Pyramid of Hawara

29.2747°N, 30.8989°E.

Twelfth-Dynasty pyramid at Hawara on the eastern edge of the Faiyum, built for pharaoh Amenemhat III as his second pyramid after the Black Pyramid at Dahshur failed structurally. Construction date approximately 1840 BCE. Original base 105 metres per side; original height 58 metres at a 48° slope. Excavated by Flinders Petrie in 1888 and 1889. The pyramid is built entirely of mudbrick on a limestone foundation, cased in Tura limestone now stripped. The burial chamber is a single 7-metre block of yellow quartzite carved hollow, with a sliding quartzite roof slab — the largest single-stone burial vault known from any pyramid. Adjacent to the south face stood the labyrinth complex described by Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Pliny the Elder as containing 3,000 chambers on two levels — an account no excavator has ever confirmed because the structure was systematically dismantled in the Roman period for limestone.

A pyramid whose burial chamber was a hollow boulder, next to a building four classical authors swore was the largest in the world, and almost nothing of either survives above ground.