammetichus, the labyrinth, includes within the circuit of one unbroken wall 1,000 houses and 12 palaces, and is built of marble as well as being roofed with the same material. It has one descending way into it, and contains within it almost innumerable paths, which have many convolutions twisting hither and thither."

I had to read that because anyone who says "hither and thither," I just like saying it.

"These paths, however, cause great perplexity both because of their continual winding and because of their porticos, which often reverse their direction, continually running through one circle after another and continually turning and retracing the steps as far as they have gone forwards, with the result that the labyrinth is fraught with confusion by reason of its perpetual meandering."

Kind of crazy, what he's describing here. I think he's also talking about unbroken walls, like it is one structure, a thousand houses, 12 palaces. The same reference to these 12 covered courtyards that Herodotus gave us 600-700 years prior to this time. He also talks about it having one descending way going into it. So it's not like it's something on the surface; this has one descending way that you use to actually get into the labyrinth. And then the men, when they get in here, were already weary. He also talks about the fact that you can get lost down here. In fact, I'm not sure if he's saying this, but it's almost like he's saying that the porticos reverse their direction. So maybe he's actually talking about the fact that some of these walls would be moved. It's kind of like a real crazy labyrinth where the walls actually get moved and the labyrinth changes its structure. Who knows? These are the accounts that we get.

Interestingly, after the classical authors of antiquity—these guys like Herodotus, Pomponius Mela, Diodorus Siculus—they had their accounts, and after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have the Dark Ages. It wasn't really until the time of the Renaissance that artists started to take another interest in the labyrinth. From that period, we get some illustrations based on these historical accounts and potentially of actual visits to the site. These are a couple of examples of them. You can see here the one on the left shows 12 massive courts surrounding this labyrinthian structure. It's almost like a symbolic representation of the labyrinth, I think. And then you have this continuous wall that runs around the outside. But there are 12 massive courts here, almost like there are 12 symbols of the zodiac, 12 disciples of Jesus. I wonder why it's always 12: 12 months of the year, 12 constellations in the sky. This is all zodiacal, precessional stuff. Twelve is a very interesting precessional number from the great year in the great cycle. The image on the right is a bit more of the traditional labyrinthian sort of confusing, convoluted pathways example of what it might have been like. Remember that the description says that there were 1,500 rooms on each level, so 3,000 rooms in total, with passages going between them and then also these giant courtyards.

One of my favorite depictions of the labyrinth is actually this one, which was engraved onto a copper plate. It shows you this depiction of these massive columned halls beneath the ground, and on top of the ground here, there's a town, a Roman or Ptolemaic-era little town where people may have no clue what's beneath the ground here. This image really strikes me and reminds me of the Mines of Moria and that scene in The Lord of the Rings when Gandalf holds up his staff and says, "Perhaps we can chance a little bit more light," and he lights it up and you just see this incredible, massive open space. You just have to wonder if the Balrog is still down here or not, but it seems like it's something like that. Absolutely incredible. This depiction happens to also match, as we'll see, the accounts of where this place actually is, because we happen to know where it is.

We get a lot of clues from these descriptions. There are descriptions talking about a pyramid being attached to it. The authors also talk about a big lake being nearby. In fact, they talk about Lake Moeris; they actually name the lake. There's a nearby city that is described in these historical accounts, a place called Crocodilopolis or Arsinoe, and we kind of know where that is.

Grandios as these historical depictions are, there's really never been any super big mystery about where the labyrinth is likely to be. In fact, most Egyptologists and historians have all typically agreed on the location for the labyrinth based on these historical accounts. That's in this area that you see right here. This is an area called the Faiyum. It's a picture of the Nile Valley. You've got Cairo up in the north. As we go down south, the green line here is really the Nile Valley, the verdant green line that follows the Nile down south. And that big leaf-shaped thing off to the left of the Nile Valley is a place called the Faiyum. This is a big depression, today used as an agricultural zone. It's actually connected to the Nile Valley through a channel. Before, when the Nile used to flood, this place would flood; it would get this annual inundation. There's a lake today called Qarun Lake in the northwest side of the Faiyum, but in ancient times, Lake Moeris was here, and it was actually a much bigger portion of the Faiyum that was contained by Lake Moeris. In what's called the neck of the Faiyum, this little green connector between these zones, this is the area where all of the modern historians and archaeologists tend to agree this is likely where the labyrinth was.

If you zoom right in on a part of the neck of the Faiyum, there's a little place called Hawara. And on it stands the pyramid of Amenemhat III. This is at Hawara, and it's said to be this area around here and below and all around this space is where the labyrinth is. Funny enough, if you actually zoom in on Google Earth, it actually says "Labyrinth." It'll tell you, "Yep, this is where the labyrinth is."

If you go to Hawara, and I've been to Hawara several times as I've been fascinated by this story for many years, this is pretty much what you see when you get there. Honestly, there isn't a whole lot to see at Hawara. The pyramid of Amenemhat III, as identified by Flinders Petrie, which we'll get into, is a mud-brick pyramid. It's made of these big mud bricks, 30-40 pound mud bricks, that have been made to create the superstructure or the internal structure of the pyramid. This pyramid was cased in antiquity, so it did have Tura limestone. It probably had smooth sides. It was likely engraved; it could well have been engraved with large figures as has been described by the historical authors. There's a small open-air museum, and if you climb up on top of the pyramid, which obviously I've done, you can see the mud brick of the pyramid itself. As you span out around here, you see the green of the Faiyum, but just the sands of the Egyptian desert that run through here. All these big fields and everything we can see here is supposedly where the labyrinth was.

Now, when you go out here and walk in this sandy area, you actually get some pretty significant clues that indeed there was megalithic building and the typical things that you might see at a place that contained large objects and architecture made from megalithic stone. There are big pieces of Aswan granite, big rose granite chunks laying out here. This piece that you're seeing here is actually a fragment of a fluted column, so it's a broken piece of a large single-piece column that was out here. You can find these pieces of limestone, of even in some cases alabaster calcite, small pieces, the remnants from quarrying. Big chunks of granite are laying out here. People have obviously been digging around looking for stuff here for, I suspect, centuries upon centuries.

An important feature on the site today is something called the Barabi Canal. This canal, you can see it running here, provides irrigation water today to the Faiyum and to the farmers of the Faiyum. It's still a functional canal that's used today. It's actually been in place for a long time. It was built in the 1830s by a French Freemason, Linant de Bellefonds, who happened to also be the guy who engineered the Suez Canal. So he put this in here in the 1830s and it's been here ever since. But when you go down and look at it, you can see on the banks of these canals these big pieces of quartzite and also on the other side of the canal. I've been on both sides of this. You can see the remnants of big blocks of either limestone or calcite, things like that. I've heard stories about when they come in with excavators to sort of clear out the canal, they will often pull up big chunks of stone and they just dump them wherever. They don't really care about trying to preserve them, but as they dig this canal out, they keep digging up chunks of stone and granite and things like that that aren't natural to the area.

