Pyramid of Unas

29.8689°N, 31.2150°E.

Pyramid at North Saqqara built for Unas, the last pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, ~2375–2345 BCE. Original base 57.7 metres per side; original height 43 metres at a 56° slope. The smallest royal pyramid of the Old Kingdom — and the most consequential. The interior chambers carry the earliest known Pyramid Texts: 283 spells inscribed in vertical columns of blue-painted hieroglyphs across the antechamber, burial chamber, and corridor walls, transforming the tomb from a closed monument into a navigation chart for the king's afterlife journey. Every later royal pyramid of the Sixth Dynasty inherits this convention. The causeway, partially restored, runs 750 metres east to the valley temple and is decorated with reliefs depicting famine victims, foreign archers, transport of granite columns from Aswan, and scenes of starvation that have no precedent in earlier royal iconography. A 19th-century inscription by Khaemwaset, son of Ramesses II, records that the prince personally restored the monument approximately 1,200 years after Unas's death.

The pyramid that ended a dynasty wrote down what every previous pyramid had only implied — and the next king to be buried in one copied it word for word.