#third world pyramic

[the-chomsky-hash]

[II. The Absolute - cont'd]

[A. What is the Absolute? We may suppose it is a truth revealed only when one is free of temptations, but "What is he looking for?" - cont'd]

[2. What is he looking for? There is a level of his research that is clearly formulated, another that barely is, a third that is not at all - cont'd]

b. The level of implicit. An experience on watercress and sulfur. However, it goes in the opposite direction to the previous ones [vis.,

not towards the purification of value (for example, gold, gasification of metals)

but towards the world as the reward of his synthesis)

[In the margin: allusive elements].

i. How, starting from a single principle and a single energy, can organic and living diversities appear? This is in line with the work of Dutrochet, Pyrame de Candolle, Brongniart.

Beyond that is the problem of Goethe, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier:

the unity of living nature

the production of diversity

– Michel Foucault, La Recherche de l'Absolu, Conférence prononcée en 1970 à l'Université d'État de New York à Buffalo), BnF, Fonds Foucault, NAF 28730, boîte 57, dossier 4

[braced-music]

“I have no opinion on what other people think about me” - Anton Newcombe 

Originally published on Drowned In Sound, 12th January 2017

Most artists promoting a new album probably wouldn't take the time to instead speak about how the world seems to be teetering precariously on the brink of war, or talk about their somewhat unflattering portrayal in a cult documentary released 13 years ago. Thankfully the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe is not most artists.

Speaking to Anton from his Berlin home about the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s latest album, Third World Pyramid, just before the US election result, his train of thought is racing far beyond Hilary and Donald’s impending doom. During the hour-long interview he barely pauses, careering fitfully from one subject to the next, apart from to occasionally say an ever so slightly intimidating, ‘Do you see what I’m saying?”

He talks in hurried detail about why geopolitics, a hemmed in Russia, and an expansionist China are marching us towards conflict. To cope with these unstable times he’s reached a “very Zen realisation” of being more accepting in his own life. Third World Pyramid, a record partially inspired by the current climate, he shockingly reveals is not the band’s best record and will be eclipsed by the forthcoming release of an “indefinable” double album entitled Don't Get Lost. However if you’re a Q reviewer, don’t expect a copy in the post any time soon.

Still keen to set the record straight on Dig!, Anton stresses how the producers “fucked up” and had to re-edit the original Sundance Film Festival cut for a less libelous and more compelling narrative centred around his flammable persona. As to whether he has any regrets about the excess around that time he’s characteristically defiant, joking that if he’d continued down this needle and bottle strewn path he’d be living with a Ferragamo model in Connecticut right now.

Instead these days he’s busy in his Berlin studio creating a soundtrack for a new Philip Johns’ film, looking forward to working with Melody’s Echo Chamber, and completing a documentary shot on the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s last UK tour about one of his roadies. Thank God for sobriety.

---

On Twitter you’ve frequently used the hashtag #fuckwar. Do you truly believe a world war is going to happen?

Anton Newcombe: What I think is this has been a long time coming for several different reasons. I was talking to my friend from Israel about the things that have been going on even since 2000 and people just continuously block those things out - it’s like mass hypnosis has taken effect. He said, ‘it’s a survival mechanism’ and it made so much sense.

If you go back even farther to the seventies and eighties, Brzezinski talked about the grand chess game with Russia, this is during the Soviet time, and how they’d ultimately defeat them by squeezing them in. There was the whole thing where Papa Bush talked about the New World Order, basically making everything a federalist system like the EU and having business and trade supercede all the old conflicts and shortcomings.

Do you think it’s a worldwide conspiracy?

No, it’s not a conspiracy. Nato’s moved aggressively all the way up to the edge of Russia, China has captured the whole of the south China sea and claimed it as their own – it is not a conspiracy. The United States owes more money to China alone than it can ever possibly pay as a debt and the whole system is based on debt. International financial services are overextended to such an extent it can never be undone. Post 9/11, with the neo-con strategy, set into course a series of events [where] there is no reverse.