As we move forward in time here, we get past the Renaissance and we get into what you might call the modern era, the last few hundred years. There have been some accounts of the labyrinth in the last few hundred years. You have guys like Paul Lucas in the late 17th century, Dr. Richard Pococke in the 18th century, Luigi Canina in the early 19th century. All of these guys visited this part. They wrote about the labyrinth, they were aware of the historical accounts of the labyrinth, and they went to try and visit it and find out more about it. They've all had accounts of it.

Probably the most famous person from this era was Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon Bonaparte and his expedition with all of his savants also visited Hawara in the early 19th century. He writes about this and there are even depictions drawn here that come from his Description de l'Égypte, which is the book you can find on archive.org. It's a remarkable work. He was always interested in ancient Egypt. He spent a night in the Great Pyramid. Napoleon was fascinated by the mysteries of Egypt. I do like this rendering of Hawara here, quite optimistically shown with the snowy peaks in the backgrounds, which I can assure you are not there when you go to Hawara. There are not a lot of snowy peaks to be seen in that part of Egypt. Maybe these date palms were there, but this is clearly Hawara, the pyramids of the Faiyum.

As we move forward into getting closer to our modern times, depictions of the labyrinth or at least accounts and maps that were drawn from expeditions there were done by guys like Karl Lepsius. His map shows the pyramid as well as these structures and remnants of what he thought were the labyrinth. You can compare that map to the Google Earth image. You can see the Barabi canal here. You can see Lepsius actually labeled his map as being a plan of the labyrinth and of the pyramid. All of these accounts were really informing the guy who did the most excavation on this site, which was of course one of my favorite figures in archaeology, Sir Flinders Petrie.

Petrie did the majority of the excavation work and we get the majority of actual data at Hawara from Petrie. He had two large-scale, big excavations to Hawara. He ran one in 1888-89 and then one in 1910-11. He wrote about his accounts at Hawara in several books, primarily Ten Years' Digging in Egypt and then another book called Hawara, Biahmu and Arsinoe. His initial interest when Petrie visited the site was the mud-brick pyramid. He's actually the guy who identified it as being of Amenemhat III of the 12th dynasty in the Middle Kingdom. He found inscriptions and things like that that date it to that period. I actually have no doubt that this probably is the work of Amenemhat III. There's nothing technologically advanced about the pyramid that's on this site. It's a mud-brick pyramid. I think all of these mud-brick pyramids were built by the dynastic Egyptians. They cased them in nice white Tura limestone, they probably inscribed them. I do think this pyramid was built here for a reason, probably because of what was in the ground, and in fact what was in the ground directly beneath the pyramid, which we'll get into. But Petrie initially focused on the pyramid. However, his primary purpose was always the labyrinth. He was well aware of these historical accounts and he was trying to find it. What he did at this site is quite amazing.

The pyramid itself is quite interesting. You remember from the historical accounts that they talk about there being a passage to the labyrinth underneath the pyramid. What's beneath this pyramid is fairly interesting. There is a structure, a megalithic structure that exists beneath the pyramid that's known about, that Petrie explored, and you can see the entrance to it here. It's a little strange when you think about the other pyramids, almost every other pyramid, particularly the big stone pyramids. Their entrance is on the north side and the pyramids are built in and around the subterranean structure and chambers. Think about the Great Pyramid; the northern entrance goes all the way through the pyramid then into the bedrock beneath it. It's kind of part of that infrastructure. That doesn't seem to be what's happened here at Hawara. The entrance to this structure made from these big megalithic blocks is below the ground level. It's almost as if the pyramid's kind of been placed over the top of this, not part of it. The entrance is actually on the western side of the south face, so it's like the southwestern corner of the pyramid is where the entrance is. The fact that the entrance to what's below the pyramid is over on that southwestern corner really confused Petrie because it took him a while to get in there.

I've labeled this slide "Petrie was a savage" because I think it's one of the most entertaining accounts that Petrie ever wrote down: the account of his exploration and what he found beneath this pyramid. It's quite amazing. Petrie knew that the entrance to these pyramids was generally on the north, so he started on the north side. He actually started cutting into the pyramid, tunneling into the pyramid to try and find if there was something just below the ground. He basically had to cut all the way towards and into the center of the pyramid. Eventually, he hit these huge, big roofing stones of this structure that's sitting beneath the pyramid. Just to give you an idea of how dangerous and how crazy this work was, and why I call Petrie a savage, let me read to you a little bit about what he did when he tunneled into the pyramid. Quoting Petrie:

"The sand between the bricks was in very thick layers, usually half to one inch, and being quite dry and clean, it ran out interminably in some parts, coming down as in an hourglass from the joints. It was needful, therefore, to board up the roof of the tunnel all along, as no native would treat the place with sufficient tenderness to avoid loosening the bricks overhead. I had to fix every board myself as the tunnel advanced. The bricks, moreover, were so large and heavy, being double the size each way of an English brick and weighing 40 or 50 lb, that a single one dropped on a person would have settled his moving powers for some time to come. It was needful, therefore, to use the greatest care in loosening and taking down the bricks."

So, he's tunneling into this thing, but the sand is literally an inch thick between these bricks. It's not exactly precision megalithic stonework here we're talking about. They're mud bricks, but they're big, heavy mud bricks. So you're tunneling in and the sand's sort of loosening and coming down on you, and he had to put boards overhead. I do like his description of, "if one of these things hits you in the head, it's going to settle your moving powers for some time to come." He had a way with words.

As he's tunneling into the pyramid, he eventually hits these big sloping roof blocks that you can see. These are big blocks of granite and they're like four or five feet thick. Apparently, when he hit them, he told his workers, "We got to cut through this to get into it." And they're like, "No, we're not doing that." He describes his masons as just throwing up their hands in despair. In fact, he finished his season in one year and he couldn't get into them. So it wasn't until the next year when he came back that he could get stonemasons—he went through several of them—willing enough to do the work to actually hammer their way through big, massive, thick beams of granite like this. But eventually they did.

Once they cut their way in through these roof blocks, Petrie started to explore this whole structure from the central point. He was trying to find the entrance to find out how to actually get into this thing. His description of his exploration of this—just put yourself in his shoes for a minute and try to imagine the terror that you would feel in the situation he was in. You have to imagine now these passages aren't clear; they're full of debris and water. We'll get into the water in a minute, but there was water and debris and mud and stuff. They had to dig their way through a lot of it. But this is what Petrie wrote as he got into this structure beneath the pyramid from that central part. He says:

"Thence I went exploring through the passages up the east passage. The muddy earth rose nearly to the roof and we had to crawl through. At the south end of this, there seemed to be no exit, but a slight gap under the southeast trapdoor showed that there was a way, and clearing out some earth, I got in far enough to stick tight and knocked the candle out. Matches had to be fetched as we were streaming with the heat so that nothing could be kept dry in the only garment I had on."

