The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

great works of the Greeks; but the labyrinth surpasses the pyramids also. It has
twelve roofed courts, with doors facing one another, six to the north and six to the
south and in a continuous line. One wall on the outside encompasses them all.
There are double sets of chambers in it, some underground and some above, and
their number is three thousand; there are fifteen hundred of each. We ourselves
saw the aboveground chambers, for we went through them and so we can talk of
them, but the underground chambers we can speak only from hearsay. For the
officials of the Egyptians entirely refused to show us these, saying that there are
in them the coffins of the kings who had built the labyrinth at the beginning and
also those of the holy crocodiles. So we speak from hearsay of these underground
places; but what we saw aboveground was certainly greater than all human works.
The passages through the rooms and the winding goings-in and out through the
courts, in their extreme complication, caused us countless marvelings as we went
through, from the court into the rooms, and from the rooms into the pillared
corridors, and then from these corridors into other rooms again, and from the
rooms into other courts afterwards. The roof of the whole is stone, as the walls
are, and the walls are full of tu&pwn e0ggeglumme/nwn, and each court is set round
with pillars of white stone, very exactly fitted. At the corner where the labyrinth
ends there is, nearby, a pyramid two hundred and forty feet high and e0n th|~ zw|~a
mega&la e0gge/gluptai. The road to this is made underground. (2.148) [102]
The building that Herodotus calls the labyrinth has been a topic of controversy
among scholars. The controversy has arisen from the fact that no securely identified
remains, in fact no remains exist at all that plausibly fit Herodotus’ description. Both the
labyrinth and the pyramid mentioned in this passage have been considered elements of
the pyramid enclosure of Amenemhat III constructed in the twelfth dynasty (ca. 1842-
1797) at Hawara in the central Fayum. The labyrinth has been equated with a structure,
also called the mortuary temple, located to the south of the pyramid and thought to be of
impressive dimensions. 432 What survives today of this structure is only a foundation bed
432 Lehner, The Complete Pyramids 183; Lloyd, Herodotus. Book II 121-124 provides a summary of all
classical authors, who refer to the labyrinth. His fig. 1 is a reconstruction of the structure based on
Herodotus’ description supplemented by those of Strabo and Pliny. Following the 1890 excavation report
and reconstruction of the structure by Flinders Petrie, he also suggests (122) that the labyrinth was an
oblong building (304.5m long; 243.6m wide) “divided across the middle from W. to E. by a cross wall, to
the south of which lay the aulai of Herodotus.” For a summary of the history of the exploration of the
Hawara labyrinth, and the issue of identification, see E. P. Uphill, Pharaoh’s Gateway to Eternity: The
Hawara Labyrinth of King Amenemhat III (London and New York, 2000) 1-9. For a brief discussion of the
discrepancy between Herodotus’ chronology (seventh century B.C.) of the construction of the labyrinth and
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