The more you look at the events with Russia the more you know it’s not a conspiracy...I understand Syria’s fake revolution was started in London by a Thinktank with people behind the scenes: they’re not hiding out in Alepo, they’re certainly not in Damascus, it’s people in London and it’s non-governmental organisations' people who’ve kicked this off. It’s ironic that this whole thing started from one person getting shot for not being able to protest.

We’re still fighting like crazy in Iraq decades on and Afghanistan, we’ve been there since the seventies. This is like misadventure on a grand scale and I’m not against war specifically but this is geopolitics. The thing is now Russia understands they’re fully surrounded and they have major commitments to China and their alignments with Iran and it’s at a serious point.

As a father how does this make you feel about your children’s future? The current situation makes it seem like we’re doomed.

Penny Rimbaud used to be part of the Crass organisation and commune. I had the observation where at one point he was so involved with Crass’ records and the commune, label, libraries, and publications during the Thatcher times educating people on how you can be your own government. Now he’s on Twitter and he’s being like this Zen guy non-stop and it lead me to a realisation in my own life.

If you understand psychologically a lot of times in life people hate things because they’re not able to interact with them and they love them because they are. It’s that simple, a certain type of love and a certain type of hate. It’s led me to a very Zen realisation because the bottom line is that I care very much so I have to refocus to that and I have to be accepting. In this life and these times it forces me to focus on my art.

The album is called Third World Pyramid. Is it in reference to the current social and political situation?

It’s multi-leveled because I'm abstract. On one level I thought it was quite interesting the peaks of regions and time periods, whether it’s mass America or the Egyptian or even the pyramids in Babylon, the Ziggurats - all of these places are in the third world now.

I thought that was interesting, but then there’s also the human pyramid. If you don’t understand, on the back of the dollar bill there’s a pyramid. Here we have this Christian nation yet all the iconography is this Roman shit and this Egyptian shit. None of it is Jesus on a cross. None of it is a picture of a church someplace or a fish, it’s something else they’re talking about and it’s another God.

In this pyramid with the eye it’s a representation of the human pyramid and each block could be a cell, like a station. Your civil servants could be in one block and all these different people going all the way up; society answering to the next group or club above them and all of them working together becomes the all seeing eye.

The interesting thing about it is the foundation of the pyramid sees nothing. The foundation of the pyramid is below the sand: doesn’t see the sky, never seen the stars, it’s never seen a cloud, it’s just holding up the pyramid.

The tone of the album has a sense of melancholic desperation, but then seems quite hopeful. What was your mindset when you were writing it?

Well, the interesting thing is I wrote in a full spectrum of human emotion. There’s another album coming out [Don't Get Lost] and it has this almost kraut-rocky, PiL Limited steel box, dubby, dystopian...it just changes style every single song and it covers so much ground you can’t imagine from track-to-track - it’s a double record.

I just split the songs into two different categories and this album [Third World Pyramid] I wanted to be more understandable, as far as a pre-conceived notion that many people have of what we probably are as far as vaguely influenced by the sixties, shamelessly wearing our hearts on our sleeves. It’s going to hark it back to that repeatedly.

The other record will be indefinable, like something I’ve discovered. Like a UFO I’ve discovered and I’ve walked inside and start pressing buttons to work out how to fly it. I knew I was going to take the heat about this record because I don’t think it’s the best album, specifically that wasn’t my goal.

It’s a rare thing to hear someone say about their own album.

I’m going to qualify that statement - the thing is I split the songs in half. I didn’t specifically go: “Well, I’m going to put these ten great songs together”. I made two albums that work cohesively in this bizarre way – one short record and one double record – but they’re two totally different albums.

When I started sharing these privately, to Simone from Primal Scream or something, I was like: “No, no, no you have to listen to the first album first and then listen to the second album and then you’re going to understand something strange”. What you’re going to understand is that I just made 45 songs at a time and that’s how quick my brain works in a week and that’s how diverse it is. This isn’t me being: “Here’s a record I want to become this album” or: “Oh, there was a band in the 80s called Jesus And The Mary Chain, let’s fucking buy a leather jacket and sound like this – can I borrow your distortion pedal?”

With such a prolific output how do you even decide what makes it onto the final album?