Pause for a second here and imagine you're underground in what I imagine has to be pitch blackness. It's hot as all hell. He's crawling through tight passages that they're just excavating out, and he shoves himself into a hole tight enough that he gets stuck and he knocks his candle out. Now he's stuck in a hole under a pyramid in what I imagine has to be unbearable heat, and he has to send some dude out behind him presumably to go get matches so they can light another candle. This is freaking crazy. So he continues:

"Under the stone, I got into the southeastern chamber, and then the south passage was so nearly filled with mud that we had to lie flat and slide along it, propelled by fingers and toes. At last, I reached the southwest chamber. The blind passage, being level, did not promise a way out. The lean lad got up the top of the first trapdoor in an incredibly shallow space, but found no exit. Then I slid down the narrow, forced hole beneath the last trapdoor, and waded through the water in the antechamber. There at last I found a passage sloping considerably upward and knew that we were in the entrance passage. The way was worst of all here, as the ground was full of sharp crystals of sulfate of lime, and the walls lined with more crystals which cut like a knife. Scraping a clear way, I squeezed up this passage as far as I could, and then began carefully measuring backwards through all the passages to the tunnel so as to know the position of the entrance."

So he spends what has to be hours, if not days, I imagine, crawling through these passages and then eventually gets to where he thinks the sloping entrance passage is, and then he starts measuring carefully going backwards to try and coordinate exactly where that entrance might be. He eventually does find the entrance. Now, today, no one can actually enter this structure. You can't get in here anymore. And if you're wondering why, well, it's because of this. If you can find the entrance, they'll open the door for you. You go down a few steps and what do you find? Water. There's literally water within several meters of getting into this entrance passage, which is nicely made, nice megalithic stonework. But you can see as the man here throws a stone into the water, the water level has risen all the way up into that entrance passage.

I think it's particularly interesting to read Petrie's description of what exactly it was that he found beneath this pyramid because it's like nothing else. It's a very interesting megalithic structure that he found beneath the pyramid here at Hawara, and it's made up of just massive megalithic blocks of stone. If you look at the diagram that Keith Hamilton made here, you can see these massive slanting roof beams that Petrie described as being quartzite or granite. He said there were basically boxes here made of quartzite and granite. He says that they were at least 80 tons, potentially more. But probably what is the most interesting component of what's beneath the ground here is something that's called the "super chamber." It's essentially they say this is the chamber, and then there's another box in there. There is a secondary kind of box that's in there, but the super chamber itself is actually a single-piece box in and of itself. It's made from yellow quartzite, and there are very few other artifacts from ancient Egypt made from yellow quartzite. It supposedly weighs, just the box, in the realm of 110 tons, likely more. A lot of the other blocks that Petrie described in the different trap doors and the different little antechambers at the corners of each of these passages he described as being in the 20 to 50-ton range. So you have a lot of these massive blocks of granite, of quartzite, stuff that's in the 80, 100, 50-ton range. Where else can we find this type of architecture? Well, we've already explored one of these sites. We've talked about it. But you can find massive blocks of quartzite, massive blocks of granite at the Osirion in Abydos. This huge lintel block that leads into the central area is quartzite. The central structure of the Osirion is all granite. The pillars, the roof, all of that is granite. The walls surrounding it, the entrance passages to it, are quartzite. So, it's the same types of stone, it seems to be the same type of architecture. I think this structure beneath the ground here at Hawara under the pyramid is just as mysterious as the Osirion.

Another interesting aspect of Petrie's exploration of what's beneath the pyramid at Hawara is this idea of it being connected to the labyrinth, or indeed maybe even part of the labyrinth by some sort of single way underneath, as Herodotus described. Petrie couldn't fully explore what was in and around that central chamber in that structure because of the water level. So even during Petrie's time, the water level was such that he was wading through at least waist-deep water in a lot of these chambers. He said the water was so saline and just caustic to his face, he didn't want to stick his head under water. So he was reaching down and trying to use his hands to feel the ground, and they were scraping trowels along the ground to try and bring up and see what they could find on the ground without actually getting in there and touching it. So, I think it's quite possible that if there was a passageway leading to the labyrinth or there was a door or something like that, then Petrie didn't find it because the water level had already subsumed it and he could never actually explore it fully. So, we don't know if there are further passages beneath it. And as you'll see, nobody can get into this space today for a very good reason.

So that's what's beneath the pyramid. But as I said, Petrie's main focus was actually on the labyrinth. He wrote extensively about trying to find the labyrinth. Quoting Petrie from Ten Years' Digging in Egypt:

"Though the pyramid was the main object at Hawara, it was but a lesser part of my work there. On the south of the pyramid laid a wide mass of chips and fragments of building which had long generally been identified with the celebrated labyrinth... When I began to excavate, the result was soon plain that the brick chambers were built on the top of the ruins of a great stone structure, and hence they were only the houses of a village as they had first appeared to me to be. But beneath them, and far away, over a vast area, the layers of stone chips were found, and so great was the mass that it was difficult to persuade visitors that the stratum was artificial and not a natural formation."

He's talking here about when he started to excavate and look at what was on the surface of the field, on both sides of the canal basically, to the south of the pyramid. He says that all these remains and these things that guys like Lepsius drew on their maps, he said those little mud bricks and all that stuff wasn't the labyrinth. That was the remains of the town that was built over the top of them, probably during the Ptolemaic and then the Persian period after that, maybe as a town for quarrying, which Petrie later described. But he's also saying that below that, he found this massive stone layer, this one continuous layer of stone that extended all over this site, that he couldn't convince people was not natural because of its size. Continuing on:

"Beneath these fragments was a uniform smooth bed of beton, or plaster, on which the pavement of the building had been laid. The mere extent of it proved that it was far larger than any temple known in Egypt. All of the temples of Karnak, of Luxor, and a few on the western side of Thebes might be placed together within this vast space of these buildings at Hawara. We know from Pliny and others how for centuries the labyrinth had been a great quarry for the whole district, and its destruction occupied such a body of masons that a small town existed there. All of this information and the recorded position of it agrees so closely with what we can trace that no doubt can now remain regarding the position of one of the wonders of Egypt."

Here Petrie is talking about the size of this layer of beton, of this layer of stone chips that he found, how it was massive—you could fit all of these temples of Egypt into it—and the fact that there was a town here and that for presumably centuries and generations, there were people quarrying the stone from this site. In fact, there was a whole industry, it seems, a whole town built up around this one particular industry of tearing apart ancient sites and using the stone for other things. He goes on to describe the wonders of Egypt in his later book, Hawara, Biahmu and Arsinoe. Quoting Petrie again:

"How far then will the remains at Hawara agree with the descriptions of the magnitude and importance of the labyrinth? We read of the enormous extent of the buildings and of their exceeding in vastness all of the temples of the Greeks put together, and that they even surpassed the pyramids... Of the beauty and magnificence of the work we cannot now judge, as almost every stone has long since been broken up and removed, but the extent of the area we can measure. On tracing these signs to their limits, it is found that they cover an area about 1,000 feet long and 800 feet broad. These mere figures will not signify readily to the mind the vast extent of construction. But when we compare it with the greatest of other Egyptian temples, it may be somewhat realized. On that space could be erected the great hall of Karnak and all of the successive temples adjoining it, and the great court and pylons of it. Also the temple of Mut, and that of Khonsu, and that of Amenhotep III at Karnak. Also the two great temples of Luxor. And still there would be room for the whole of the Ramesseum. In short, all of the temples on the east of Thebes and one of the largest on the west bank might be placed together in the one area of the ruins at Hawara. Here we certainly have a site worthy of the renown which the labyrinth acquired."

