Pyramid of King Shabaka

18.4168°N, 31.7668°E.

The pyramid of king Shabaka at El-Kurru, built for the second king of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty who reigned over both Egypt and Kush from approximately 721 to 707 BCE. Original base 11 metres per side; original height around 14 metres at a 70° slope. Excavated by George Reisner in 1919. The substructure preserved a granite burial chamber, a stone bench for the king's body in the Kushite tradition, and fragments of the canopic chest. Shabaka is best known for the Shabaka Stone, a basalt inscription now in the British Museum recording an old Memphite theological text describing Ptah as the creator god of the universe — the Memphite Theology — which Shabaka had copied from a worm-eaten papyrus he found in the temple of Ptah at Memphis and inscribed permanently on stone.

A pyramid for the Kushite king who personally preserved the most important surviving theological text of the Old Kingdom by recopying it from a rotting scroll onto basalt that has lasted twenty-seven centuries.