Some friends helped me. Either it’s absolutely clear to me in this way that there’s like an invisible chord that connects everything...As one song gives way to the next it becomes harmonious with the previous one and the one that’s about to come. You can manipulate the listener’s experience that way just by the arrangement of the songs and the pacing. Sometimes it’s an awareness on a level that cannot be studied or premeditated, but it’s harmonious in your own workings of your mind.

The opening track ‘Good Mourning’ is sung by your wife and is about your son. However, it’s very sombre.

She asked me to write a song and I wrote one for her. It just happens, like some people can do that [laughs]. Ultimately, in a large body of work, it’s ok to reflect a full spectrum of emotions.

Would you ever consider being overtly political in your lyrics?

Only if it was true to exactly what I was feeling with the comments. I wrote a song called ‘Take It From The Man’ a long time ago and it basically breaks down what I was thinking and what I was feeling about splitting, about knowing and my awareness of everything - just calling it like you see it in a classic motif or whatever.

There’s no reason because what I’m going to explain to you is you can’t want for other people what they don’t want for themselves. That’s precisely why I’m not at Oxford station passing out socialist literature. On many levels people have got it the way they want it.

I always think when you go to the ‘90s when you first started and artists had the time, space, and money to grow and live cheaply. Do you think as a band you could start out now in the same way you did back then?

We had to fight. We were already in an economically expensive environment in San Francisco - an environment now that’s the most expensive in America. We had to fight principles of collective socialism in the arts where you share a rehearsal space, you borrow a car, you borrow amps, you do whatever you have to do. Because we had to rent out Masonic Temples to play we would do our own promotion, so we had to step completely out of the system. That’s the only advice I’d have for anyone else to fully understand that.

At that time everyone was against us, you’d have other bands tearing down our flyers - we were such a threat to everyone. I could never understand that, obviously none of those people have bands any more. People are so competitive and you really can’t look at other things in that light; you need to foster an eco-system to support yourself whether it’s the record store or the venue. A lot of people don’t understand that, you have no competition as a band.

A lot of new bands starting out who admire Brian Jonestown sometimes take more interest in the rock n roll element, like the drugs...

They fucked up Dig. I don’t want to dwell on it, but they didn’t have an ending so they had to compile a story out of the footage. A few things get in there but they’re not backed-up, they’re not qualified - you don’t really hear me speak. My responses [in this interview] have been over 25 words, with syntax, and everything works right? You can understand what I’m trying to say and what I’m saying. There’s no example of that in the movie...it’s fucking scary listening to me from the very beginning, if you don’t share my viewpoint it’s fucking scary talking to me.

Anyway, the first thing that I say is: “We’re going to start a revolution and we’re going to teach you how to do it” and that was because I was navigating all the record companies in the world. Everybody was trying to go: “You’re the next Kurt Cobain and this is what we want from you”. I would say “no” and my band is going: “Fuck you! We’re starving to death, what are you doing? They’re buying us $6000 meals!”

I wanted to show people an example of how you could make your thing work and that alone would propel you to a greater level of success than the people who didn’t know how to market you and create something.

Do you think artists have greater control in the current landscape?

We’re fucked. It’s fucked because everybody is asleep. Here you had the opportunity with Al Gore talking about the internet and how great it would be and all this shit, this gift to humanity, and then you had Facebook completely usurp everybody and thinking that’s the way to market your stuff. Without paying Facebook your posts get suppressed.

Going backwards, what I wanted to do at the start of the movie, my only goal was to enter the popular lexicon. Basically be understood as this person who did this type of thing, for this reason. It’s really odd because Jimi Hendrix, when he entered the popular lexicon as being this free spirited electric guitar player one of kind, right? You can’t be Jimi Hendrix. There’s no clues that he left us of how to be him. Paul McCartney going on and on his whole life talking [Paul McCartney voice]: “Well, you know we had a lot of fun” There’s nothing that guy's ever said that can help you ever be him.

So, you’re saying you can’t be imitated?

There’s something really amazing about full reality, that if I leave enough clues and you try and emulate me what you ultimately become is you. Johnny Rotten did the same thing in this really odd way. The only thing when you copy Sid Vicious is you could become a derelict, but when you copy Johnny Rotten you couldn’t be Johnny Rotten but the thing was you became yourself.

