Beneath the mud-brick pyramid at Hawara, roughly 80 kilometers south of Cairo at the entrance to the Fayum depression, a single block of quartzite weighing an estimated 45 tons seals the burial chamber of Pharaoh Amenemhat III of the 12th Dynasty (c. 1855–1808 BC), lowered into place by a sand-lowering device. Beside that pyramid, six ancient Greco-Roman authors insist, once stood a structure so vast that Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC) counted 3,000 chambers – 1,500 above ground and 1,500 below – arrayed around twelve roofed courts, while Strabo (c. 64 BC–AD 24) remembered monolithic columns supporting single-stone roofs that required no timber. [1]
The 17th-century Jesuit Claude Sicard first proposed modern Hawara as the location of that Labyrinth, and that identification has remained the consensus in mainstream Egyptology ever since. Karl Richard Lepsius’s 1843 Prussian expedition, however, mistook Roman mud-brick remains west of the canal for the structure itself – a misidentification later corrected when those remains were dated to the Roman period. Then William Flinders Petrie spent three seasons at the site – January to April 1888, December 1888 to mid-June 1889, and the winter of 1910–1911 – searching for the building the ancient texts described so vividly, and finding, instead, something the texts never quite accounted for. [2]
Hawara’s Pyramid, Foundations, and Roman Necropolis
Hawara sits at the entrance to the Fayum depression, roughly 10 km southeast of modern Fayum city, where the Bahr Yussef canal passes between Gebel El Lahun and Gebel El Naalun before watering the oasis. The site’s dominant feature is a pyramid attributed to Amenemhat III of the 12th Dynasty (c. 1855–1808 BC), built after his earlier Black Pyramid at Dahshur was abandoned due to structural failure. Mainstream scholarship treats the pyramid as Amenemhat III’s final burial place, though one travel website misattributes it to Amenemhat II — a factual error that contradicts the academic consensus. The pyramid was constructed of mud-brick around a core of limestone passages and burial chambers, with an original white limestone casing that was almost entirely pillaged over the centuries, leaving the mud-brick core visible today. The reported dimensions are approximately 105 m base length and 58 m height, with a slope reduced to 48°45’ — an engineering response some scholars interpret as directly addressing the Dahshur collapse, lowering the angle by roughly 9°30’ compared to the failed pyramid. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Inside the pyramid, Petrie found a burial chamber carved from a single massive quartzite monolith, sealed by a roofing slab of approximately 45 tons lowered into place by a sand-pulley mechanism, with corridors protected by enormous stone portcullises. Separate from the pyramid, south of it, lay the structure ancient visitors called the Labyrinth — known in Egyptian as ‘Ankh-Amenemhat’ or ‘Hw.t-wr.t’ (the Great Temple) — which modern scholarship identifies as Amenemhat III’s mortuary temple. Six Classical authors describe this complex: Herodotus, Strabo, Manetho, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny the Elder, and Pomponius Mela, though scholars such as Alan Lloyd argue only Herodotus and Strabo actually visited the site, with the others drawing on hearsay. Herodotus claimed the Labyrinth contained 12 roofed courts and 3,000 chambers (1,500 above ground, 1,500 below), declaring it surpassed the pyramids in grandeur — though he and Strabo disagree on fundamental structural details. The 17th-century Jesuit priest Claude Sicard first proposed modern Hawara as the Labyrinth’s location based on these ancient descriptions. [2]
William Flinders Petrie conducted the first systematic excavations at Hawara across three seasons — January 1888, December 1888 to mid-June 1889, and winter 1910–1911 — producing the primary modern reports still used today. The 1888 work was financed by Manchester cotton industrialist Jesse Haworth, which is why the Manchester Museum holds a significant share of the site’s finds. Petrie’s excavations identified the Labyrinth’s remains as a vast artificial stone platform of approximately 304 m (north–south) by 244 m (east–west), divided by a central east–west wall, with a great retaining wall at the southern end — dimensions that exceed the temple of Karnak. He found a large quartzite sandstone door jamb close to the extended middle axis of the pyramid, suggesting it had been part of a great entrance to the complex, alongside red granite column fragments confined to the area north of the central dividing wall. Petrie did not excavate beneath the platform foundation, and the entire site south of the pyramid was covered in a layer of limestone chips — the residue of centuries of stone-robbing that ended when blocks were removed for a 19th-century railway. Karl Richard Lepsius’s 1843 Prussian expedition had earlier mistaken Roman-period mud-brick remains on the western side of the site for the Labyrinth itself; Petrie’s stratigraphic work demonstrated these were later constructions built atop the Middle Kingdom platform. A 2022 peer-reviewed article by David Brügger in the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology critically reassesses Petrie’s own field standards at Hawara, marking a rare scholarly self-examination of the foundational excavation. [2] [3] [8] [9]
