Pyramid of Senusret III

29.8167°N, 31.2167°E.

Twelfth-Dynasty pyramid at Dahshur, built for pharaoh Senusret III, who reigned approximately 1878–1839 BCE. Original base 105 metres per side; original height 78 metres at a 56° slope — the steepest pyramid built in the Middle Kingdom. Excavated by Jacques de Morgan in 1894 and re-examined by Dieter Arnold for the Metropolitan Museum from 1990. The substructure is a maze-like sequence of chambers, dead-end corridors, sliding portcullises, and concealed passages — the most elaborate anti-robbery system attempted in any Egyptian pyramid — and it failed: the burial chamber was empty when reopened. Senusret III may have been buried instead in the cenotaph complex he built at Abydos, identified by Arnold's mission in 2002 as the earliest royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings template, four centuries before the New Kingdom.

A king who built two tombs to contain himself, both of them empty by the time anyone alive could open them, in a pyramid whose corridors were specifically designed to defeat the people who rifled it anyway.