Why Egypt Is Suddenly Excavating the Lost Labyrinth | Louis de Cordier (Danny Jones)

Egypt is digging up the Labyrinth. Louis de Cordier found out the way anyone else would have, from a phone call: a friend touring Hawara with a group told him crews were on site with equipment, in March of this year. He did not believe it. The plan he had spent years on called for draining the site first and preserving it before anyone broke ground, and the Egyptian government had skipped all of it. Crews from the Fayum inspectorate are down there now, exposing giant megalithic walls and pulling up what look like pieces of pillars, and the interviews say they intend to go as deep as they can.

De Cordier led the 2008 Mataha expedition, the ground-penetrating radar and geophysical survey that mapped what sits under the sand at Hawara. He knows exactly how far the current dig has to travel. The crews are about two meters down. The foundation layer starts around five. The part that changes the story sits at minus twenty meters, roughly sixty feet, where the building stops being stacked blocks and becomes chambers carved directly out of the bedrock. Satellite scans done in 2015 by the group that later founded Merlin Burrows show one of those spaces running about a hundred meters long and forty meters wide. He compares the central atrium to a shopping mall. Archaeologists from University College London looked at the same scan and picked out an omega-shaped moat around the structure, matching one recently found at Saqqara, and a row of Persian tomb shafts dropping thirty to forty meters into the ground.

Danny gets him to explain why almost none of this reached the public for a decade. The scan data came with NDAs, some still running, signed to keep the images away from journalists and away from Egyptian officials who could shut the work down. Publishing it anyway is what he believes finally moved the government to dig. His fear now is the shallow version of success: a government that digs two meters, plants a flag, and announces there was never anything down there.



[Posted at the SpookyWeather2 blog, August 31, 2026.]