In the Greco-Roman cemeteries north of the pyramid, Petrie discovered 146 mummy portrait panels across his 1888 and 1910–11 seasons — naturalistic encaustic or tempera paintings on thin wooden boards attached to mummies of the Roman Imperial period, dating roughly from the late 1st century BC to the mid-3rd century CE. Round-topped wooden panel shape is a stylistic-provenience indicator specifically associated with Hawara, distinguishing it from stepped panels at Antinoopolis and angled panels at er-Rubayat. About 900–1,000 such portraits are known worldwide, with the Fayum basin, particularly Hawara and Antinoopolis, being the dominant findspots. Scientific analysis by the APPEAR project (launched 2013) has examined roughly one-third of the known corpus, finding that approximately 70% of the wood panels are imported European lime (Tilia europaea) rather than native Egyptian species, and challenging the long-standing binary classification into ‘encaustic’ versus ‘tempera’ mediums. Petrie’s interpretation of the portraits was shaped by his eugenicist and racial-typological worldview, including the practice of detaching skulls from mummies to attempt skull-to-portrait matching — methods that contemporary bioarchaeology has moved well beyond. Today, the pyramid’s entrance and substructure are submerged under approximately 4–5 metres of groundwater — a level that has risen about 5 m since Petrie’s 1889 excavation, driven by modern agricultural irrigation and the Bahr Wahbi canal, posing a documented and ongoing conservation threat to the mud-brick structure and any surviving subterranean remains. The AHRC-funded LABYRINTH project (2018–2022, led by Nottingham Trent University and University of Leeds with NRIAG and Egypt’s Ministry of State of Antiquities) has begun a peer-reviewed conservation and virtual-reconstruction programme, but no official excavation of the Labyrinth complex has taken place since 1911.
[10]
Ancient Witnesses: Six Authors Describe the Labyrinth
The earliest eyewitness description comes from Herodotus, who visited the Egyptian Labyrinth in the fifth century BC and recorded in Histories 2.148 a building containing twelve roofed courts, six facing north and six south, with two stories of 1,500 chambers each for a total of 3,000. Herodotus states explicitly that he himself saw only the upper chambers; Egyptian priests refused him access to the underground rooms, which allegedly held the tombs of the kings who built the complex together with the tombs of sacred crocodiles. [11]
Four other ancient authors mention the monument without visiting it: Manetho in the third century BC, Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC, Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), and Pomponius Mela (c. AD 43). Pliny’s Natural History 36.13 is the most detailed, placing the Labyrinth in the Nome of Heracleopolites, attributing it to a king called Petesuchis or Tithoes (or, per Herodotus, twelve kings ending with Psammetichus), reporting thirty palaces, temples of all Egyptian gods, and forty Nemesis statues. Pliny further states that Daedalus used the Egyptian Labyrinth as the model for the Cretan one. Of the six, only Herodotus and Strabo can be claimed as eyewitnesses; the other four accounts derive from hearsay. [2]
The site of Hawara in the Fayum was first proposed as the location of the Labyrinth in the seventeenth century by the Jesuit priest Father Claude Sicard, working from these ancient written descriptions. Flinders Petrie’s excavations in 1888 converted that textual identification into an archaeological one, reconstructing the main rectangular structure at approximately 304 by 244 meters — larger than Karnak — and recovering a quartzite sandstone doorjamb along the extended axis of the pyramid. The pyramid itself is attributed to Pharaoh Amenemhat III of the 12th Dynasty, conventionally dated c. 1855–1808 BC, built of mud-brick core coated with limestone, originally c. 58 meters high with a 100-meter base. Mainstream scholarship now characterizes the Labyrinth as a multifunctional building complex — likely including a palace, town, and administrative/temple centre — built south of the pyramid of Amenemhat III at Hawara in the Fayum. But here’s where the evidentiary situation turns grim: the site has been heavily damaged as a limestone quarry since antiquity, with the last major block removals occurring in the nineteenth century for railway construction, leaving the area “covered in a layer of limestone chips” by the time Petrie arrived. The fundamental problem for modern reconstruction is now clear: the ancient textual descriptions — though they converge on Hawara’s location — diverge sharply in architectural detail, and the physical evidence that might resolve those discrepancies has been quarried away. [12]
