Pyramid of Couhard

46.9433°N, 4.3141°E.

The Pyramid of Couhard in Autun, Saône-et-Loire department, central France — a Roman-period dressed-stone pyramidal funerary monument built in the first century CE during the Roman occupation of Gaul, when Autun (Augustodunum) was one of the major cities of the western Roman Empire. Original height approximately 27 metres on a base of 10 metres per side, in a steeply sloped square monument built of dressed limestone blocks. The structure is one of the few surviving Roman-period pyramidal funerary monuments north of the Mediterranean and the largest such structure documented in Roman Gaul. It was substantially robbed for limestone in the medieval period; the surviving core preserves the conglomerate-block infrastructure with most of the dressed-limestone outer casing missing. Excavated in part by French missions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the original burial chamber has not been securely identified.

A 27-metre Roman-period pyramidal tomb in central France, the largest surviving structure of its type from the Roman occupation of Gaul, built in the same century the Romans were converting the Egyptian pyramids into a tourism circuit.