Again, he's describing the scale, he's trying to express the scale of just how big this structure must have been. 1,000 feet by 800 feet, that's 300-plus meters. That's a huge size for a multi-level structure as this is indeed described. The other thing that Petrie is saying here, which is a very interesting point and this leads us to the modern or standard model accounting of the labyrinth as not existing anymore, that it's been quarried, is that Petrie dug down and he found these layers of stone chips, he found this layer of plaster, and what he assumed was that all of the stone was gone. He assumed that he was standing on the foundation of the labyrinth and this was the remnants from quarrying. It very much likely was or is the remnants from quarrying. But he was suggesting that the labyrinth has pretty much all been destroyed, all the stones have been cut up and taken. There was an industry here for centuries doing this.

Turns out what most likely happened is Petrie dug down and he was probably standing on the roof. He was probably standing on the top of the lower layers, or at least one of the lower layers of the labyrinth, and that this structure still exists. This is where the story gets really interesting because it's only been in modern years, using modern technology, that this hypothesis has been pretty much fully vindicated.

This all started in around 2008 with a guy named Louis de Cordier and his expedition to Egypt, which was called the Mataha Expedition. Louis de Cordier is a philanthropist, a Belgian artist. He was behind putting together an expedition to Hawara to go and search for the labyrinth using modern technology, things like ground-penetrating radar, seismic tomography, geomagnetism, things like that. He partnered up with the Supreme Council of Antiquities as well as the NRIAG, which is the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, which is located in Cairo. Those are the guys that do the technical work. He had full permission for this expedition. He literally had permission from Zahi Hawass at the time, who was the minister of antiquities back in 2008. They scanned this whole site using a whole bunch of different techniques, like I mentioned: ground-penetrating radar, geomagnetism, electrical resistivity tomography, very low frequency electromagnetic scanning, lots of different techniques. What was the result? Well, they found the labyrinth, and it turns out it's still there.

During the expedition, they scanned on two sites, basically to the south of the pyramid at Hawara. One large site was to the east of the Barabi Canal and one site was to the west on the other side of the canal. These sites, you have to imagine, were 150 meters by 100 meters and then 100 meters by 80 meters. So some big zones were actually scanned, and it turns out they found the labyrinth. It's literally right here. You can see at a depth of 8 meters, using the VLF tools, you can see the labyrinthian nature of the results. There are blocks and channels and passages. This is not a natural formation at all. They found the labyrinth.

Here you can see their results from all of these different techniques put together. In the top layers here in the green, you see this sort of chaotic structure down to about 3-4 meters below ground level. This is the Ptolemaic and probably Persian period town. This was the remains of the mud-brick town that actually was built on this site, likely related to the industry of quarrying that was around here for centuries. The ground surface up here, this is what's remaining in the first few meters from this town. It's not part of the labyrinth. Today, in our modern times, the water table is up at around that 4 to 5-meter level on the site. Then you can see here at 5 meters, that was as far as Petrie dug in different places at Hawara, and he found that slab. All of the interesting results that are coming back from these different techniques exist below that slab. So these are the possible labyrinthian structures. Now quoting from the Mataha Expedition themselves, this is what they wrote about this:

"In the upper ground zone above the water level, walls appear at the shallow depth ranging between 1.5 to 2.5 m. These decayed mudbrick features are very chaotic and show no consistent grid structure and can be comfortably related with the historic period of the Ptolemaic and Roman times. Underneath this upper zone, below the artificial stone surface appears at a depth of 8 to 12 m, a grid structure of gigantic size made of very high resistivity material like granite stone. This states the presence of a colossal archaeological feature below the labyrinth foundation zone of Petrie which also has to be reconsidered as the roof of the still existing labyrinth. The conclusion of the geoarchaeological expedition counters in a scientific way the idea that the labyrinth was destroyed as a stone quarry in Ptolemaic times and validates the authenticity of the classical author reports. The Mataha expedition geophysical survey confirms the presence of archaeological features at the labyrinth area south of the Hawara pyramid. These features, covering an underground area of several hectares, have the prominent signature of vertical walls on the geophysical results. The vertical walls with an average thickness of several meters are connected to shape nearly closed rooms which are interpreted to be huge in number. Consequently, the geophysics survey initiated with the permission of Dr. Zahi Hawass, the president of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and conducted by the NRIAG with the support of Ghent University can now officially verify the occurrence of big parts of the labyrinth as described by the classic authors at the study area."

They found the labyrinth. So, how come this wasn't big news? This should be world news. It's like you can imagine what happened with the Khafre scan; that came out and it was headline news around the world. Piers Morgan was doing shows, it was on the news, mainstream media was covering it. How come this didn't register on anybody's radar? Well, they tried. Part of this expedition was Ghent University in Belgium. There was a public lecture that was put on by the team and Louis de Cordier. It was barely attended by a few Belgian press. They apparently weren't very impressed with it. But then the project was quite deliberately shut down, and this was 2008, and they were told that they couldn't publish any details. What happened here, and this is quoting the Mataha Expedition, quoting Louis de Cordier specifically, is this. He said:

"The conclusion of the Hawara Geophysical Survey is however still waiting to be internationally released by Dr. Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities."

Now, this is a pretty common practice. You might wonder how Zahi has control over this. Well, pretty much the way it works in Egypt, and this is to this day and has worked this way for decades now, is that there are a lot of foreign institutions—different universities from different parts of the world, the Czech universities, the Brits, the Americans, the French, etc.—they do get permission to dig at sites. In a lot of cases, they'll get pretty much ownership of a particular site. I can tell you for example that the Czechs have Abusir; it's always the Czech universities doing the work out there. But the contracts that they sign and the permissions that they get to do all of this work is always bound by the condition that it's Zahi Hawass and the Supreme Council of Antiquities who get to decide about what gets released to the public. A good example of this is the ScanPyramids project. If you remember, back in like 2015 or 16 when they actually announced the ScanPyramids findings, on their own they went out and said, "We found these big voids in the pyramids." Now, they did this without the permission of Zahi Hawass, who then consequently flipped out. He was on record then as saying, "Well, no, no, there's nothing here. They're talking rubbish and if there is something there, then we knew about it already." He basically poo-pooed the whole idea and shut it down. The same thing he's saying about the Khafre scans now, just saying, "Ah, it's all nonsense, it's crap." However, when it came time to go and drill the hole and look at the little chamber behind the chevrons, who was doing the press, who was getting all of the glory, who was making the announcement? It was Zahi. He was, now all best buddies with the ScanPyramids project because that's the control he has. They have all of the control about what actually gets released to the public.

