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As one heads south through the flat Nile Delta, imposing limestone outcrops loom in the distance, marking the beginning of the Nile Valley. That on the left (east) includes the Tura and Muqattam hills, from which the fine limestone for casing the pyramids and mastabas of the Old and Middle Kingdoms was extracted. That on the right (west) is the mountain of Abu Rowash. On its summit was erected one king’s pyramid, while two other royal tombs were built around its foot, all clearly intended to be seen from a great distance by anyone beginning a journey up the Nile. Today, all are heavily denuded, and have received little attention from Egyptologists. Yet the three royal tombs mark important waypoints in the development of the burial places of the pharaohs of the first part of the Old Kingdom and deserve better understanding.
The pyramid-complex of Djedefra
By far the best known of these monuments is the Pyramid of Djedefra (c.2566-2558 BC) which, although reduced to little more than its rock-cut core, can still be seen from far away. As with several pyramids – including another one at Abu Rowash – the core of the pyramid was cut from a natural knoll of rock to minimise the amount of masonry required to complete the pyramid; in this case, the requirement for quarried blocks was reduced by 45%. The area around the knoll was levelled to allow the construction of the mortuary temple and two smaller pyramids, one the subsidiary pyramid of the complex, the other for a queen.
A deep T-shaped cutting, beginning on the north, was made into the core, within which the descending corridor and chambers were built. Only a few blocks of these survive, suggesting that there was originally an antechamber under the centre of the pyramid, with the burial chamber to the west. A fragment of sarcophagus indicates that it was of a very unusual oval form, only paralleled in the Unfinished Pyramid at Zawiyet el-Aryan. This suggests that the latter was constructed directly after that of Djedefra, something supported by the fact that the burial chambers of both pyramids were located at the bottom of deep cuttings.
The mortuary temple lay on the east side, and was partly constructed in brick, suggesting the king’s premature death. Extensive remains of sculpture have been recovered, hinting that it was adorned with statuary to a degree not found in previous royal mortuary temples. A boat pit was constructed directly south of the temple. The causeway led, uniquely, from the north side of the complex to allow it to follow a 1.5 kilometre natural ridge for the descent; this probably explains why much of the mortuary temple lay adjacent to the northern part of the east face. The valley building at the bottom of the causeway has never been excavated. What seems to have been the subsidiary pyramid lay in the south-west corner of the enclosure, an unusual position otherwise found only at the slightly later Giza pyramid of Menkaura.
The pyramid itself was originally 106 metres square and 67 metres tall – almost the same size as the pyramid of Menkaura at Giza, and half the size of that of Djedefra’s predecessor, Khufu. Like Menkaura, Djedefra made up for a smaller size by sheathing much of his pyramid with granite, but his trump card was the exceptional location that he had chosen. As completed, the tip of Khufu’s pyramid lay 210 metres above sea level; the tip of Djedefra’s pyramid rose 160 metres above sea level, of which the first 90 metres was the mountain on which it was built. Furthermore, the Abu Rowash pyramid could be seen from the Nile Delta to the limits of visibility, something not true of any other pyramid in the Memphite necropolis. Khafra would play a similar trick at Giza by placing the second pyramid on higher ground, with its tip slightly above that of the Great Pyramid. He enhanced the effect by giving his pyramid a slightly steeper angle (53°, rather than Khufu and Djedefra’s 51.5°).
The prominence of Djedefra’s pyramid is an important point, as the popular view has long been that he chose an obscurely remote site. This has been fed by George Reisner’s view that Djedefra’s choice of Abu Rowash was ‘as if he wished to separate himself from his brothers and sisters and start a new royal cemetery’. He further elaborated this by suggesting that Djedefra might have been involved in the premature death of his elder brother Kawab, and that the smashing of the king’s statues in the Abu Rowash complex was ‘revenge’ undertaken during the reign of Djedefra’s younger brother Khafra. The latest fieldwork has indicated that the destruction at Abu Rowash was the result of Roman Period quarrying of stone for reuse, and that Reisner’s speculations were more down to his well-documented love of detective novels than any substantive evidence.
