Both pyramids are of brick, lined with stone, like those of Dashur, with some differences of internal construction, since stone walls exist in the interior.  The central chambers and passages leading to them were discovered; and in both cases the passages are peculiarly complex, with dumb chambers, great stone portcullises, etc., in order to mislead and block the way to possible plunderers.  The extraordinary sepulchral chamber of the Hawara pyramid, which, though it is over twenty-two feet long by ten feet wide over all, is hewn out of one solid block of hard yellow quartzite, gives some idea of the remarkable facility of dealing with huge stones and the love of utilizing them which is especially characteristic of the XIIth Dynasty.  The pyramid of Hawara was provided with a funerary temple the like of which had never been known in Egypt before and was never known afterwards.  It was a huge building far larger than the pyramid itself, and built of fine limestone and crystalline white quartzite, in a style eminently characteristic of the XIIth Dynasty.  In actual superficies this temple covered an extent of ground within which the temples of Karnak, Luxor, and the Ramesseum, at Thebes, could have stood, but has now almost entirely disappeared, having been used as a quarry for two thousand years.  In Roman times this destroying process had already begun, but even then the building was still magnificent, and had been noted with wonder by all the Greek visitors to Egypt from the time of Herodotus downwards.  Even before his day it had received the name of the “Labyrinth,” on account of its supposed resemblance to the original labyrinth in Crete.

That the Hawara temple was the Egyptian labyrinth was pointed out by Lepsius in the ’forties of the last century.  Within the last two or three years attention has again been drawn to it by Mr. Arthur Evans’s discovery of the Cretan labyrinth itself in the shape of the Minoan or early Mycenaean palace of Knossos, near Candia in Crete.  It is impossible to enter here into all the arguments by which it has been proved that the Knossian palace is the veritable labyrinth of the Minotaur legend, nor would it be strictly germane to our subject were we to do so; but it may suffice to say here that the word

[Illustration:  125.jpg (Greek word)]

has been proved to be of Greek-or rather of pre-Hellenic-origin, and would mean in Karian “Place of the Double-Axe,” like La-braunda in Karia, where Zeus was depicted with a double axe (labrys) in his hand.  The non-Aryan, “Asianic,” group of languages, to which certainly Lycian and probably Karian belong, has been shown by the German philologer Kretschmer to have spread over Greece into Italy in the period before the Aryan Greeks entered Hellas, and to have left undoubted traces of its presence in Greek place-names and in the Greek language itself.  Before the true Hellenes reached Crete, an Asianic dialect must have been spoken there, and to this language the word “labyrinth” must originally have belonged.  The classical labyrinth was “in the Knossian territory.”  The palace of Knossos was emphatically the chief seat of the worship of a god whose emblem was the double-axe; it was the Knossian “Place of the Double-Axe,” the Cretan “Labyrinth.”