For whatever reason, and we'll get into that, I think Zahi Hawass squashed and just suppressed the findings of the Mataha expedition. They sat on it for two years. So, Louis de Cordier sat on it for two years. Around 2010, he created a website called labyrinthofegypt.com. It doesn't exist anymore, you have to go back to the Wayback Machine to find it. But he created a website, and on it he wrote:

"After two years of patience, we decided in June 2010 to oppose all cunning and deceit by posting the conclusion on the labyrinthofegypt.com website."

And on it he posted the paper, the Mataha Expedition paper which I've shown you the results from. You can still find this paper if you go and look hard enough. I think I have it on my website now too, but it is something you can find if you go and look for it. In the paper, this is what they said:

"Since the release of the scan results at the Ghent University public lecture, Dr. Zahi Hawass requested to stop communicating our results, intimidating the Mataha Expedition team members with Egyptian national security sanctions."

He was saying that it's a national security threat, basically, and that they were going to come and arrest them, and certainly if they ever came back to Egypt, but they might even just try and get them anywhere in the world if they decided to talk about this stuff. So, he's basically invoking national security and saying that you can't talk about what you found at Hawara.

You have to ask why. Why would you do this? What is the point here? Is this a case of hiding the truth because it's potentially going to be out of your hands or something like that? Or is it something else? Is there some other political reason? I think there's a bit of both involved in this and we have to explore that. We have to understand a little bit about the actual geological situation in Hawara and what's going on.

The water table in Egypt is rising, in particular on a lot of these ancient sites. It's most notably rising. This is footage from down below the Giza plateau in the Osiris Shaft, which is a huge series of different chambers cut into the bedrock below the causeway of the Middle Pyramid complex. It goes down about 150 feet and at the bottom there's a big chamber. You can see the water in this room. It's actually quite a deep room and there are passages leading off from here. But this water table obviously wasn't like this when this room was built. It probably wasn't like this when people were exploring it 50-60 years ago even.

The reason that the water table is rising is because of something that happened in Egypt in the 1960s. It was when the Aswan High Dam was built. There was always a low dam in Egypt. In the early 1900s, the British built a dam. That's the one that we float around on the boats on our tours to Egypt. But it was the 1960s when they built the really big dam. They actually partnered with the Soviets. So it's still a monument to Soviet-Egyptian friendship at the Aswan High Dam. When they built this, they created effectively to the south of that what is the biggest man-made lake in the world, Lake Nasser, and this had the effect essentially of getting rid of the inundation of the Nile. The annual flooding—everybody familiar with this area knows that every year typically the Nile would flood, it would deposit all of this silt and fertile material, and that's the basis for the agriculture in the Nile Valley, certainly the basis for agriculture in the Faiyum. But ever since the mid-1960s when this dam was built, this no longer happens.

You might be wondering how that makes the water table rise. It seems counterintuitive. You'd think that the water table would go down, but it has the opposite effect because what you're actually doing is you're removing the 9-month dry season. So yes, you have a 3-month sort of wet season where it floods a bit, but then you have nine months of the year where there's less water in the Nile than there is today. Essentially with this dam, they control the flow of water in the Nile going north, and the result is you end up with more water in the Nile, it's distributed through these canals and everything else, and the ultimate effect of that is that the water table has been steadily rising.

This presents quite a problem for Egypt from a political perspective because we're talking about the great lost Labyrinth of Egypt, something that's described as exceeding in grandeur all of the wonders of the ancient world and indeed things like the pyramids. If the news got out that we found the great lost labyrinth, this would literally be the discovery of the century, probably of the millennium. You'd want to do something about it. But this puts, I think, Egypt in a bit of a sticky situation because today the labyrinth is below the water table level at Hawara. And admittedly, it seems to be pretty caustic, salty, shallow groundwater. That's probably eroding and working on the stone. You saw the image of when we go into that passage in the pyramid; the stone's eroding, there's this crystal growth going all over it. It's not going to be in great condition if it's left like that for, let's say, a few hundred years. It's probably going to deteriorate quite significantly.

So, in order to do something about it, you would have to do a really large-scale remediation effort on this huge area at Hawara, and that's likely to cost a whole lot of money. You have to do a whole lot of experimentation and research to find out where the water's coming from. Then you've got to go to the trouble of trying to do remediation to actually remove the groundwater problem. You might have to start messing with the agriculture and the farmers' irrigation water, which is never... you start messing with farmers' water and you're asking for trouble. To be honest, Egypt is one of those countries that needs all of the agriculture they can get. They are the world's biggest net importer of wheat. They can't grow enough food to support everyone. You start messing with their agriculture, a lot of which is being supplied through this canal that cuts right through this site, and it's fraught with difficulty and danger.

On the other hand, if you tell everyone, "Hey, we found the labyrinth, but we're not going to do anything about it because it's too difficult or it's too expensive," then you're going to face a whole lot of criticism over that. It's literally the wonder of the ancient world, one of the biggest discoveries ever of something in the ancient world. What do you mean you're not going to do anything about it? So, I think they were between a rock and a hard place. You've got this really difficult, expensive problem on one hand, or if you announce it and you say you're not going to do anything about it, you're going to face a lot of international criticism. So I think the decision was likely made that the best thing we can do is just pretend this never happened. We're not going to talk about the labyrinth. We're not going to explore it. The Mataha Expedition, the fact that we found it, is never going to be released to the public, and that's where it stands.

I think that's what happened. There is an element here of also just hiding the truth. I think when it's convenient, that's what happens. I suspect there's a lot of just actual hiding of the truth of hidden expeditions and things like that. I think that's what's happened here. I don't think it's anything more complicated than a difficult political decision that's unfortunately affected the discovery of what should have been one of the most amazing sites ever.

However, this is not where the story ends. Around the same time, 2008-2009, there was another expedition done by a Polish university along with Cairo University, and they went out and did a geological exploration at Hawara. They actually went in to try and figure out where the water was coming from. This was not an archaeological expedition; it was much more of a geological effort to try and figure out where the water's coming from in order to block or redirect its flow and just start to figure out what we need to do to remediate this site. So they went and dug a whole bunch of different boreholes all around the site. They were digging geological test pits, which you can see here, dating different strata levels down a few meters. They also did ground-penetrating radar here and interestingly, from their report, they found many ground-penetrating anomalies which were interpreted as voids being found. So they also essentially rediscovered the labyrinth. Although this research was done in 2008 and 2009, it wasn't published anywhere until around 2017 because also, like the Mataha Expedition, this was also shut down by Zahi Hawass. In fact, this was shut down a little more abruptly than the Mataha Expedition. This is quoting again the expedition team members. In their paper, this is what they wrote:

"Dr. Zahi Hawass halted the mission, briefly jailing its director, Professor Ala Shaheen, then dean of Cairo's archaeology faculty, who was swiftly ousted from his post."