The point I was trying to make is I never wanted permission from anybody or validation to do anything. My mom is a psychologist so she was like: “You’re going to fucking end up in a mental hospital or prison, because you are so belligerent." I had a job as a plumber’s apprentice when I was 16 or 17 and they were like: “Anton, we love you, we want to buy you your own truck, you’ll have a really good future with us”...and I was like: “Fuck that”. Could you imagine? Me being a plumber to some rich white people in Newport beach?

Do you ever feel like you’re imprisoned by your characterisation in Dig? You tweeted reviews of Third World Pyramid saying ‘They think they know me’.

No, that’s what they tried to say about this record...anybody who tries to critique me like a Q writer when they reviewed the recording. First of all, they didn’t even comment that I covered the ‘Assignment Song’ by Jane & Lorraine and that also Nina Simone did it; it’s a fucking epic song that nobody knows about, just attempting to do a 10 minute song like that is amazing. Now, what did I see in it that Nina Simone saw in it? I’m obviously not an idiot because then she wasn’t an idiot. I knew when they didn’t comment on that they didn’t listen to it.

I know they’re going to eat their words, because the next record isn’t like any of that shit - I hope they don’t bother to review it. The ironic thing in passing any mentions of the last song [‘The Sun Ship’] is it got to fucking number five in the UK.

I wasn’t fairly portrayed [in Dig!] and there were a lot of things that happened. The movie people saw entitled ‘Dig’ wasn’t the movie that won Sundance. The movie that won Sundance had all the spy camera footage of me dealing with all the record deals, the lawyers and those guys threatening – they’re basically the mafia. A lot of the people talking, the A&R people, are basically hookers with cocaine that they sent to try and talk us into it; the drug parties and all the shit that went down. None of those people signed off and I had it signed off. What they got is something less than that, they had to go back to the drawing board when it won and they sold the rights and they had to edit another movie.

It was always clear in my mind that that wasn’t the story, I was never a failure, I’ve always been friends with the Dandy Warhols and all this other shit.

Do you ever watch Dig!?

Never, I never watched it. I watched one version of the movie.

Now you’re sober do you have any regrets about your drug use at that time, especially as you’re creatively so prolific now?

I was always prolific. I did six records in 18 months in 1995 – six 18-song records – I’ve always written every day under every circumstance. I only got into smack the last two years of the decade, so we were actually filming before then. I mean I only got like, “This is a problem”. It’s a problem to start with. After that I started drinking to get rid of the smack and that took while to get rid of.

If I have hundreds of songs it really doesn’t matter either way. What can I say? I used to have a Ferragamo model as a girlfriend and I pretty much lost her as I was doing smack. Like, what, would I have her and live in Connecticut? It’s really hard to quantify. It took me until the mid-2000s to leave America for good and it never occurred to me to do that. If I had done that in the nineties in my late teens or twenties if I possible could have figured that out, would I even have a group?

You wrote the soundtrack for the film Moon Dogs released in the summer. Have you got any plans to work on other soundtracks?

I know this is going to be stupid and people always tell me to focus, but I’ve come up with two really good concepts for movies and two of my friends who are screenwriters have both said they’d help me do that in a second and Phillip Johns [Moon Dogs’ Director] said, “I’m in any time”. But then Phillip Johns has come up with another movie and presented the concept to me, which would be pretty cool; another Scottish film that would be pretty badass with Dean Cavanar writing it. I said I would do that.

Some people in Los Angeles sent me a synopsis about some fucking DMT duality thing. I want to record with Melody’s Echo Chamber, I want to do some work with some Belgium artists and I’ve been working with a Danish woman. There’s so much stuff I want to do, I’m recording a band from Germany right now.

I read you were going to make a film about a roadie on your last UK tour. Did that happen?

Yeah, I’m just worried my filmmaker friend didn’t do it the way I wanted it to be done. The problem is I couldn’t be the guy filming because the whole premise of the film is I’ve known the guy in the film for 26 years, but I don’t know anything about him and he’s really interesting guy...

