Everything about Hawara totally explained
Hawara is an archaeological site of
Ancient Egypt, south of the site of
Crocodilopolis (Arsinoe) at the entrance to the depression of the
Fayyum oasis. The first excavations at the site were made by
Karl Lepsius, in
1843.
William Flinders Petrie excavated at Hawara, in 1888, finding
papyri of the first and second centuries, and, north of the pyramid, a vast
necropolis where he found 146 portraits on coffins dating to the Roman period, famous as being among the very few surviving examples of painted portraits from
Classical Antiquity, the
"Fayoum portraits" illustrated in Roman history textbooks.
Amenemhet III was the last powerful ruler of the
12th Dynasty, and the pyramid he built at Hawara (
illustration, right) is believed to post-date the so-called "Black Pyramid" built by the same ruler at
Dahshur. It is this that's believed to have been Amenemhet's final resting place. At Hawara there was also the intact (pyramid) tomb of
Neferu-Ptah, daughter of Amenemhet III. This tomb was found about 2km South of the king's pyramid.
In common with the
Middle Kingdom pyramids constructed after
Amenemhet II, it was built of
mudbrick round a core of limestone paassags and burial chambers, and faced with limestone. Most of the facing stone was later pillaged for use in other buildings— a fate common to almost all of Egypt's pyramids— and today the pyramid is little more than an eroded, vaguely pyramidal mountain of mud brick, and of the once magnificent mortuary temple precinct formerly enclosed by a wall there's little left beyond the foundation bed of compacted sand and chips and shards of limestone.
The entrance to the pyramid is today flooded to a depth of 6 metres as a result of the waters from a canal built nearby.
The huge mortuary temple that originally stood adjacent to this pyramid is believed to have formed the basis of the complex of buildings with galleries and courtyards called a "labyrinth" by
Herodotus (see quote at
Labyrinth), and mentioned by
Strabo and
Diodorus Siculus. (There is no historicity to the assertion of
Diodorus Siculus that this was the model for the labyrinth of
Crete that Greeks imagined housed the
Minotaur,) The demolition of the "labyrinth" may date in part to the reign of
Ptolemy II, under whom the Pharaonic city of Shedyt (Greek
Crocodilopolis, the modern Medinet el-Fayum) was renamed to honour his sister-wife
Arsinoë; a massive Ptolemaic building program at Arsinoe has been suggested as the ultimate destination of Middle Kingdom limestone columns and blocks removed from Hawara, and now lost.
Queen
Sobekneferu of the
Twelfth dynasty also built at the complex. Her name meant "most beautiful of
Sobek", the sacred crocodile.
Among the discoveries made by Flinders Petrie were
papyrus manuscripts, including a great papyrus scroll which contains parts of books 1 and 2 of the
Iliad (the "Hawara Homer" of the
Bodleian Library, Oxford).
Further Information
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