Hawass actually jailed the guy who went out there and dared to actually try and solve this problem or to start trying to solve this problem. Ever since then, Hawara has kind of been a dirty word in the Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt. Nobody wants to deal with it; it's like a pariah. He put a guy in jail. He put the dean of the archaeology faculty of Cairo University in jail over trying to investigate at Hawara, which was kind of sketchy.

However, they have published their results. What did they say? What did they figure out? Well, ultimately they figured out that the water on the site is quite a difficult problem to solve. It's essentially coming from three different locations. It's coming from the southwest, from the north, and from the east. It's shallow groundwater that's kind of pouring in through the sedimentary layers. The upland side—the west, north, and east side of the pyramid—the water is 1 to 3 meters above that in the canal. So it's more water coming in from the northern side. On the south side, the water table level is only about 0.5 to 2 meters above the water level in the canal. You might be wondering how the groundwater is at a higher level than the level in the canal. Well, the layers of rock and soil and sediment here essentially wick the water up. If you put paper in a glass, it's going to wick and suck that water up. The same thing's kind of happening here. They determined this with the use of all these boreholes as well as the test pits that they dug. They suspect that if there are deeper levels of water, it might be coming from a separate aquifer somewhere on the site. But that ultimately, more excavations are needed. They need to do more investigation here to truly determine the source and the direction of the water in order to start remediating it.

As far as I know, that is the end of any of the on-site research at Hawara. It was essentially all stopped by Hawass. He jailed a dude, he shut down the Mataha Expedition. He put it all to bed. That was really until the more modern, space-based technology started to come in. The first account of this that I heard about was something that was done by Dr. Carmen Boulter and then Klaus Dona. Both Dr. Carmen Boulter, rest in peace, she passed away a few years ago, and Klaus Dona, I guess you could consider them kind of alternative independent researchers and authors in their field. Carmen Boulter made a pretty good documentary series called The Pyramid Code. It actually features the work of Abd'el Hakim Awyan, who is the father of my good friend Yousef Awyan. Her whole show, I think, is based on his teachings of the indigenous Sufi legends and everything. She's been essentially a warrior for the labyrinth for a long time. She had heard from Klaus Dona, who's an Austrian, who said that he has a friend in Germany who happens to own or is part of a startup company that can look into the earth from 6 km down. It's essentially using satellites to peer into the earth and be able to find voids and minerals and materials 6 km down.

Now when I first heard of this, I was a little skeptical. Some of you may know that I've actually done a video on the labyrinth in the past, several years ago. I got to this point in the story and I was like, I can't find any information about this technology that he's talking about. No one had... the synthetic aperture radar stuff hadn't come out. This was the first I'd heard of anyone saying, "Oh, we can look kilometers deep into the ground." I was asking for pointers about what this technology is, where it comes from. Since then, some details have actually emerged about this technique, and it happens to be a company called Geoscan Systems, and they do remote sensing.

I'm going to talk a little bit about their technology and how it works because it's important as it kind of relates to the ongoing scans at Hawara as well as the SAR work that's happening elsewhere in Egypt. These guys are talking about using remote sensing technology to look into the ground. They can detect anomalies down to around 6 km deep using proprietary processing techniques. The way they do this is they say that the breakthrough involves modeling light and its interactions with matter based on a more complete implementation of Maxwell's equations coupled with a more complete understanding of the mathematical nature of the constant i, which is the imaginary number representing the square root of minus one. Including these new insights makes complex spectral analysis more complete. Now don't ask me to explain what that means. I don't know. It does seem like a fairly mathematical, statistical approach to it. They go on. They say that filters are then applied which allow the detection and identification of subsurfaces by means similar to utilizing Fraunhofer absorption lines to identify substances in the atmosphere of stars.

With a more complete appreciation of the actual information contained in ordinary light, we can detect subsurface anomalies which show up as a kind of interference in longitudinal components. This is what I had originally heard about this when I looked into it. The most information I had gotten out of it at the time was that it was a technique that was used to look at stars and try and look at the different elemental composition of stars, what elements and substances are in the atmosphere of stars using some sort of statistical approach. This is kind of the telling point with a lot of these technologies that you see, and it's one of the reasons for a little bit of skepticism, certainly warranted with some of the claims that are made by them. But they also say that they regret having to withhold details of the process involved. It requires intensive computation utilizing computer software and special processing hardware to apply our techniques. They're invoking proprietary software, which is fine, it's their special secret sauce. The key is, how do you prove this works? Well, you have to go find something that nobody knows was there, say that you found it, and then drill down to or get to it and find it, which is what they claim they can do.

They do say the best way to know these techniques are valid is to look at our results. In particular, a special study was ordered recently which detected water in Morocco. Indeed, you go to their website, you look at their reference material. They reference a study where they did a survey site in Morocco. You can see the blue markings of water here and they went and found water at depths of 15 to 18 meters. They have other references where they found gold in Bolivia or oil deposits off the coastline of Nigeria at much deeper depths, like hundreds of meters deep here in some cases. I'm assuming the gold is also quite deep. So they seem to have some reference cases that suggest that they used this technology to find stuff and then apparently they went and drilled and found it. So there must be something to this technique.

Klaus Dona claims that he asked his friend who was involved in this company to scan the area of Hawara, and they apparently did so. There was a 3D rendering of these scans that were made that Carmen Boulter briefly showed, I think on a podcast with somebody. I've not seen too many other results of it. These are the screenshots from that podcast. But you can see here again, you see the pyramid, you see the Barabi canal running through the site, and then you see multiple layers of chambers and structures down beneath the ground, under the pyramid on both sides of the canal. This lines up with the findings from the Mataha Expedition. They scanned on both sides of the canal, they found it. It kind of lines up with the historical accounts about there being multiple levels.

Let's look specifically at some of the claims that were made by the Geoscan work at Hawara. This is a 2D model with the red and blue being different depths of chambers and structures. According to their scan results, they say that the actual hard bedrock begins at about 18 meters down. So you have sedimentary and other layers of stone and sediment above the bedrock, and the bedrock starts at 18 meters down. The subsurface infrastructure consists of a network of monumental spaces. They say they found halls that are 80 meters long by 50 meters wide and that these halls and these chambers are linked by giant corridors at depths of 40, 60, 80, 100 meters and beyond. So they're describing multiple levels of different chambers that are separated by at least 20 meters. Now that's kind of interesting, right? Because if you remember back some of the historical accounts, they talked about there being 90 steps in between the layers. Certainly 90 steps easily gets you 20 meters in depth. These depictions also start to get to the scale of things that were described by the historical authors.

Unfortunately, Carmen Boulter passed away. Louis de Cordier was involved in this a little bit. They tried to get some interest in it from Egypt. They really couldn't get any traction in the department of antiquities. They couldn't get any backers to look any further into this. So that's kind of where the Geoscan stuff stopped.