The pyramid was first investigated by John Perring during 1837, as part of his wider survey of Memphite pyramids, and then examined by the Prussian expedition of Richard Lepsius during November 1842 to January 1843. Flinders Petrie found fragments of statues and a piece of an oval sarcophagus during 1881-1882. The 19th century saw much of the remaining limestone of the pyramid being taken away for reuse, contributing to the long-standing – but erroneous – view that the pyramid had been left unfinished in antiquity. The first systematic investigations were by Émile Chassinat during 1900-1901, with new work carried out between 1995 and 2007 under the direction of Michel Valloggia.
Burial chambers at ground level
While chambers in the pyramids of Djoser, Sekhemkhet, Khaba (possible owner of the Layer Pyramid at Zawiyet el-Aryan) and Khufu had been placed deep underground, the Pyramid of Khafra had its burial chamber just below ground-level, with its roofing blocks projecting into the body of the pyramid. This scheme was continued in all later pyramids of the Old Kingdom, indicating that all pyramids with ‘deep’ substructures should pre-date Khafra (c.2558-2532 BC).
I E S Edwards, author of the seminal Pyramids of Egypt, suggested that this change of approach was to aid the introduction of a stone sarcophagus, something lacking from every pre-Khufu pyramid, except for that of Sekhemkhet (c.2648-2640 BC). He proposed that the abandonment of the rock-cut subterranean chamber in Khufu’s pyramid, and its replacement with chambers in the superstructure, was prompted by the desire to enclose the king’s mummy in a stone sarcophagus, the descending corridor being too low and narrow to permit such a container to be introduced.
The Brick Pyramid
In contrast to Djedefra’s pyramid, the second such monument at Abu Rowash has not only received minimal archaeological attention, but was also ‘lost’ for many years. It was first reported by Perring, who observed:
upon a projecting knoll, on the eastern side of the mountain… the remains of a building of considerable magnitude and solidity. It is composed of crude bricks, made of Nile earth, without any intermixture of straw. Small sepulchral grottoes at the bottom of inclined passages have been roughly hewn in the side of the mountain; they contain sarcophagi, which are without any ornament or inscription.
The Prussian expedition dubbed this structure ‘Pyramid I’ (Djedefra’s being ‘Pyramid II’), and published sketches. However, it was subsequently ‘lost’, a consequence of the disappearance of the remaining brickwork by the end of the 19th century. Leslie Grinsell, the author of Egyptian Pyramids (1947), remarks that he had ‘never succeeded in locating this monument’, calling it ‘a supposed third pyramid’. He was not helped in this by Baedeker’s Egypt stating that the pyramid lay ‘in the plain to the N. of the village’ of Abu Rowash – rather than directly to the south of the settlement. One wonders whether this was a result of some confusion of the Brick Pyramid with el-Deir (see below), which does lie in such a location. This erroneous location was repeated by Ahmed Fakhry in his The Pyramids (1961), although its position was correctly stated in the publications of Adolf Klasens, who excavated at Abu Rowash during the late 1950s (see below).
It was only in 1986 that Nabil Swelim definitively reidentified and published the remains of the Brick Pyramid. He showed that Lepsius had been right in his assessment of the remains. As with the builders of Djedefra’s pyramid, a natural knoll had been used to form the core, into which a corridor was cut, leading down to a burial chamber. Although all of the brickwork had long since disappeared, the cuttings in the rock made to receive the bricks were still clear, and combining these with the Prussian drawings allowed the original form of the structure to be determined.
This revealed that it had been a step pyramid some 215 metres square – about the same as the Red Pyramid of Sneferu at Dahshur and the Pyramid of Khafra at Giza. It was thus one of the largest pyramids ever built, and by a wide margin the largest such brick monument known. Brick pyramids are normally thought of as Middle Kingdom constructions, but rock-cut substructures of the kind used in the Brick Pyramid are not found after the reign of Khufu, while the stepped form of the pyramid places it prior to Sneferu, when entrances high in the north face are first seen. The only place it could fit into the overall pyramid sequence is around the end of the Third Dynasty, with the most probable owner being Huni (c.2637-2613 BC), the predecessor of Sneferu. Although credited with over two decades of rule, no other potential tomb is known for him; old speculations that he might have begun the stepped phase of the Meidum pyramid have no basis.
