Mastabat el-Fara'un

29.8350°N, 31.2120°E.

Mastabat el-Fara'un — the Pharaoh's Bench — at South Saqqara, the Fourth-Dynasty mortuary monument of pharaoh Shepseskaf, last king of the Fourth Dynasty, who reigned approximately 2503–2498 BCE. Original base 99.6 by 74.4 metres; original height 18 metres in the form of a giant rectangular sarcophagus rather than a pyramid — the only Egyptian royal mortuary monument of the Old Kingdom built to this template. Excavated by Gaston Maspero in 1881 and re-examined by Gustave Jéquier in 1924–1925. The substructure preserved a granite-lined burial chamber accessed by a long descending corridor with three portcullises, an emptied basalt sarcophagus, and fragments of a ceremonial flail and crook. Why Shepseskaf abandoned the pyramid form for a giant rectangular cenotaph is unrecorded; his successor in the Fifth Dynasty returned to the pyramid template within a generation.

A royal monument shaped like a sarcophagus rather than a pyramid, built by the king who closed the dynasty that built Giza, in an architectural choice no other pharaoh ever repeated.