Egyptian pyramids

Egypt is a country in Africa with a long river, the Nile.

Long ago, its kings had giant pyramids built as their tombs. Many of them stand in the desert near the river. Some are smooth, some have steps, and one is even bent!

Egypt's pyramids were built as tombs for kings, and sometimes queens. Each pyramid was the biggest part of a group of buildings, with temples and a long road leading down toward the Nile.

The biggest pyramids were built in a time historians call the pyramid age, from about 2686 to 2325 BCE. Archaeologists have found dozens of royal pyramids in Egypt. Many have crumbled into heaps of stone, and robbers took their treasures long ago. More than 38 pyramids stand in the desert west of the Nile, between Giza and Dahshur. This page tells how pyramids developed; the famous Giza pyramids have their own pages.

Britannica defines the pyramids of ancient Egypt as funerary edifices built over some 2,700 years, from the start of the Old Kingdom to the end of the Ptolemaic period, with the true 'pyramid age' running from the 3rd to roughly the 6th Dynasty (c. 2686 to 2325 BCE), when the pyramid was the usual royal tomb. Each stood within a complex: the pyramid in an enclosure on high desert, a mortuary temple, and a causeway down to a valley temple at the edge of the cultivated land.

Scores of royal pyramids are known, many reduced to mounds of debris and long ago plundered. UNESCO's Memphis necropolis alone holds more than 38, documenting what it calls the development of royal tombs from the mastaba to the pyramid. The Giza group and the Great Pyramid are covered on their own pages.

After Giza, kings built smaller pyramids.

Some had writing carved on the walls inside. Much later, kings stopped building pyramids. They were buried in tombs dug deep into hills instead.

After the giant pyramids of Giza, kings of the 5th Dynasty built much smaller pyramids at Abusir, but decorated their temples and roads with fine carvings. The pyramid of King Unas, the last king of the 5th Dynasty, at Saqqara, has the earliest known writing carved on the walls of its inner rooms. These spells are called the Pyramid Texts.

Kings of the Middle Kingdom built pyramids at Dahshur too. But in the New Kingdom, almost all kings, from Thutmose I onward, were buried in tombs cut into the rock of the Valley of the Kings instead. Far to the south, in what is now Sudan, the kings of Kush later built pyramids of their own at Meroe.

Britannica describes the 5th Dynasty pyramids at Abusir as much smaller than those of the 4th, though their temples and causeways bore fine reliefs; in the 6th Dynasty the monuments at Saqqara declined further in size and workmanship as central power waned. The earliest known Pyramid Texts, spells carved on inner chamber walls, are in the pyramid of Unas, last king of the 5th Dynasty.

Several 12th Dynasty kings of the Middle Kingdom raised pyramids at Dahshur, the southernmost Memphite field. In the New Kingdom, almost all kings from Thutmose I to Ramses X (1539 to 1075 BCE) were buried in the rock-cut tombs of the Valley of the Kings. In Sudan, UNESCO describes the pyramids of Meroe as outstanding Kushite funerary monuments of a kingdom that lasted from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE.