Lecture report: Excavations at Djedfre's pyramid, Abu Roash

Heritage Key (Owen Jarus)

With photos

Dr Michel Baud of the Louvre Museum in Paris gave an interesting lecture last week about his excavations of a pyramid at Abu Roash. The monument was badly preserved and its stone had been quarried in Roman times, but the certain details, such as its apparent solar connections, were still discernible. Earlier, Vassil Dobrev stated that the pyramid may actually be a solar temple. However, Baud dismisses these claims....

Nearly 4,500 years ago, in the time of the Old Kingdom, the pharaoh Khufu built one of the greatest monuments on earth - the Great Pyramid. His pyramid was actually a complex of monuments at Giza. Using up 2.7 million cubic meters of stone, it incorporated three queens’ pyramids, a satellite pyramid and hundreds of mastaba tombs for his officials. At a height of nearly 147 meters it was the tallest human-made monument in the world – up until the construction of the Lincoln Cathedral in the 14th century AD.

So what did Khufu’s successor do? The person who succeeded him as pharaoh would have had a tough act to follow. We know that the person who succeeded him as pharaoh was a man called Djedefre (also spelled Radjedef). He was Khufu’s son and, like his father, would have had access to the vast resources of the Egyptian state.