Sedeinga Pyramid Complex

20.5534°N, 30.2929°E.

The Sedeinga pyramid complex in modern Northern State, Sudan, on the west bank of the Nile downstream of the Third Cataract. Construction phase approximately 100 BCE to 100 CE during the Meroitic period. The site contains more than 80 small Meroitic pyramids arranged in a dense cluster — many less than three metres per side — making Sedeinga the largest concentration of small private pyramids in any Meroitic cemetery. The pyramids are built of mudbrick faced with painted plaster and were originally crowned by stone or bronze finials, several of which were recovered intact in the excavations. Excavated since 2009 by the French Archaeological Mission to Sedeinga under Claude Rilly and Vincent Francigny, who have produced one of the most detailed studies of late-Meroitic provincial society available in any modern publication. Sedeinga sits adjacent to a much earlier New Kingdom Egyptian temple of queen Tiye built by Amenhotep III in the fourteenth century BCE — making the cemetery an active religious site for fourteen centuries before the Meroitic pyramids went up.

A cemetery of eighty miniature pyramids built in the shadow of an Egyptian queen's temple a thousand years older than any of them.