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The Red Pyramid of Dahshur was the third largest Egyptian pyramid ever built and contains some
of the best-preserved architecture of the Old Kingdom.
It’s often cited as the moment when pyramids finished evolving from haphazard constructions
to a uniform design of smooth symmetry.
It’s easy to think of it as being the simplest pyramid of its time, and many historians attempt
to downplay any mysteries associated with it.
As mentioned in my video about Menkaure’s casing stones, the Red Pyramid only received
this nickname in modern times after the white Tura casing stones were plundered.
The internal masonry of this pyramid has a slightly reddish hue, hence the nickname.
But for the longest time, Menkaure’s Pyramid was the truly red one, with its 16 courses
of Aswan Granite and red-painted limestone above.
It seems likely that after both pyramids lost most of their casing, the nickname of the
‘Red Pyramid’ migrated over to this larger monument at Dahshur, accidentally.
The other reason we call this monument the modern-day Red Pyramid is because it can’t
be conclusively identified as a burial spot for a king.
The pharaoh Sneferu allegedly built three pyramids, the collapsed one at Meidum, the
Bent Pyramid of Dahshur and this somewhat flattened Red Pyramid just north of the Bent
one.
The conventional explanation is that Sneferu must have found 2 of the 3 pyramids unsuitable
as a burial site.
I call it the Goldilocks and the Three Pyramids Theory.
This pyramid’s too small.
This pyramid’s too lumpy.
This pyramid is just right.
That explanation is not overly persuasive to me, and there seems to be more going on
than a simple upgrade from one pyramid to the next.
I respect the archaeology that’s been conducted at all three pyramids which suggests Sneferu
was involved at all of them in some way.
But I can’t make the leap that this means he was entirely responsible for the construction
of all three.
Reasoning that each pyramid was designed to be Sneferu’s burial site is also a huge
assumption that overlooks a lot of the physical evidence.
If you don’t think of a pyramid as much more than a bunch of mastabas stacked high
with smoothed edges, than the Red Pyramid’s architecture seems ideal as a point of comparison.
Tomb security is a strong interest of mine, and Egyptologist Reg Clark’s 2019 book ‘Securing
Eternity’ gives a comprehensive analysis of how kings and elites were buried prior
to the enormous pyramids of the 4th dynasty.
The general idea is that mastabas evolved to get larger over time, so as to provide
more protection from above.
This would combine with making the burial chamber deeper underground, disguising the
entrance, and completely backfilling the corridors after burial.
All of these efforts would make for a maximally difficult tomb to plunder.
At a superficial glance, the Red Pyramid seems to adopt this defensive strategy.
The entrance is located at the highest point of any pyramid.
The descending corridor is the longest of any pyramid and could receive maximum plugging.
And finally, the presumed burial chamber is located with an inaccessibly high entrance
that seems ideal to disguise.
When taking a closer look at each of these features, however, none of the design choices
were implemented in a way to take advantage of the mastaba defense strategy.
Placing the entrance so high on the Red Pyramid seems like a clever way to disguise it.
But, like all other Old Kingdom pyramids, the entrance remains centered on the north
side.
Furthermore, the Red Pyramid’s gentler slope makes it much easier to traverse, and so exploring
the pyramid’s upper face wouldn’t be a challenge.
And the remaining stones surrounding the corridor suggests an enormous lintel would still advertise
the location of the corridor, as it does on the neighboring Bent Pyramid and its Satellite
pyramid.
In fact, placing the entrance so high would make this oversized lintel even more obvious,
because pyramid masonry always trends shorter in the courses that are higher on the structure.
In order to make a course of masonry tall enough to match the descending corridor, it
would have almost certainly been much taller than the courses above or below it.
There’s no reason why pyramids had to be designed in this way, but subsequent Old Kingdom
pyramids always did so.
The idea of plugging the over 62-meter-long descending corridor is also highly problematic.
It would require more than 400 tons of limestone to fill it to the bottom, and where could
this material possibly be stored high up on a completed pyramid?
Perhaps individual workers could carry up loose debris from the desert floor, but this
would be an ineffective defense.
All the evidence from Old Kingdom pyramids indicate only large solid blocks were ever
used for plugging.
And as Flinders Petrie states, there is no physical evidence to suggest pyramid corridors
were ever plugged up other than perhaps at the mouth of an entrance.
This makes the extra-long descending corridor mostly useless as a line of defense.
The final obstacle for an intruder to overcome would be locating the upper chamber that is
presumed to be where a pharaoh would be buried.
This seems like an ingenious design; the height of the chamber below makes inspecting the
access point extremely difficult.
A looting party unaware of this secret would have no reason to suspect such a novel disguise.
But there’s a problem.
The builders left large sockets for pulleys, or perhaps even the pulley logs themselves,
near the hidden corridor.
Even with minimal sources of light that intruders might carry, the round sockets would stand
out dramatically from the perfectly-squared corbels that make up the tall ceiling.
And when we inspect the mouth of the upper corridor that leads to the hidden chamber,
we discover the biggest mystery the Red Pyramid has to offer.
The short corridor between the upper chamber and the top of the second antechamber is uniquely
designed.
Many investigations have noted that the upper section is perfectly squared and smoothed,
while the lower half is roughly cut.
The difference is reasonably explained by looters quarrying the bottom half of the corridor
to more easily remove items from the upper chamber.
It’s the ceiling of this corridor that defies all expectations.
Looking up, we notice that the ceiling is not covered by single blocks, but instead
a masonry joint runs along the center of the passage.
No other Old Kingdom pyramid corridor is designed in this way.
The ancient Egyptians always designed corridors with lintels spanning the entire width of
a passage.
It’s safe to assume that the builders didn’t want masonry joints in corridor ceilings because
it might compromise structural stability.