We did film it and it looks spectacular I’m just worried we didn’t get enough of him in a very odd way. I want to make the whole thing in French subtitles, so it has to be a little bit weird enough to make absolutely no sense - it can’t be campy or weird. The concept is bananas because we’re playing to like 4,000 people in this old place and you’re only seeing it from behind. It’s all shot in this Anton Corbin black and white, ultra gloss, HD like crazy.

You’re often referred to as interview gold. Do you enjoy interviews?

I just try to listen to what’s being said and I answer honestly and I never worry about it too much. It turns out very consistently over the years. I’ve always had an interesting take on society and the motivations of people and where it’s going. An authority on all the stuff. I’ve always been counter culture...I have no opinion on what other people think about me or the way I behave [laughs].

Third World Pyramid is out now via A Recordings. Don’t Get Lost is released on 24 February 2017. Marie Wood

[yarotours]

Egyptian pyramids

The Egyptian pyramids are ancient pyramid-shaped masonry structures located in Egypt. As of November 2008, sources cite either 118 or 138 as the number of identified Egyptian pyramids. Most were built as tombs for the country’s pharaohs and their consorts during the Old and Middle Kingdom periods.

The earliest known Egyptian pyramids are found at Saqqara, northwest of Memphis. The earliest among these is the Pyramid of Djoser, which was built c. 2630–2610 BC during the Third Dynasty. This pyramid and its surrounding complex were designed by the architect Imhotep, and are generally considered to be the world’s oldest monumental structures constructed of dressed masonry.

The most famous Egyptian pyramids are those found at Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo. Several of the Giza pyramids are counted among the largest structures ever built.[8] The Pyramid of Khufu at Giza is the largest Egyptian pyramid. It is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still in existence.

Historical development By the time of the Early Dynastic Period, those with sufficient means were buried in bench-like structures known as mastabas

The second historically-documented Egyptian pyramid is attributed to the architect Imhotep, who planned what Egyptologists believe to be a tomb for the pharaoh Djoser. Imhotep is credited with being the first to conceive the notion of stacking mastabas on top of each other, creating an edifice composed of a number of “steps” that decreased in size towards its apex. The result was the Pyramid of Djoser, which was designed to serve as a gigantic stairway by which the soul of the deceased pharaoh could ascend to the heavens. Such was the importance of Imhotep’s achievement that he was deified by later Egyptians

The most prolific pyramid-building phase coincided with the greatest degree of absolutist rule. It was during this time of the Old Kingdom of Egypt that the most famous pyramids, the Giza pyramid complex, were built. Over time, as authority became less centralized, the ability and willingness to harness the resources required for construction on this massive scale decreased, and later pyramids were smaller, less well-built and often hastily constructed.

Long after the end of Egypt’s own pyramid-building period, a burst of pyramid building occurred in what is present-day Sudan, after much of Egypt came under the rule of the Kingdom of Kush, which was then based at Napata. Napatan rule, known as the 25th Dynasty, lasted from 750 BCE to 664 BCE, and during that time Egyptian culture made an indelible impression on the Kushites. The Meroitic period of Kushite history, when the kingdom was centered on Meroë, (approximately in the period between 300 BCE and 300 CE), experienced a full-blown pyramid-building revival, which saw more than two hundred Egyptian-inspired indigenous royal pyramid-tombs constructed in the vicinity of the kingdom’s capital cities.

Al-Aziz Uthman (1171–1198), the second Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt, tried to destroy the Giza pyramid complex. He gave up after only damaging the Pyramid of Menkaure because the task proved too large.

Pyramid symbolism

The shape of Egyptian pyramids is thought to represent the primordial mound from which the Egyptians believed the earth was created. The shape of a pyramid is thought to be representative of the descending rays of the sun, and most pyramids were faced with polished, highly reflective white limestone, in order to give them a brilliant appearance when viewed from a distance. Pyramids were often also named in ways that referred to solar luminescence. For example, the formal name of the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur was The Southern Shining Pyramid, and that of Senwosret at el-Lahun was Senwosret is Shining.

