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Labyrinth" by such ancient scholars as Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, and Pliny. The account of Herodotus explained that the Egyptians had divided the land into twelve nomes, or parts, and it was agreed that a memorial monument would be constructed in honor of the twelve kings of the nomes.
An account of the description of the "Egyptian Labyrinth", as documented by Herodotus who had found the structure even more impressive than the pyramids, reads as follows. "‘It has twelve covered courts, with opposite doors, six courts on the North side and six on the South, all communicating with one another and with one wall surrounding them all. There are two sorts of rooms, one sort above, the other sort below ground, fifteen hundred of each sort, or three thousand in all.’ He says that he was allowed to pass through the upper rooms only, the lower range being strictly guarded from visitors, as they contained the tombs of the kings who had built the labyrinth, also the tombs of the sacred crocodiles. The upper rooms he describes as being of super-human size, and the system of passages through the courts, rooms, and colonnades very intricate and bewildering. The roof of the whole affair, he says, is of stone and the walls are covered with carvings. Each of the courts is surrounded by columns of white stone, perfectly joined" (Matthews, 7-8).
The description of the "Egyptian Labyrinth" by Strabo, who lived four centuries after Herodotus, confirmed many points made by the latter. Both men had been impressed by the pyramid next to the Labyrinth, as well as by the man-made lake beside it in which, Strabo wrote, the crocodile lived that was worshipped by the inhabitants of the nearby nome.
For a great length of time, the "Egyptian Labyrinth" was only known through accounts by men such as the aforementioned, as it had been destroyed during the Roman invasion. A town had been built upon its site, and its remains were not discovered until 1888, when Professor Flinders Petrie was able to establish its exact location and excavate the site. Situated opposite the ancient city of Arsinoe (Crocodilopolis), to the east of Lake Moeris, and to the south of the pyramid of Hawara, the sepulchral monument covered an area of 1000 feet from east to west by 800 feet from north to south. A plan, which had attempted to reconstruct the Labyrinth as it was during the time of Herodotus, was drawn up by the Italian archaeologist Canina and restored by Petrie. This ground plan allows one the opportunity to visualize how this monument could have seemed like a labyrinth to a person walking through its interior, and therefore referred to as such.
It has been recorded that "according to the Roman-Greek writer Apollodorus, "... Daedalus built the Labyrinth at Knossos for King Minos on the lines of the Egyptian Labyrinth, but only one-hundredth part of the magnitude of the latter" (Matthews, p. 23). The restatement of this assertion, by other ancient writers, resulted in the continual search for the site of the legendary Cretan Labyrinth, which figures prominently in specific ancient Greek myths. No such labyrinth has ever been discovered on Crete, but a few main theories exist regarding its existence.
One theory, embraced by various authors of antiquity, is that the legendary Cretan Labyrinth was actually a complex of caves and quarries on the island, the most likely of which was the labyrinthine cavern near Gortyna. Opening on the side of Mount Ida, the intricately winding passages were explored over the years by many, including a certain C.R. Cockerell, R.A., who recorded a description