Mainstream Egyptological Reading of the Hawara Labyrinth
Amenemhat III, sixth pharaoh of the 12th Dynasty (c. 1855–1808 BC), built his final pyramid at Hawara in the south-eastern Fayum after abandoning an earlier “Black Pyramid” at Dahshur that had collapsed from foundation failure at low elevation near the Nile. The Hawara monument, named “Amenemhat Lives” (“Ankh-Amenemhat”) and begun around Year 19 of his reign, was constructed at a deliberately reduced slope as a structural concession to unstable ground, built with a mud-brick core faced with limestone casing. It was the first multiple-pyramid commission since Sneferu of the 4th Dynasty, and the king ordered its burial chamber carved from a single quartzite monolith estimated at roughly 110 tons, with a roof lowered onto sand-filled wells drained after interment. A subsidiary pyramid about 2 km south held the burial of his daughter Neferuptah, found intact in 1956 sealed by seven massive limestone blocks. Sobekneferu, the last ruler of the 12th Dynasty, is credited in the textual record with extending the funerary complex — the structure that classical authors would later call the Labyrinth. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17]
To the south of the pyramid, Amenemhat III erected a large cult complex that served as mortuary temple, palace, and administrative centre, and in which the pharaoh was worshipped as a god for over 1,500 years. Flinders Petrie, who conducted three seasons at Hawara (January–April 1888, December 1888–June 1889, and winter 1910–1911), documented the main rectangular platform as approximately 304 by 244 metres — larger than the temple of Karnak — divided east-to-west by a central wall, with red granite column fragments confined to the northern half and a massive quartzite sandstone door jamb marking the southern central axis. The site had been used as a limestone quarry since antiquity, with the last blocks removed to help build a 19th-century railway, so Petrie found “a wide mass of chips and fragments of building” rather than standing architecture. The complex is identified by mainstream scholarship with the building described by Herodotus, Strabo, Manetho, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela — six authors whose accounts diverge sharply: Herodotus counted twelve roofed courts and 3,000 chambers (1,500 above ground, 1,500 below), while Strabo described a single long palace of “as many palaces as there were formerly nomes,” roofed with monolithic stone slabs and supported by 27 columns per court. Alan Lloyd argued that only Herodotus and Strabo actually visited the site; the rest wrote from hearsay. The Jesuit priest Father Claude Sicard proposed modern Hawara as the Labyrinth’s location in the 17th century, on the strength of the textual descriptions converging on the geography adjacent to a pyramid and Lake Moeris. [13] [18] [15] [16] [17]
The Hawara project was embedded in a broader Middle Kingdom programme of Fayum hydraulic engineering. The Hawara Channel, widened from the Bahr Yussef canal, connected the Nile to Lake Moeris and transformed the depression into the only region of premodern Egypt irrigated by an artificial canal network. Lake Moeris once spanned 1,270–1,700 km²; today it has shrunk to roughly 202 km² at Qarun. Herodotus’s “pyramids” rising from the lake were almost certainly the two colossal seated quartzite statues of Amenemhat III at Biahmu, whose pedestals appeared pyramid-like when partially submerged during flood season. The amenemhat cult persisted through the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, with the king remembered as “Pramarres”; houses rose atop parts of the western aisle, a Roman necropolis with gold-faced mask mummies (c. 30 BCE–50 CE) occupied the area north of the pyramid, and a Christian community was established by the 5th century CE. Petrie’s 1888 excavation recovered 146 of the famous Fayum mummy portraits from this Roman cemetery, his most celebrated single find. [19]
