Pyramid of el-Kula

25.0825°N, 32.7792°E.

Provincial step pyramid at El-Kula, on the west bank near Edfu in Upper Egypt, attributed to pharaoh Huni or pharaoh Sneferu of the Third or early Fourth Dynasty, ~2600 BCE. Original base 18.6 metres per side; original height around 12 metres at a 51° slope. The structure is a four-stepped pyramid built of limestone blocks with no internal substructure — no burial chamber, no entrance, no corridor system — and oriented with its faces aligned to the diagonals of the cardinal directions rather than to the cardinal points themselves, the only Egyptian pyramid known with this orientation. Excavated by James Edward Quibell in 1909. El-Kula is one of seven nearly identical small provincial pyramids built across Upper and Middle Egypt during the same period; all are solid, none contains a burial. Their function — boundary marker, royal estate marker, religious symbol, or something else — has never been securely determined.

A solid pyramid rotated 45 degrees from every other Egyptian pyramid ever built, on a template repeated six times along the Nile, for a purpose nobody alive can recover.