Meidum Pyramid

Listen first. Out here, on the edge of the Western Desert, the wind moves across loose sand and pale rubble. A dog barks somewhere in the fields below. Under your feet the ground crunches. It is not just sand. It is broken limestone, thousands of fragments of a building that once stood much larger than the one in front of you. And rising out of that pale mound is a shape unlike any other pyramid in Egypt. It looks like a tower. Some visitors say it looks like a stepped fortress.

This is the Meidum Pyramid. It stands south of Cairo, close to the Faiyum, where the green strip of the Nile valley meets the dry plateau. Turn around and you can see the line clearly. On one side are palm trees, canals and farm fields. On the other side is desert. The ancient Egyptians chose this border on purpose. The living worked the black soil of the river valley. The dead were buried in the red land of the desert, toward the setting sun.

So what exactly are you looking at? You are looking at the inner core of a pyramid. Its outer layers have fallen away. What remains are several steep stepped stages of smooth, pale stone, standing on a hill of their own debris. Local people have long called it the False Pyramid — in Arabic, el-Haram el-Kaddab. The name makes sense. From a distance, it does not look like a pyramid at all.

The history of this building begins at the start of the Old Kingdom, in the age often called the Pyramid Age. Most scholars connect the pyramid with King Sneferu, the founder of the Fourth Dynasty. Some Egyptologists think his predecessor, Huni, began the work, and Sneferu finished it. That question is still debated. What is clear is the importance of Sneferu. He was the father of Khufu, the king who later built the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Here is the first surprise. This building did not start as a smooth pyramid. It began as a step pyramid, a stack of shrinking platforms, like the earlier pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. Then the builders enlarged it. They added more steps. Later, they filled in the steps and added an outer casing. That casing turned the whole structure into a true pyramid with straight, sloping sides. In other words, you are standing at a turning point in architecture. Egypt was changing from stepped tombs to the classic pyramid shape.

Sneferu was an ambitious builder. He did not stop at Meidum. At Dahshur, further north, he raised two more pyramids. One of them, the Bent Pyramid, changes its angle halfway up. The other, the Red Pyramid, is a true pyramid from base to tip. Together, these three sites show the engineers of one reign learning through experiment, and sometimes through failure. Meidum is part of that story. The lessons learned here helped prepare the way for Giza.

So why does the pyramid look like this today? The outer casing collapsed, and much of it now lies in the mound around the base. When did that happen? Scholars disagree. Some argue for a dramatic collapse, perhaps even during construction. Others believe the stone fell slowly over many centuries, and that people took the fine blocks away for other buildings. One clue supports the slower idea. Visitors in the New Kingdom, more than a thousand years later, left written graffiti nearby, and they praised the monument.

Now look at the north side of the pyramid. High on that face is the entrance, and a modern stairway climbs to it. From there, a long, narrow passage slopes down into the rock. If you go inside, be ready to bend low. The air is warm and still, and it smells of dust. At the bottom, a short shaft leads up into the burial chamber. Here is another surprise. The roof of the chamber is corbelled. Each row of stone sticks out a little further than the row below it, until the two sides almost meet.

Inside the passage, look for old timber beams. Archaeologists think the builders or the workers who moved the burial left them there. No sarcophagus was found in the chamber. It is still not certain that a king was ever buried here. That empty room is part of the mystery. The ancient builders put great effort into a burial chamber that may never have held a body.

Walk to the east side of the pyramid. Against its base is a small temple of plain limestone. It is one of the earliest pyramid temples that survives in Egypt. Inside, there is a small courtyard with two tall, rounded stone slabs called stelae. Stelae usually carry the names of kings and gods. These two are blank. No one carved an inscription on them. A causeway once ran from this temple down toward the valley, linking the tomb to the world of the living.

Around the pyramid lie the tombs of nobles and royal family members. These are mastabas, low, flat-topped tombs shaped like benches. Two of them became famous after excavation. In the tomb of a prince named Rahotep and his wife Nofret, archaeologists found two painted seated statues. They have bright, inlaid eyes that still look alive. Those statues are now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Many visitors there do not realise that the statues came from this quiet desert ridge.

A second treasure came from the tomb of Nefermaat and his wife Itet. From it came a painting known as the Meidum Geese. It shows several geese walking and feeding in a row, painted in soft browns, greens and white. It is one of the oldest and most admired paintings from ancient Egypt. Look north and you will also see a huge mudbrick mound, a large mastaba with no known owner. Tomb robbers once dug tunnels into it. Its owner remains anonymous.

Modern investigation of the site began in the late nineteenth century. The British archaeologist Flinders Petrie worked here and cleared the temple at the foot of the pyramid. Many later teams followed. Today, Meidum sees fewer visitors than Giza or Saqqara. That means you often have the place almost to yourself. There are no crowds and no traffic noise. There is only sand, stone and the sound of wind against the pyramid's steep walls.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment and look up at the smooth faces of the core. Notice how sharply the light catches the edges of each stage. Look down at the broken stone around your feet. Every pale fragment was cut, carried and placed by human hands about forty-five centuries ago. Then turn toward the green fields of the valley. The farmers there are working the same land that fed the builders. As you walk back across the crunching rubble, you are walking across the remains of an experiment that taught Egypt how to build a pyramid.