But the site is now in conservation crisis. The entrance to Amenemhat III’s pyramid sits submerged under approximately 4–5 metres of groundwater, and the local water table has risen roughly 5 metres since Petrie’s 1889 campaign — to about 5 metres below the topographic surface and some 7 metres above the lower corridor level. Stable-isotope analysis published in 2007 identified the Bahr Selah canal, cut through the site in the 1820s–1830s, as the primary source of the rising water. In response, the Newton-Mosharafa Fund LABYRINTH project (November 2018 – March 2022, £230,611) — led by Nottingham Trent University with the University of Leeds, Egypt’s Ministry of State of Antiquities, and NRIAG — combined 3D laser scanning, geophysical surveys (GPR, VLF-EM, electrical resistivity tomography, transient electromagnetics), thermal modelling, and VR reconstruction to document the site before further deterioration. Yet mainstream scholarship has not been able to excavate beneath the Petrie platform, and the underground chambers described by Herodotus remain unverified — which is why the question of whether they survive intact below the documented foundation, or were quarried away centuries ago, remains the central unresolved problem for the Labyrinth. [20]
The Fringe Reinterpretation of Hawara as Lost Civilization
The 2008 geophysical survey at Hawara — the ‘Mataha expedition’ — used Very Low Frequency electromagnetic (VLF-EM) surveys south of Amenemhat III’s pyramid and identified subsurface anomalies interpreted as possible walls and rooms. The surveys covered only a limited area and could not determine the full extent of any underground structure. Flinders Petrie’s 1888 excavation at Hawara had reconstructed a rectangular complex approximately 1,000 × 800 feet (304 × 244 m) — larger than the temple of Karnak — with a central east–west dividing wall and a great retaining wall at the southern end. Yet the site was extensively quarried in antiquity and the 19th century, leaving almost no above-ground remains. That gap between an ambiguous modern geophysical signal and a thoroughly robbed-out ruin has not constrained the extrapolations layered onto it. [21]
Fringe interpretations explicitly linked to Hawara include claims of a connection to Atlantis and ‘advanced prehistoric civilizations,’ a 130-foot metallic object buried in the complex, and a substantially older date for the Labyrinth than the Middle Kingdom. Alternative-archaeology commentators themselves acknowledge that this online narrative — a multilevel complex with a metallic object inside — diverges from modern archaeological consensus. The general pattern of fringe ‘ancient aliens’/’lost civilization’ arguments rests on imprecise precision, unsourced scale exaggeration, and selective citation of ancient texts rather than material evidence. A signal is not a sample; a thumbnail is not peer review. [22]
The Hawara site faces a serious preservation obstacle: a high local water table threatens any surviving subterranean structures and may also impede further research. This hydrology limits both excavation and ground-truth verification of any geophysical anomaly, and the conditions that would normally resolve such an ambiguity are largely absent. Six ancient authors mention the Labyrinth — Herodotus (c. 450 BC), Strabo (c. 64 BC–AD 24), Manetho (3rd c. BC), Diodorus Siculus (1st c. BC), Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), and Pomponius Mela (c. AD 43) — but only Herodotus and Strabo likely visited personally; the other four accounts are second-hand or hearsay. The fringe narrative ultimately rests on a foundation of unexcavated geophysical anomalies, century-old field notes, and a self-acknowledged divergence from every line of mainstream evidence. [2]
Connecting the Dots
The standard account holds together at the pyramid itself. Petrie’s 1888 excavation uncovered a burial chamber carved from a single quartzite monolith, sealed by a ~45-ton roofing slab — the kind of construction Egyptologists routinely cite as direct material evidence of funerary function, placing Hawara in the same category as Giza, Saqqara, Dahshur, Abu Roash, Lisht, Meidum, and Lahun. The identification of the adjacent temple complex as the “Labyrinth” of the Greek and Roman writers is similarly secure: Herodotus placed the building beyond Lake Moeris near the City of Crocodiles, Claude Sicard matched that geography to Hawara in the 17th century, and Petrie’s discovery of Amenemhat III’s cartouche fragments at the site sealed the match. Six ancient authors mention the Labyrinth — Herodotus, Strabo, Manetho, Diodorus, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela — though only Herodotus and Strabo appear to have visited in person. [2]
But the archaeological record at Hawara is compromised in ways the mainstream narrative tends to gloss. Brügger’s 2022 reassessment in the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology critiques Petrie’s “mindset, field methods, and results at Hawara against the standards he himself was developing” — meaning the 304 × 244 m footprint, the central east-west dividing wall, and the distribution of red granite columns all inherit that uncertainty. The site had already been stripped as a limestone quarry since antiquity, with the last blocks removed for a 19th-century railway, so Petrie found no surviving sand substratum to assist reconstruction. Lepsius’s 1843 Prussian expedition even mistook Roman-period mud-brick remains west of the canal for the Labyrinth itself, an error corrected only when later research demonstrated the structures were Roman. Today the burial chamber sits too close to the groundwater table to enter safely, and researchers must rely almost entirely on Petrie’s original excavation notes. The quartzite tomb, the cult that worshipped Amenemhat III as a god for over 1,500 years, and the Roman-era mummies with their gold-faced masks and ~900 surviving Fayum portraits are therefore all read through a fragmentary, methodologically contested 1888 excavation. [23]
The fringe narrative exploits precisely those gaps. Pliny’s Natural History 36.13 calls the Egyptian labyrinth the model for Daedalus’s Cretan labyrinth and attributes its construction to “King Petesuchis or Tithoes” — a textual bridge later commentators seize to connect Hawara to lost-civilization and Atlantis narratives. The 2008 Mataha expedition’s VLF-EM survey south of the pyramid identified subsurface anomalies interpreted as possible walls and rooms, but covered only a limited area and could not determine the full extent of any underground structure. In 2023, Carlotto’s space-based ground-penetrating radar claimed to identify “an enormous underground structure” potentially matching Herodotus’s 1,500 subterranean chambers — yet the proprietary “3D reconstruction” circulated online without an accompanying peer-reviewed methodology paper. Fringe commentators fold these anomalies, Pliny’s Daedalus passage, and Strabo’s account of monolithic stone roofs over columned halls into a single narrative: that Hawara preserves a technology too advanced for the 12th Dynasty, evidence of a forgotten precursor civilization. [21]
The Other Side
The case for the Labyrinth as a prehistoric superstructure rests on a thin evidentiary base that mainstream scholars identify as methodologically compromised. The 2008 Mataha expedition’s VLF-EM survey, frequently cited as confirmation of a “vast structured underground grid,” covered only a limited area and explicitly “could not determine the full extent of any underground structure” — a limitation noted in the survey’s own published findings. Similarly, the much-circulated space-based radar reconstruction claiming a two-level subterranean complex was acknowledged by its own author, Carlotto, as “never accompanied by a scientific paper describing the methodology or data used,” and appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration — a publication widely regarded in mainstream archaeology as outside the peer-reviewed literature. The mainstream identification of Hawara, established by the Jesuit priest Claude Sicard in the 17th century and confirmed by Petrie’s excavations, treats the Labyrinth as the mortuary temple of Amenemhat III, with Hawara recognized alongside Giza, Saqqara, Dahshur, Abu Roash, Lisht, Meidum, and Lahun as one of the Egyptian cemetery sites where human remains have been recovered — a funerary context that mainstream scholars treat as directly supporting the conventional “pyramid-as-tomb” reading. Even the suggestion that the complex predates Amenemhat III rests on an apparent architectural mismatch rather than any direct stratigraphic evidence of pre-Pharaonic construction. [2]
Herodotus’s reliability as a source for the Fayum has been substantially undermined by quantitative checks against the archaeological record. He overstated Lake Moeris’s circumference by a factor of four, and the Biahmu colossi he described are reduced by modern reconstructions to roughly one-quarter the reported height — discrepancies directly relevant to accepting his “3,000 chambers” figure at face value. Petrie himself documented that the site had no surviving sand substratum, with the entire south of the pyramid covered in limestone chips from centuries of quarrying, meaning every “what Petrie found” claim inherits a critical epistemic weakness about whether any architecture at all survives intact. This is not a problem mainstream scholars have resolved; it is one they have flagged as inherent to the site since the 1880s. [21] [2]
