Pyramid of King Aktisanes

18.5338°N, 31.8175°E.

The pyramid of king Aktisanes in the Gebel Barkal cemetery, attributed to an early Meroitic ruler whose reign is dated to approximately 280 BCE. Original base approximately 11 metres per side; original height around 18 metres at the steep Meroitic slope. Excavated by George Reisner in the early twentieth century. Aktisanes is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus (1.60) as an Ethiopian (Kushite) king who briefly conquered Egypt during a period of political weakness — possibly during the disputed succession after the death of Ptolemy II — and ruled both kingdoms before being driven back south by a resurgent Ptolemaic army. The historicity and chronology of the episode are contested; no Egyptian inscriptional evidence confirms the Aktisanes invasion, and the Diodorus passage may conflate several earlier and later Kushite incursions into Egypt under a single name.

A pyramid for a king Greek historical tradition remembered as a Kushite conqueror of Egypt, whose actual reign and conquests are documented in one paragraph of one classical author and nowhere else.