The Black Stone That Crowned a Sinking Pyramid: Amenemhat III’s Capstone

In 1900, robbers attacked the guards at the Saqqara necropolis, just south of Cairo. Gaston Maspero, then director of Egypt’s Department of Antiquities, responded the way a worried museum chief would: he sent people to check on the neighbouring royal cemetery at Dahshur. On the east side of a crumbling, dark mound of brick, the inspectors spotted a grey block poking out of the sand. Up close, it was covered in beautifully cut hieroglyphs.

It was the very tip of a pyramid. More precisely, it was the capstone, or pyramidion, made for King Amenemhat III nearly 3,900 years earlier. Today it sits in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and it is one of the best-preserved royal pyramid tips ever found.

A recent post by the popular science account @Rainmaker1973 put this stone back in the spotlight. It pointed out that pyramidia were usually made of hard stone like diorite or granite, or of fine limestone, that some were covered in gold or electrum, and that very few survive. All of that is true, and this one has a better story than most.

A four-and-a-half-tonne crown

The pyramidion was carved from a single block of very dark, hard stone. It is usually called black granite, though some sources, including its Wikipedia entry, describe it as basalt. Either way, it is heavy: about 1.40 metres tall, with a base about 1.85 metres on each side, and an estimated weight of around 4.5 tonnes.

Apart from one broken corner, it is mostly intact. The four sloping faces were polished and inscribed. The bottom edges are undercut, a detail that would have helped lock the block onto the top of the pyramid. It was carved around 1850 BC, near the end of Egypt’s 12th Dynasty, during the Middle Kingdom.

The king who watches the sunrise

The best decoration is on the east face, the side that would have caught the sunrise first. At the top spreads a winged sun disk with a cobra, or uraeus, on each side. Under it sits a pair of wedjat eyes, the familiar painted-on Egyptian eyes, which here stand for the eyes of the king himself.

Below the eyes are three nefer signs, the hieroglyph for beauty, goodness or perfection. Below those is a sun disk for the god Ra. From that sun disk, the king’s two names run in opposite directions: his throne name, Nimaatre, to one side and his personal name, Amenemhat, to the other.

Read as one picture, the face says something like “Amenemhat beholds the perfection of Ra,” often translated as “the beauty of Ra.” It is a sentence you read in pictures: the eyes look, the nefer signs are the beauty, and the sun is the god. For a stone meant to sit at the top of a tomb and face the morning sun every day, the message could hardly be clearer.

Two lines of text run along the bottom of all four faces. They ask that the king’s sight be opened so he can see the “lord of the horizon” crossing the sky. They say his ba, a part of the soul, is higher than the constellation Orion. They also call on other gods, including Ra-Horakhty, Ptah, Osiris and Anubis, to give the king life, stability and a good place in the west, the land of the dead.

A name scratched out

There is a small mystery in the carving. In the king’s cartouches, the name of the god Amun (the “Amen” in Amenemhat) has been chiselled away. The most famous campaign against Amun’s name came under the pharaoh Akhenaten in the 18th Dynasty, around 1350 BC. If his agents did it, the capstone was probably already lying on the ground by then, within easy reach.

Its fairly good condition has made some researchers wonder whether it was ever hoisted to the top at all. A four-tonne block falling from a pyramid would normally come off much worse. Nobody knows for sure, and that is part of the appeal.

A pyramid built on bad ground

The pyramid this stone was made for has an unflattering modern nickname: the Black Pyramid. Its ancient name meant something like “Amenemhat is mighty.” It was built around 1850 BC and originally stood about 75 metres tall on a base about 105 metres wide.

Like other Middle Kingdom pyramids, it was not solid stone. The core was mudbrick and clay, covered with a smooth casing of fine limestone. Once later stone robbers took that casing away, the bricks underneath were left exposed. They weathered into the dark, ragged lump that gives the pyramid its name.

The bigger problem was underground. The pyramid stood in one of the lowest parts of the necropolis, only about 10 metres above sea level, on clay that could not carry its weight. Groundwater from the Nile seeped in. Below the pyramid was a complicated network of passages and chambers, without enough relieving structures above them to spread the load.

The pyramid started to sink, and it began crushing the rooms beneath it. The builders tried to save it by quickly adding wooden support beams and mudbrick walls, but it did not work. Centuries earlier, Sneferu’s Bent Pyramid, about 1.5 kilometres away, had run into similar trouble with the ground.