Construction from brick would seem at first glance to be a retrograde step, since stone had been used since the time of Djoser (c.2667-2648 BC). It is possible that this well-tried medium was used to expedite construction, and was linked to the proximity of the cultivation, with easy access to ample quantities of the raw material needed for bricks. However, the pyramid was probably not finished, since by the end of the Old Kingdom enough brick had been removed to allow the cutting of tombs (Cemetery H) into the southern face of the rock core.
El-Deir
The most neglected – and mysterious – monument at Abu Rowash lies three kilometres north-east of Djedefra’s pyramid, close to the probable location of the latter’s valley temple, and the mouth of the wadi (the Wadi Qaren) that runs parallel to the north side of the causeway. Like so much of the topography of Abu Rowash, it was first noted:
At the edge of the hills, on the northern side of the valley… [as] traces of an ancient square building. It is called by the Arabs El Deir (the convent), a name, however, which is often indiscriminately applied by them to ancient ruins.
The site was investigated in 1902 by Charles Palenque, who cleared elements of Coptic structures on the site together with a Late Period/Graeco-Roman tomb, containing a single room and a series of loculi. The next – and last – excavation at the site was by Rizkallah Macramallah in the autumn of 1931, facilitated by the laying of a drainage pipe across the site. He revealed a central massif, built of brick around a natural knoll of rock, with a brick wall that seemed to be part of the south-eastern quadrant of an enclosure centred on the massif. Remains were also found of a more massive set of walls that had been constructed subsequently, following the orientation of the massif on the north and south sides, but deviating on the east. Material dating down to Coptic times was found.
Macramallah interpreted the inner enclosure with the massif as a Middle Kingdom fortress. However, pottery on the site went back at least to the Third Dynasty, and the central massif of natural rock, sheathed in brick, apparently in the centre of a rectangular enclosure, suggests something rather different. Rectangular enclosures were a feature of royal funerary complexes from the First Dynasty until the middle of the Third Dynasty, with a central element added under Djoser. Accordingly, it seems possible that el-Deir may represent a royal tomb of the Third Dynasty. Unfortunately, the area of the monument is now partly covered by housing and other structures. A significant part of the brick massif still survives; however, investigation and verification of the nature of the monument would be a major piece of work, especially as previous excavations have indicated activity on the site stretching into late antiquity and beyond.
Should the provisional dating to the Third Dynasty be correct, the most likely owner would seem to be Sanakhte, perhaps second successor of Djoser, for whom no tomb is yet known. As already noted regarding the Brick Pyramid, Djoser’s embracing of stone for his mortuary complex need not imply that brick was now abandoned for royal tombs. Mud-brick remained the fundamental building material in Egypt, used for temples and tombs down to the latest times, and, where a monument was constructed on the edge of the desert, it was probably more convenient than stone.
Private tombs
Directly to the west and to the south-west of the Brick Pyramid lay a cemetery of mastaba tombs, datable to the First (Cemetery M) and Fifth-Sixth Dynasties (F), excavated by Pierre Montet during 1913-1914, Fernand Bisson de La Roque during 1922-1923, and Adolf Klasens during 1958-1959. Bisson de la Roque also excavated Late Period tombs in the Wadi Qaren, north of Djedefra’s pyramid, which included a catacomb, possibly for mummified crocodiles.
A gatepost to the Nile Valley
Abu Rowash therefore emerges as something rather different from the remote backwater that it is often perceived to have been – an idea that contributed to Reisner’s over-imaginative interpretation of Djedefra’s career. It was a gatepost to the Nile Valley, and the builders of the three major monuments there placed them to greet travellers approaching from the north, most spectacularly on the part of Djedefra, who sited his pyramid atop the mountain that dominates the site of Abu Rowash.
Aidan Dodson is honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol, a former Simpson Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, and former Chairman of the Egypt Exploration Society. He is the author of 30 books, including The Royal Tombs of Ancient Egypt (Pen & Sword, 2016 – reviewed in AE 99) and The First Pharaohs: their lives and afterlives (American University in Cairo Press, 2021 – reviewed in AE 129).
All images: Aidan Dodson, unless otherwise stated
