and sculptured scenes.  It adjoined the wall of the town, and the neighbouring quarters are almost intact:  the streets were straight, and crossed each other at right angles, while the houses on each side were so regularly built that a single policeman could keep his eye on each thoroughfare from one end to the other.  The structures were of rough material hastily put together, and among the debris are to be found portions of older buildings, stehe, and fragments of statues.  The town began to dwindle after the Pharaoh had taken possession of his sepulchre; it was abandoned during the XIIIth dynasty, and its ruins were entombed in the sand which the wind heaped over them.  The city which Amenemhait III. had connected with his tomb maintained, on the contrary, a long existence in the course of the centuries.  The king’s last resting-place consisted of a large sarcophagus of quartzose sandstone, while his favourite consort, Nofriuphtah, reposed beside him in a smaller coffin.  The sepulchral chapel was very large, and its arrangements were of a somewhat complicated character.  It consisted of a considerable number of chambers, some tolerably large, and others of moderate dimensions, while all of them were difficult of access and plunged in perpetual darkness:  this was the Egyptian Labyrinth, to which the Greeks, by a misconception, have given a world-wide renown.  Amenemhait III. or his architects had no intention of building such a childish structure as that in which classical tradition so fervently believed.  He had richly endowed the attendant priests, and bestowed upon the cult of his double considerable revenues, and the chambers above mentioned were so many storehouses for the safekeeping of the treasure and provisions for the dead, and the arrangement of them was not more singular than that of ordinary storage depots.  As his cult persisted for a long period, the temple was maintained in good condition during a considerable time:  it had not, perhaps, been abandoned when the Greeks first visited it.*

* The identity of the ruins at Hawara with the remains of the Labyrinth, admitted by Jomard-Caristie and by Lepsius, disputed by Vassali, has been definitely proved by Petrie, who found remains of the buildings erected by Amenemhait III. under the ruins of a village and some Graeco-Roman tombs.

The other sovereigns of the XIIth dynasty must have been interred not far from the tombs of Amenemhait III. and Usirtasen II.:  they also had their pyramids, of which we may one day discover the site.  The outline of these was almost the same as that of the Memphite pyramids, but the interior arrangements were different.  As at Illahun and Dahshur, the mass of the work consisted of crude bricks of large size, between which fine sand was introduced to bind them solidly together, and the whole was covered with a facing of polished limestone.  The passages and chambers are not arranged on the simple plan which we meet with in the pyramids of earlier date.