The king’s own burial chamber, with a large sarcophagus, was found mostly intact, but the king had never been buried there. Two of his queens were buried in the pyramid, including Queen Aat, whose chamber robbers looted in antiquity. Amenemhat III went on to build a second pyramid at Hawara, near the Faiyum. It is widely believed to be where he was finally laid to rest. He was the first pharaoh since Sneferu to build more than one pyramid.

Modern archaeologists took their time with the site too. The French excavator Jacques de Morgan began work at Dahshur in 1892. The German Archaeological Institute in Cairo finished excavating the pyramid in 1983.

Why the tip mattered: the benben

For the ancient Egyptians, the capstone was not just the last block. They called a pyramidion a benbenet, which links it to the benben, one of the oldest ideas in their religion.

In the creation story told at Heliopolis, the great cult centre of the sun god, the world began as dark, endless water. The first dry land was a mound that rose out of those waters, and the creator god Atum settled on it. A sacred stone called the benben, named after that mound, stood in the temple of Ra at Heliopolis. It was said to be the place where the first rays of the sun fell. The Bennu bird, a likely ancestor of the Greek phoenix, was said to live on it.

The benben is thought to have been the model for obelisk tips and pyramid capstones. Both were probably polished or covered so they flashed in the sunlight. A pyramidion was, in a sense, a small copy of the first land on Earth, placed where it would catch the first light of every day. That makes “Amenemhat beholds the beauty of Ra” feel less like decoration and more like a job description.

Granite, limestone and gold

Capstones came in several materials, including limestone, sandstone, basalt and granite. Some were covered with plates of copper, gold or electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver. From the Middle Kingdom onward, they were often carved with royal titles and religious symbols, like Amenemhat’s.

Why so few survive is easy to guess. A capstone sits at the point most exposed to wind, earthquakes and stone robbers. Any metal covering was an obvious target. Once a pyramid’s casing was quarried away, its tip had nowhere to go but down.

The few that made it

A handful of royal pyramidia have been recovered, and each one has its own story:

• Sneferu’s Red Pyramid, Dahshur. The oldest known pyramidion is a badly damaged block of white Tura limestone, thought to have been made for the Red Pyramid. It has been reconstructed and displayed beside the pyramid. Oddly, its sides are steeper than the pyramid it supposedly crowned.
• Khufu’s satellite pyramid, Giza. In 1992, a small satellite pyramid, now called G1-d, was found near the southeast corner of the Great Pyramid during work to remove a road. A large limestone block with three sloping sides, the base of its capstone, lay to the south. The missing piece turned up by accident in 1993 on the north side, found by Alaa el-Din Shaat, an assistant to Zahi Hawass. Restorers joined the fragments into what is considered the second-oldest pyramid capstone ever found.
• Khendjer, South Saqqara. This 13th Dynasty king’s pyramid is now almost entirely gone. While digging there in 1929, the Swiss Egyptologist Gustave Jéquier found its black granite pyramidion in pieces and restored it. It shows the king making offerings and gives his throne name, Userkare. It also suggests that his pyramid was actually finished.

Khendjer’s capstone now shares the Egyptian Museum with Amenemhat’s. Two more are displayed there too: one belonging to the king Merneferre Ay and one from the southern South Saqqara pyramid. Four royal pyramid tips in one building is a small miracle, considering how many were lost.

An echo in aluminium

The idea of a special, shining tip never went away. At 2:17 p.m. on December 6, 1884, workers set the capstone of the Washington Monument in place, an Egyptian-style obelisk on the National Mall. On top of the marble capstone went a small pyramid of aluminium.

That tip is about 8.9 inches (23 cm) tall and weighed 100 ounces (about 2.8 kg). William Frishmuth of Philadelphia cast it, and at the time it was the largest single piece of aluminium in the world. Back then, aluminium cost about as much as silver. Before it went up, the apex was shown at Tiffany’s in New York, where visitors could say they had stepped over the top of the Washington Monument. The east face is inscribed “Laus Deo,” Latin for “Praise be to God.”

Just two years later, the Hall–Héroult process made aluminium cheap, and the precious metal became an everyday one. Lightning has since burned a little off the tip. The idea is the same one carved into the Dahshur stone, though: put something precious and shiny at the very top, where the sun hits first.

If you go

The Black Pyramid is still at Dahshur, a dark broken stub on the edge of the desert. Its capstone is on display in Cairo, where you can stand in front of the east face and look the king in his carved eyes. Around 3,900 years after it was cut, the stone is still saying the same thing: Amenemhat sees the beauty of Ra.

Further reading