Yet here, near the bottom of the Red Pyramid, this corridor bears a heavier load than almost
any other pyramid corridor ever built.
The design has held up perfectly, meaning the builders were very capable of disguising
corridors by using ceiling joints.
However, not once did they ever choose to do so.
Not even in this very corridor that has a masonry joint in its ceiling.
At the entrance to this upper corridor, at its most northern point, the ceiling joint
does not continue.
The first ceiling block is a lintel which spans the entire passage.
The entrance lintel is scrawled with graffiti including the name ‘Burton’, so I reference
it as the ‘Burton Block’.
If the Egyptians were concerned about structural stability or attempting to disguise the upper
corridor, this design is entirely backwards.
They would instead make the Burton Block the only section with a ceiling joint, and keep
the entirely hidden length of the corridor spanned with lintels for structural support.
The Burton Block lintel, along with the pulley log notches, dramatically undermine any secrecy
the upper passage might have possessed.
The only conclusion can be that the upper corridor was designed to be inaccessible by
virtue of its height alone, and that no serious attempt was made to camouflage its location.
All of this physical evidence reveals that a secrecy defense was not employed at the
Red Pyramid.
Like all of the other old Kingdom pyramids, only physical barriers and permanent guards
occupying nearby temples could stop intruders.
When confronted with this reality, the Red Pyramid’s design is even more vulnerable.
This is because unlike other Old Kingdom pyramids, the Red Pyramid lacks numerous essential features.
These include a Valley Temple for worship, a causeway for cult transportation, a portcullis
barrier for internal protection, and it either had no enclosure wall or a meager mud-brick
one that has left almost no evidence of its existence.
Would a pharaoh entrust his eternal resting spot with such an incomplete monument?
It would seem we’re not the only ones that have asked this question, as the final mystery
about the Red Pyramid is plain to see in the upper chamber that is attributed for burial.
The enormous excavation within the upper chamber’s floor is a huge anomaly.
If a looting party is looking for hidden chambers, usually a small, exploratory shaft is perfectly
adequate.
Many other Old Kingdom pyramids have had their floors ripped up by visitors looking for secrets.
But these excavations are usually limited to the Tura limestone pavement.
Even the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid only ever had one corner of its granite floor
dug out.
How then, can we possibly explain this enormously destructive undertaking in the Red Pyramid?
The talented researcher Keith Hamilton writes in his guide that perhaps the upper chamber
floor was excavated to create a ramp that would facilitate the removal of heavy treasures.
The amount of material removed roughly corresponds to what it would take to build a stone ramp
from a lower chamber to the upper access corridor.
If you’ve watched my video on the Robber’s Tunnel of the Great Pyramid than you know
that I am sympathetic to such an explanation.
But when I look at the pattern of destruction in the Red Pyramid it doesn’t come across
as very methodical.
As mentioned earlier, the upper corridor has been mostly excavated one course downwards
which indicates an interest in moving large objects through it.
But this won’t solve the problem of getting oversized objects out of the pyramid, because
the 62-meter-long descending corridor is almost no larger than the original upper access passage.
There’s also the problem of the excavation itself in the Red Pyramid’s upper chamber.
When removing treasures, you would require a staging area to keep them until your exit
ramp is completed.
But the entire floor has been dug out, and there’s no place for anything to be stored
during the excavation work.
It also would make more sense to dig further into the upper corridor, using that area as
the ramp itself and saving an enormous amount of effort.
Instead, we find the upper chamber has its excavation centered in the middle of the room.
The hole gets shallower towards each wall, typical of how you might dig when trying to
get as deep as possible.
A single block beneath the northern wall has been removed, the only example of an exploratory
dig within the enormous excavation.
This evidence indicates the looters were quite keen to dig downwards at the expense of any
other excavation strategy.
My interpretation of the digging in the upper passage is simply to facilitate maneuvering
large blocks through it.
They were likely pushed into the lower chamber and smashed from the fall.
This would explain why later restorers had no trouble removing all of the smaller debris,
since hauling enormous blocks up the descending corridor would be an overly difficult task.
It must be asked, what would convince a looting party to make such an enormous effort in this
space.
Why would they be so confident the floor of the upper chamber is the place to dig?
The walls are left untouched, and not even the conspicuously dark block centered on the
north side has been probed.
The answer to this riddle can only be solved by a thorough analysis of all 3 pyramids attributed
to Sneferu.
Unless the looting party who made this excavation was the dumbest of all time, they probably
were the first ones to reach the upper chamber.
You would need to be very confident nobody had looted the pyramid before you in order
to entirely dig up this room.
But this means the upper chamber was discovered empty – because why search for a burial
chamber, if you’ve already found one?
Because the Red Pyramid is missing so many other standard pyramid features, it’s not
a huge stretch to suggest a burial chamber is missing as well.
This should not be a controversial assertion, because even mainstream Egyptology claims
that 2 of 3 Sneferu pyramids must have been unused for burial.
But simply updating the Goldilocks and the 3 pyramids theory, to make one of the other
pyramids more ideal, isn’t a satisfactory solution.
What the incompleteness of the Red Pyramid can teach us, is that the evolution from mastaba
to pyramid is not nearly as straightforward as Egyptology likes to portray.
Every defense strategy for mastaba burials is abandoned in the enormous pyramids of the
Old Kingdom.
Even the Red Pyramid, which is cited as an ideal comparison, has nothing in common with
the methods of burial for pharaohs from before the 4th dynasty.
Certainly, pyramids did evolve to become a burial place for pharaohs.
But the superstructures of stone and the crypts within may not have been unified in their
purpose.
Only by separating those two concepts does the physical evidence we see at monuments
like the Red Pyramid start to make sense.
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