Pyramid of Ahmose

26.0408°N, 32.6133°E.

Eighteenth-Dynasty pyramid at Abydos, built for pharaoh Ahmose I, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty and expeller of the Hyksos, who reigned approximately 1550–1525 BCE. Original base approximately 52 metres per side; original height around 40 metres at a 60° slope. The structure is built of small limestone blocks and rubble fill on a sand foundation — the construction has been described by every excavator since Arthur Mace as conspicuously casual for a major royal monument — with no surviving substructure or burial chamber. Excavated by Mace and Charles Currelly between 1899 and 1903 for the Egypt Exploration Fund. Ahmose was almost certainly not buried here; the pyramid functioned as a cenotaph linked to a separate cliff-temple complex 800 metres west and a series of subsidiary buildings dedicated to his grandmother Tetisheri and his sister-wife Ahmose-Nefertari.

The last royal pyramid built in Egypt, raised by the king who reunified the country after a century of foreign rule, and emptied of any actual burial — a thousand-year tradition closed with a monument that was never meant to contain its owner.