The Dahshur Pyramids

Dahshur is where the true pyramid was worked out. Two of them stand here, both built for Sneferu — the father of Khufu — within a single reign, and between them they tell the story of a problem being solved.

It is about twenty minutes south of Saqqara, and quieter still. On many mornings there are more guards than visitors.

The Bent Pyramid is the most instructive ruin in Egypt. It rises at a steep angle for about half its height and then abruptly shallows out. The usual reading is that the builders realised the original slope was unstable — cracking has been recorded inside — and finished it at a safer angle rather than starting again. You are looking at an engineering correction, frozen mid-build, from 4,600 years ago.

The Red Pyramid, a short distance north, is the answer to that problem: the first large pyramid built successfully at a shallow angle from the ground up, and effectively the prototype for Khufu's.

It is also, for most visitors, the best pyramid to go inside. The descending passage is long and steep, but the chambers at the bottom are corbelled — walls stepping inward course by course to a high, narrow ceiling — and they are genuinely impressive in a way the bare granite room inside Khufu's pyramid is not.

Sneferu, first king of the Fourth Dynasty, is credited with more pyramid masonry than any other Egyptian ruler — the two at Dahshur plus the pyramid at Meidum. That single reign is where the form was resolved.

The Bent Pyramid retains more of its outer casing than almost any other Egyptian pyramid, which is why its surface looks so much smoother than Giza's. It also has an unusual second entrance on its western face, and a satellite pyramid beside it.

Both monuments sat inside a restricted military zone and were only opened to visitors in 1996, which is part of why they remain so lightly visited.

Some seven centuries later the Middle Kingdom came back to the same desert strip. Amenemhat II, Senusret III and Amenemhat III all built pyramids at Dahshur, on the lower ground towards the cultivation. The last of them was raised on a mud-brick core that settled and cracked, and survives as the dark eroded mass known as the Black Pyramid.

Excavation here has been slow and rewarding. Jacques de Morgan, digging beside the Middle Kingdom pyramids in the 1890s, found the royal jewellery now displayed in Cairo as the Dahshur treasure. Ahmed Fakhry cleared the Bent Pyramid's valley temple in the 1950s, and the pyramid's own interior was not opened to visitors until July 2019.

• The Bent Pyramid, with its visible change of angle and much of its original casing
• The Red Pyramid, the first successful true pyramid, which you can usually enter
• The corbelled interior chambers of the Red Pyramid
• The satellite pyramid on the south side of the Bent Pyramid
• The causeway running east from the Bent Pyramid towards its valley temple, some 700 metres away
• Wide, empty desert — Dahshur sees a small fraction of the visitors Giza and Saqqara take
• The reconstructed pyramidion of the Red Pyramid, standing at ground level beside it
• Amenemhat III's Black Pyramid, an eroded mud-brick core out across the sand