However, around the same time, roughly 2015-2016, there was another company, one based in the UK called Merlin Burrows, and they also scanned Hawara. Merlin Burrows is also another very interesting startup company that claims to basically use a space-based technique to find and peer down below the ground. The company is made up of a couple of people: Tim Akers on the left and then CEO Bruce Blackburn from Merlin Burrows. Unfortunately, Tim Akers has also since passed away since all of this work happened. Merlin Burrows is an interesting company in that they are also involved in the new work on the film by Michael Donnellan, which is something called Atlantica, which I think is being released in the US pretty soon. We saw a preview of the first three episodes of it at the Cosmic Summit and they claim to have found Atlantis, remnants of it, and it's a super interesting film. I think it's going to cause quite a stir when it comes out. The way that they found this—and they certainly found something, they went out and found a lot of undersea ruins and structures—is they found it by using Merlin Burrows technology.

So how does this technology work? According to Merlin Burrows and what I can find, this is what they say. They use high-frequency satellite images from private orbital agencies that are obtained and then run through military or classified facilities. At least they were in the case of the Hawara scans. They're used in combination with the constant vibration of the Earth's geophysical activities, so seismic data, and they're capable of distinguishing between granite, diorite, limestone, metal. They can map voids and tunnels with precision down to a few inches essentially. I think the description was the size of a wristwatch was the resolution of this.

This might sound familiar if you've dived into the Italian scientists and their synthetic aperture radar. They're instead of using high-frequency images, they're using synthetic aperture radar, but they are also combining it with essentially seismic data from the planet, which is the same thing that Merlin Burrows are doing. Instead, they're using images instead of SAR data. This technology, and Tim Akers himself, actually apparently come out of the British military. Tim Akers is ex-military. He worked in the British Army satellite scan security division and he used some of those techniques to essentially create this startup from what I understand. This is a description of how they used their technology in the military and how it might work:

"Picture a pan filled with water. Drop several pebbles into it and ripples form, colliding into intricate wave patterns. If you could freeze that water instantly and lift out the ice, shining a light beneath, it would project a 3D image of the pebbles at impact, a hologram born from frozen ripples. Tim's technology does this on a grand scale and with far greater precision. This tech could detect a sub's path by analyzing the residual water ripple field left behind, fluid footprints."

Apparently, this technology has been used to figure out the paths of submarines by looking at the surface of the water using this technique. What you're looking at here are these renderings, as I understand them. They're fairly complex images which are collapsing multiple depths together. In this case, blue being the deepest. We have here a similar technique to the SAR work that's happening in Giza with the Italians. It's a different technique to the one used by Geoscan. But what were their results? What did they say about the scans at Hawara? It's quite interesting. They said that they found vast chambers with massive walls plunging into bedrock, colossal complexes of great halls at 40, 60, 80, 100 meters and deeper. An atrium of approximately 40 meters by 100 meters long, followed by a central chamber of 44 by 44 meters. Two different techniques, and they're kind of lining up with their details. The Geoscan technique talked about the same things: a huge complex plunging down into the bedrock, multiple levels at 40, 60, 80, 100 meters and deeper, big huge halls and chambers all connected with different tunnels and passages. We're seeing a bit of correlation between two different techniques here.

This is what Tim Akers said about the scan at Hawara. He says that there are four levels of structures, four distinct layers underground. Five, if you include the surface above the mother rock. These layers are separated by 20 to 50 meters and align quite strikingly with the elements seen in the Hawara Geoscan Survey. These also showed four levels. However, my scans reveal a clearer separation between the top two layers and the bottom two. He also says that the deeper structures are likely free of groundwater and hollow. This is pretty amazing. Remember the historical depictions of the labyrinth, 90 steps going between the layers, 20 to 50 meters between the layers. This is all kind of lining up. Isn't that interesting? Also, the fact that the deeper structures are likely free of groundwater. The groundwater, if you remember from the geological surveys, is flowing in pretty shallow, coming into the site from different directions. It may not be penetrating that deeply into the bedrock. So, there's a good chance that whatever's down there is likely free of the water.

What is down there seems to be also quite a mystery because this was the most intriguing part of what Tim had said about this. Unfortunately, because Tim's no longer around, it's essentially hearsay from what he told Louis de Cordier, and this is what he had said to him as reported by Louis de Cordier. Quoting Tim Akers:

"All layers converge at a central corridor or avenue, like the atrium of a shopping mall where you can see all floors from one vantage point. My personal interpretation is that this entire hall was constructed to house a centrally positioned freestanding object about 40 meters long."

What object are we talking about? Well, Tim apparently found this object in this hall with his scans.

"The central object is hard to classify. It appears metallic, not stone or wood. I named it 'Dippy' after the giant Diplodocus skeleton in the Hintze Hall of London's Natural History Museum. It could be anything. Its shape resembles those Tic Tac hard mints. It might also be an upright disc or even a colossal shen... That big object alone raises profound questions. How did it get there? Why is it there? A more speculative theory is that it's some kind of portal, either interdimensional or interstellar, a Stargate. Its material signature is unlike anything I've seen in my entire career, but it's there, undeniably there. I'll let the future find out what Dippy is."

A freestanding, 40-meter-long, metallic, Tic Tac-shaped object approximately 50-60 meters below the ground in a huge, big, open corridor and atrium in the Labyrinth of Egypt. This is a remarkable claim. I'm not saying this is true; this is what Tim Akers is saying about it. But I can tell you on stage at the Cosmic Summit when I talked about this, I could see Micah Hanks whip his head around when I was talking about a freestanding object that's 40 meters long and Tic Tac-shaped. There have long been rumors and speculation about alien crafts and stuff that are beneath the sands of Egypt in some places. I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm saying this is a remarkable claim. We seem to have some correlation between these scan results. Merlin Burrows as well as these Geoscan guys seem to have a track record of actually being able to use their technology to find stuff. So I don't think you can just dismiss their findings with nothing. Literally, this is an ex-military technique that was apparently used to find submarines. So they found something; there's something down there.

So now we've got Geoscan, we've got Merlin Burrows, we've got the Mataha Expedition, ground-penetrating radar, VLF, geomagnetism—just so many different techniques showing you that the labyrinth is there. Let's look at some of the correlations between all of these scans. What can we tell?

We know that the Mataha Expedition, using ground-penetrating radar, likely only revealed the very top layer of the labyrinth. They couldn't penetrate very deeply, maybe 15-18 meters. We could see the structure, so there's definitely a layer of the labyrinth in that relatively shallow bedrock.

The Geoscan and Merlin Burrows satellite technologies, these two different techniques—one's a more statistical approach, the other one is a more satellite-based seismic/high-frequency imaging approach—they seem to be aligned. As Tim Akers said, they're telling you the same things. They're telling you the same levels at the same depths. They're talking about the same size passages, the same scale of what is beneath the ground at Hawara.

These historical accounts that we spent all that time going through earlier seem to align with the data that we're finding now, within reason and within the language of the time. Herodotus talked about underground chambers and passages leading to the pyramids. We seem to see in these scans passages running to the pyramids. Petrie wasn't able to find a connection, but that's because the place was already filled up with water. Herodotus talks about 12 courts, 3,000 chambers, 90 steps down to another level. We certainly are hearing depictions of big, large open spaces, 80-100 meters long, that seems to fit that description of large open courts that might have 40-80 columns in them. We see stone on the site. You can literally go there today and see the remnants of megalithic stone, the remnants of whatever's happened there with quarrying and been dug up in the past, although I don't think anybody's been digging it up to the depth that we need to to actually get into it. Vast halls, open spaces—all of these things are being depicted both in historical accounts and they're being shown in these modern scans at Hawara. The interesting thing to me is that Petrie, who genuinely seems to have been the last person inside the Hawara pyramid, might have been very close to finding an actual entrance to the labyrinth. He might have been the guy that got the closest to actually discovering the true Labyrinth of ancient Egypt. I think this is just a fascinating series of discoveries and information.

What's my opinion? A lot of this has been me reporting what historical authors have said, what the scan companies have said. My perspective on this is that I do remain cautiously optimistic about all of these different new space-based scanning technologies. They're obviously still proprietary, there's still an element of a black box within them. Whether it's Geoscan or it's Merlin Burrows or it's the Italians with their synthetic aperture radar Doppler tomography approach, there's an element of a black box. It's not understood what exactly it is they're doing to produce their results. That said, there's a lot of promise in these technologies like Geoscan and Merlin Burrows. They seem to have reference accounts. Even the Italians are claiming the same thing where they've got examples of how they've used their technology to find stuff and that it's accurate. We'll see, I guess. At the same time, well-established and very well-understood technologies have been used on this site: ground-penetrating radar, geomagnetism, VLF, electrical resistivity tomography. Those types of things have definitely established that there's something significant at Hawara. The Mataha Expedition was there.

The most interesting part about all of this to me is what the labyrinth could represent. Well, I think based on the depictions and based on the stonework we can still see on the site, this is 100% the same type of architecture that we see in what I would classify as the most mysterious and interesting places in Egypt: the Valley Temple, the Osirion, the pyramids. Massive megalithic structure, perfection in style, most precise huge blocks, the oldest stuff. It definitely seems to be associated with that style of building. I think it's probably another structure that comes from the "Builder Culture." I firmly believe that a lot of these things were inherited by the dynastic Egyptians, that they weren't capable of making them. I think things like the vases and giant statues and the boxes are all part of that culture. I think this architecture is likely part of that culture, too. I think all of these sites were renovated, reused, and then destroyed and quarried and all those sort of things. I think there's a tremendously complex history that's happened to them. But I do believe that a lot of these sites are way, way older than we think they are. And the labyrinth fits that same mold. It seems to fit exactly the same type of megalithic structures and has those same characteristics as all of those sites.

For sure though, the dynastic Egyptians were on the site. There are accounts of that. We know they were there, they were renovating it, they were using it. They probably built the pyramid there, the mud-brick pyramid. They cased it. I think they built that pyramid over the structure that was already there in the ground, probably done by Amenemhat III in the 12th dynasty in the Middle Kingdom, for him to attach himself to the site, make it part of his myth and legend.

What could have the labyrinth actually contained? Maybe it was a library, maybe it was a repository. We just don't know. What was this freestanding metal object, "Dippy," that's down there? We don't know. I think you can speculate all day about what it actually is, but it's absolutely fascinating. It seems to be the biggest opportunity that we can have to try and find something that's real and tangible about a lost chapter of history. To me, the labyrinth is the number one example. However, if it is actually underwater, if some of the... I hope that some of those lower layers are not filled with water. If they are underwater, certainly anything that isn't stone probably isn't there anymore. If the shallower layers are being flooded as a result of what happened in the '60s, then I suspect they're going to be deteriorating fairly rapidly, and I hope something can be done about it in the near future.

Let's wrap this up. I know I've been talking for quite a while here. I want to explore the future a little bit and put some conclusions on the table about Hawara. My overall goal in doing this and doing this presentation at the summit is to try and raise awareness about the labyrinth. I honestly think it's quite a crime that it's been covered up the way that it has. It should have represented the biggest discovery certainly in the last several hundred years of anything significant. I also think it does truly represent one of the biggest opportunities for classical archaeology and Egyptology. If these guys want to get more attention on social media, they want to be well known, they should be campaigning for the labyrinth to try and uncover that, start digging out there and see what they can find.

However, I think without a doubt, we can say that the mythical Egyptian labyrinth does exist and it has been found. There's no question. Modern technology is just continually peeling back the layers of the onion here. I think it's showing that these results and what's down there might actually be even more incredible than the descriptions that have been provided by classical accounts and eyewitnesses. None of these accounts talk about a 40-meter-long freestanding metal object in the deeper chambers, but that seems to be what they found. I'm fascinated by this find. I have no idea what it means. I'm sure it's going to mean more people in the comments say that I think it was built by aliens, which is not what I'm saying. I am just reporting. I'm not saying that. I'm saying there's something interesting down there and we should probably try and figure it out.

On-the-ground research has been suppressed, no doubt. Zahi Hawass has been tightly wrapped up in this. Although stuff that's space-based, he can't suppress, even though it's been dismissed with true snorts of derision by him in any number of places. Anytime that this comes up, it's like if stuff isn't in his control or he doesn't agree with it, then it's nonsense. It doesn't make sense.

I think what's under the ground today is suffering neglect and likely some damage due to the rising water table and the salty groundwater that's coming into the Hawara site as a result of the water table rising. Could we actually do something about it? I think we could. Is it going to be expensive? Probably. I don't know how expensive. But I genuinely think that if this was given the proper attention and people around the world and the institutions around the world realized what the opportunity here is, I think we could find the funds. I think we could get the money to Egypt. I think we could remediate the site. We could dig the wells, we can pump the water out, we can start to excavate. I genuinely think that's a possibility and I don't think there's any better opportunity for this.

Lastly, as I'm sure some of you have probably already thought about, this seems like an excellent target for the Italians with their synthetic aperture radar and Doppler tomography approach, the stuff that they've been scanning at the Giza plateau at the Sphinx and all those sort of places. I'm happy to say that from, according to Louis de Cordier at least, they've agreed to do just that. So I'm hoping that in the near future, the Beyond and May team will actually take a look at Hawara from space and process that data and come out with some results. Hopefully, in the coming months or year, we'll find out some more about this and just see if we have a third satellite-based approach that's going to confirm that the mystery of Hawara and the labyrinth still exist. I certainly hope so.

Alright, guys. Well, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed the presentation. It's a little different to my normal videos. I know I wanted to share a version of this with everyone on YouTube. It looks like I've gone a little bit longer than I did at the summit. I do have an older video on the labyrinth that goes through some of this detail, but I wanted to get this information out there. Again, if you're interested in seeing these sites, I think we're actually going to go to Hawara as part of my extension on the upcoming 2026 March UnchartedX Egypt tour. Please do check it out. You can find all the details on that on my website. And if you're interested in supporting my work through that value-for-value model, please do consider it. You can find all of those details again on my website, unchartedx.com/support. Thanks very much, guys, and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye-bye now.