Pyramid Beg. N 11

16.9392°N, 33.7497°E.

Pyramid Beg. N 11 in the Reisner catalogue of the Begarawiyah North cemetery at Meroë — the principal royal necropolis of the late Meroitic kingdom. Construction date approximately 50 BCE. Original base approximately 8 metres per side; original height around 15 metres at the steep Meroitic 70° slope. Excavated by George Reisner between 1920 and 1923. The substructure preserved a small vaulted burial chamber, fragmentary canopic jars whose inscriptions had been deliberately erased in antiquity, and a cache of broken Meroitic ceramic offering vessels. The owner has not been securely identified — the pyramid is one of several at the Meroë North Cemetery whose royal occupants cannot be matched to surviving king-list entries because the Meroitic script can be read aloud but not translated. The cartouches survive but their meaning does not.

A pyramid in the principal royal cemetery of an empire whose king-lists exist on its monuments in a script we know how to pronounce but cannot understand, leaving the burial of a king or queen we cannot name.