B (153:24)
Yeah, so it's not the Giza pyramids, it's a different pyramid called Hawara, which is further south in the country. So what Ben has been talking about, and he's done a great job talking about it. I recommend everyone watch his video on his channel and he spoke about on Rogan, so a lot of people would have heard of it. So there's always been this almost tale of the labyrinth of ancient Egypt, the lost labyrinth of ancient Egypt. And ancient writers from Greece and Rome wrote about it and visited it. So the most, the first example is Herodotus. Have you heard of Herodotus? Greek historian, wrote the very famous histories. Almost seen as the father of history, the first historian, in many ways. He claimed to have visited the lost labyrinth of ancient Egypt at Hawara. And he said some pretty outlandish things about it. Like he said it was greater than anything that his people, the Greeks, had ever achieved, both in grandeur and in expense, which is quite a mad thing. He also said it surpassed the pyramids of Giza in terms of its achievement. So the great pyramids of Giza are perhaps the most impressive construction in all of antiquity. Right? And they still confuse us to this day. Like, how were they built? Why are they so big? Why are they so precise? What were they for? They're just massive and they're ridiculously impressive. And he said that this labyrinth surpassed that in grandeur. So it's a more impressive achievement than the Egyptian pyramids, which is a big thing to say. So he went there and he said, you know all this, and he said he went in it and like had a detailed description of all of it. But he wasn't the only one. There was also the Greek geographer Strabo who said he went there, said it was incredibly impressive. There were a few Roman writers like Diodorus Siculus who went there, and Pliny the Elder who went there and Pliny. Pliny the Elder made the interesting claim that the labyrinth was constructed over 3,600 years before his time. So I believe he was writing in the era of Augustus, as we were just talking about the start of the Roman Empire. So 3,600 years before his time would put it, before the first dynasties of ancient Egypt, so before the Egyptian civilization, dynastic Egypt arose. So that's something that's quite a confusing thing. How are they, how are they constructing something that surpasses the pyramids in grandeur before the beginning of Egyptian civilization? That's a pretty crazy thing. So we have all these classical authors that say they visited the labyrinth, say that it was like this incredible construction, but that was it. And then it kind of faded away into obscurity. And everyone thought it was just, you know, this legend and these ancient writers were talking about it. So then you fast forward to the modern day and you get the, the European explorers visiting Hawar. First notable one, I guess is Napoleon Bonaparte, you know, the famous French general. He was obsessed with ancient Egypt. He loved ancient Egypt. He, he once spent a night in the king's chamber of the Great Pyramid and said he Never spoke about it, but apparently he was quite shocked by his experience in there, which is a weird thing, but he spent a night in the king's chamber, which is pretty crazy. So, yeah, and he brought teams of scientists and scholars to Egypt and some of them went to Hawara and they said that they could see some, like, foundations and some ruins at the base of the pyramid there. And that was kind of the first modern identification of the labyrinth's potential location. But that's kind of all it was. And then you fast forward to some British explorers, like most notably Flinders Petrie, who's the famous British Egyptologist. He was the first one to kind of conduct any serious excavations there. And so he drilled into the pyramid and under the base there, and he came across this kind of base that he assumed was the foundation of the labyrinth. That was all that was left of it. And he had this, like, he found this massive base. And he was like, okay, the labyrinth was here and I found all that's left of it, this. This massive base. So the labyrinth was real. These ancient writers weren't making it up, up. But it's gone now, you know, there's nothing left of it other than this base. And that kind of was the theory that for forever, basically about this labyrinth was that it was real. These writers weren't making it up. Petrie found the base of it. That's the end of the story, Right? And that was the case forever. In recent years, in the 21st century, a couple of independent researchers have thought maybe that's not the true, that's not the. The full extent of the story. Right? So there's this interesting expedition in 2008, I believe, called the Matah Expedition, which was led by a Belgian researcher called Louis de Cordier. And he went to Hawara with the permission of the Council of Antiquities in Egypt, the Egyptian authorities, led by Dr. Zahi Hawass, who I'm sure you've heard of a few times. Yeah. So they went. So they went there and they had the permission of Hawass and the Egyptian authorities and they basically, they tried to conduct some scans using, I think, ground penetrating radar. But what they discovered was not that the labyrinth was gone, but that the labyrinth was still there and that they came back with these results that showed these vast subterranean grids beneath the sand of Hawara, completely untouched and still existing. And they wanted to release this. Right. Because obviously that's an incredible find. Like you found the lost labyrinth in of ancient Egypt, this elusive discovery that's been known about since antiquity. But no one's ever found. But apparently according to Louis de Cordier and his team, Hawass and others weren't, they didn't want to release it. They were like, you can't put this out there. They said it was a national security issue to start talk to release this data. And they basically kept finding themselves getting blocked. And eventually, after years and years of this, they were like, you know, fuck this, I'm putting out independently. So they released the scan data to the world on a website that he made at the same time as this, a different team from a company called Merlin Burrows and a man called Tim Akers also conducted, I think, satellite scans of the area. So Tim Akers was, he's dead now, but he was a ex British military satellite scanning specialists, so legit guy, worked with the British military, knows his stuff. They conducted scans of the same area and it came back with similar results. There you go, exactly right on cue. So they, they found the, a similar thing which is these scans of, you know, vast geometric grids in the right area that was identified by Petrie and people with Napoleon. And it appears to look like a vast, you know, labyrinth.
