Dahshur: Sneferu's pyramids and the marks their builders left

The Bent Pyramid changes its slope halfway up

The southern of Sneferu's two pyramids rises at about 54 degrees and breaks to about 43 degrees for its upper part. The usual explanation is that the steep slope showed signs of instability during building. Kurt Mendelssohn tied the change to a collapse at Sneferu's earlier pyramid at Meidum, and others suggest the builders simply wanted to use less stone. Its polished limestone casing survives better than on any other pyramid in Egypt.

Inside, the writing is a single cartouche. On blocks of the upper chamber, Sneferu's name was daubed in red ink: the folded cloth (S29) for s, the heart and windpipe (F35) for nfr, the mouth (D21) for r and the quail chick (G43) for w. The Bent Pyramid opened to visitors in July 2019, for the first time since 1965, with a 79-metre passage from the north entrance down to two chambers.

Write Sneferu in a cartouche

Sneferu's estates walk in procession in the valley temple

The finest hieroglyphs of his reign at Dahshur came from the valley temple below the Bent Pyramid, excavated by Ahmed Fakhry between 1951 and 1955. Its reliefs show female figures carrying offerings, each one standing for an estate that supplied the king's cult, with the estate's name written beside her. The provinces of Upper and Lower Egypt line the walls in the same way, and the courtyard carried scenes of Sneferu's jubilee festival.

Look on these reliefs for his Horus name, Nebmaat, nb-mꜣꜥt, "Lord of Maat". It sits in a palace frame, the serekh, under the falcon of Horus (G5), and reads with the basket (V30) for nb and the platform (Aa11) for mꜣꜥ. The reliefs survive as fragments.

Dated casing blocks time the building of the Red Pyramid

The Red Pyramid, about a kilometre north of the Bent one, was built at the gentler 43 degrees from the start. It stands about 105 metres high, the third largest pyramid in Egypt, and its modern name comes from the reddish core stone left bare when its white Tura casing was carried off in the Middle Ages.

In the debris at its base Rainer Stadelmann recovered hundreds of casing fragments. On their inner faces, hidden once the blocks were laid, the builders had marked Sneferu's name, the names of the crews who placed them and dates. A date reads "year of the Nth occasion of the count": rnpt, "year", with the palm rib (M4), then sp, "occasion", with the threshing floor (O50). The count was a national census of cattle, held every other year in Sneferu's time but not always on a fixed rhythm.

A block from a corner at the base gives the 15th count. Stadelmann worked out that the pyramid took about 17 years. Rolf Krauss read the same marks as 10 to 11 years. The highest date at the pyramid, the 24th count, is one of the main pieces of evidence that Sneferu reigned more than the 24 years the Turin king list gives him.

Three 12th Dynasty kings built pyramids beside Sneferu's

Amenemhat II's White Pyramid, east of the Red Pyramid, was built of limestone and quarried down to a heap of rubble. Senusret III's pyramid, the northernmost at the site, and Amenemhat III's Black Pyramid, near the edge of the fields, had mud-brick cores cased in white limestone. With the casing gone, the brick weathered into the dark mounds seen today. The Black Pyramid stood on clay too weak for its weight and took in groundwater. It was abandoned, and Amenemhat III built a second pyramid at Hawara, probably his burial place.

Jacques de Morgan dug the tombs of royal women around these pyramids in 1894 and 1895. Beside Amenemhat II lay the jewellery of the princesses Ita and Khnumet. A gallery near Senusret III's pyramid held the treasures of Sithathor and Mereret, with pectorals naming Senusret II, Senusret III and Amenemhat III. Senusret III's throne name on them is ḫꜥ-kꜣw-rꜥ, Khakaure, "the kas of Ra appear": the sun disc (N5), the sun rising over a hill (N28) for ḫꜥ and three pairs of raised arms (D28) for the kas.

See Senusret III's names

The Black Pyramid's capstone holds its longest text

In 1900 an inspection sent by Gaston Maspero found a dark block in the sand on the east side of Amenemhat III's pyramid. It was the pyramidion, the capstone, a single piece of basalt (often called black granite) about 1.4 metres tall, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo as JE 35133.

All four faces are inscribed. The east face carries a winged sun disc over two wedjat eyes (D10), then three heart and windpipe signs and a sun disc. Together with the king's two cartouches, Nimaatre and Amenemhat, they read "Amenemhat beholds the perfection of Ra". The other faces call on Ra-Horakhty, Osiris, Ptah and Anubis. The name of Amun was chiselled out of the cartouches, perhaps under Akhenaten, and the stone's good condition has led some scholars to doubt it was ever set on top of the pyramid.

Cedar boats lay buried beside Senusret III's pyramid

De Morgan also dug up five or six wooden boats outside the enclosure of Senusret III's pyramid, each about 10 metres long and built of cedar. They are thought to have taken part in the king's funeral, but they carry no inscription that says so. Four can be traced today: one in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, one in the Field Museum in Chicago and two moved from Cairo to the Sharm El-Sheikh Museum in 2020. The fifth is lost.

A torch shows more than the midday sun

Dahshur lay inside a military zone until the mid-1990s. Army land still borders it, so some parts stay off limits. It is far quieter than Giza.

Come early or late, when low sun rakes across the Bent Pyramid's casing. Inside either of Sneferu's pyramids, sweep the walls with a torch for traces of red ink, take a steady photo of anything you find and trace over it afterwards in Hiero Lens. Painted marks are faint, and your strokes over them often read better than the photo alone.

Read a sign with the camera

Questions

People in this article

• Sneferu c. 2613–2589 BC
• Senusret III c. 1870–1831 BC
• Senusret II c. 1877–1870 BC
• Amenemhat II c. 1911–1877 BC
• Amenemhat III c. 1831–1786 BC

Where to see it

• Dahshur site
• Bent Pyramid monument
• Red Pyramid monument
• Saqqara site
• Giza Pyramids site
• Egyptian Museum, Cairo museum

More to read

• Hieroglyphs in the Great Pyramid: the work gangs who wrote Khufu's name Pyramid of Giza hieroglyphs: no carved texts inside the Great Pyramid, but red work-gang marks naming Khufu above the King's Chamber, and what they say.
• The temple of Seti I at Abydos: what to read on its walls Temple of Seti I, Abydos: its raised reliefs and Ramesses II's sunk ones, the seven chapels, the king list, the Osiris halls and the helicopter signs.
• A hieroglyph walk through Karnak Karnak hieroglyphics to read on a walk: cartouches on the Hypostyle Hall columns, Hatshepsut's obelisk, Shoshenq's list of towns and the White Chapel.