The fringe interpretation of Hawara fits the documented pattern of pseudoarchaeology — sensational claims about lost civilizations, reliance on unreliable ancient sources, and direct contradiction of mainstream scholarship on matters of scale and dating. The Bosnian Pyramid phenomenon provides a documented parallel: a fringe pyramid claim that encountered systematic mainstream rejection based on geological evidence, yet continues to attract popular support. Scholars working in mainstream archaeology treat the Hawara fringe claims as part of this same pattern — claims that substitute speculative architecture for the mortuary-temple reading supported by Petrie’s stratigraphy, the recovered human remains, and the Sicard-to-Petrie identification tradition. The mainstream interpretation is not the final word on every question at Hawara, but it remains the reading most consistent with what has actually been excavated, surveyed, and published in peer-reviewed venues. [24]
What We Actually Know
The case for Hawara as the Labyrinth rests on solid ground. Six ancient Greco-Roman authors describe the structure, and two of them — Herodotus and Strabo — likely visited the site personally. Herodotus’s account specifies twelve roofed courts and 3,000 chambers; Strabo describes a monumental palace with monolithic stone roofs and an adjoining royal tomb. The seventeenth-century Jesuit Claude Sicard first proposed the Hawara identification, and it has held in mainstream Egyptology ever since. Petrie’s three excavation seasons at the site produced the primary modern reports, and his reconstruction placed the Labyrinth’s main rectangular foundation at roughly 304 by 244 metres — larger than Karnak, with a central dividing wall and a great southern retaining wall. The mainstream identification of the Labyrinth as Amenemhat III’s mortuary and funerary temple complex is supported by cartouche evidence, onomastic data, and cult statuary — a pharaoh worshipped as a god for over 1,500 years. [13] [18] [15] [16] [17]
The evidence grows more complicated when newer work enters the picture. A 2008 Belgian-Egyptian expedition using very-low-frequency electromagnetic surveys detected subsurface anomalies south of the pyramid — elongated and square features at shallow depth — interpreted by the team as possible walls and rooms, though the survey covered only a limited area. A 2010 VLF-EM study by Khalil and colleagues targeted the labyrinth mortuary temple complex specifically. More recently, Carlotto’s 2023 space-based radar analysis claimed to identify an enormous underground structure beneath the site, but this work remains an SSRN preprint, not peer-reviewed, and satellite GPR operates at resolutions well above the wall-thickness scale of ancient Egyptian construction. A 2022 reassessment in the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology found that Petrie’s pioneering fieldwork at Hawara is open to methodological critique even by the standards he himself was developing. These findings do not overturn the mainstream identification, but they suggest the Labyrinth’s footprint below ground may be more extensive — and more uncertain — than Petrie’s foundation-based reconstruction indicated. [25]
Within mainstream scholarship itself, two coexisting readings of the Labyrinth’s function compete. One treats it primarily as a cultic mortuary temple, supported by the Egyptian name ‘Ankh-Amenemhat,’ the concentration of red granite columns north of the central dividing wall, and the documented Sobek-Hathor-deified-Amenemhat III statuary — the religious-political mechanism being the late 12th–13th Dynasty ‘Age of Sobek.’ The other reads the complex as a multifunctional palace, town, and administrative centre, framing the 120 by 300 metre inner footprint as a cult-core within a larger enclosing rectangle. These are not contradictory measurements — they target different architectural features — but they reflect genuinely different emphases in interpretation. The structural engineering itself pushes against easy categorisation: monolithic stone-slab roofing without timber, single-row monolithic columns, and red granite shafts quarried at Aswan and Nile-transported represent the high end of attested Middle Kingdom capabilities. [26]
What remains genuinely open is whether anything new will be confirmed beneath the surface. Reports of a 2026-era excavation underway at the Labyrinth appear in recent YouTube news from Anyextee and Ancient Architects, but no peer-reviewed or institutional source has corroborated them. The pyramid entrance and substructure currently sit under approximately four to five metres of groundwater fed by modern agricultural irrigation — an active conservation threat and a barrier to direct investigation of the platform itself. All three recent geophysical surveys covered only limited ground, leaving the full spatial extent of any subterranean structure undetermined. The biggest unanswered question is whether intact below-ground architecture survives at Hawara at all — and whether the modern water table will allow direct investigation of any of it. [8] [7] [14] [27]
References
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