While it is generally agreed that pyramids were burial monuments, there is continued disagreement on the particular theological principles that might have given rise to them. One suggestion is that they were designed as a type of “resurrection machine.”

The Egyptians believed the dark area of the night sky around which the stars appear to revolve was the physical gateway into the heavens. One of the narrow shafts that extend from the main burial chamber through the entire body of the Great Pyramid points directly towards the center of this part of the sky. This suggests the pyramid may have been designed to serve as a means to magically launch the deceased pharaoh’s soul directly into the abode of the gods

All Egyptian pyramids were built on the west bank of the Nile, which, as the site of the setting sun, was associated with the realm of the dead in Egyptian mythology

Number and location of pyramids

In 1842, Karl Richard Lepsius produced the first modern list of pyramids – now known as the Lepsius list of pyramids – in which he counted 67. A great many more have since been discovered. As of November 2008, 118 Egyptian pyramids have been identified.[3]

The location of Pyramid 29, which Lepsius called the “Headless Pyramid”, was lost for a second time when the structure was buried by desert sands after Lepsius’s survey. It was found again only during an archaeological dig conducted in 2008.

Many pyramids are in a poor state of preservation or buried by desert sands. If visible at all, they may appear as little more than mounds of rubble. As a consequence, archaeologists are continuing to identify and study previously unknown pyramid structures.

The most recent pyramid to be discovered was that of Sesheshet at Saqqara, mother of the Sixth Dynasty pharaoh Teti, announced on 11 November 2008

All of Egypt’s pyramids, except the small Third Dynasty pyramid of Zawyet el-Amwat (or Zawyet el-Mayitin), are sited on the west bank of the Nile, and most are grouped together in a number of pyramid fields. The most important of these are listed geographically, from north to south, below.

Abu Rawash is the site of Egypt’s most northerly pyramid (other than the ruins of Lepsius pyramid number one)[5]— the mostly ruined Pyramid of Djedefre, son and successor of Khufu. Originally it was thought that this pyramid had never been completed, but the current archaeological consensus is that not only was it completed, but that it was originally about the same size as the Pyramid of Menkaure, which would have placed it among the half-dozen or so largest pyramids in Egypt.

Its location adjacent to a major crossroads made it an easy source of stone. Quarrying, which began in Roman times, has left little apart from about 15 courses of stone superimposed upon the natural hillock that formed part of the pyramid’s core. A small adjacent satellite pyramid is in a better state of preservation.

Giza

Giza is the location of the Pyramid of Khufu (also known as the “Great Pyramid” and the “Pyramid of Cheops”); the somewhat smaller Pyramid of Khafre (or Chephren); the relatively modest-sized Pyramid of Menkaure (or Mykerinus), along with a number of smaller satellite edifices known as “Queen’s pyramids”; and the Great Sphinx of Giza.

Of the three, only Khafre’s pyramid retains part of its original polished limestone casing, near its apex. This pyramid appears larger than the adjacent Khufu pyramid by virtue of its more elevated location, and the steeper angle of inclination of its construction – it is, in fact, smaller in both height and volume.

The Giza pyramid complex has been a popular tourist destination since antiquity and was popularized in Hellenistic times when the Great Pyramid was listed by Antipater of Sidon as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Today it is the only one of those wonders still in existence.

Zawyet el-Aryan

This site, halfway between Giza and Abusir, is the location for two unfinished Old Kingdom pyramids. The northern structure’s owner is believed to be pharaoh Nebka, while the southern structure, known as the Layer Pyramid, may be attributable to the Third Dynasty pharaoh Khaba, a close successor of Sekhemkhet. If this attribution is correct, Khaba’s short reign could explain the seemingly unfinished state of this step pyramid. Today it stands around 17 m (56 ft) high; had it been completed, it is likely to have exceeded 40 m

Abusir

There are a total of fourteen pyramids at this site, which served as the main royal necropolis during the Fifth Dynasty. The quality of construction of the Abusir pyramids is inferior to those of the Fourth Dynasty – perhaps signaling a decrease in royal power or a less vibrant economy. They are smaller than their predecessors, and are built of low-quality local limestone.

The three major pyramids are those of Niuserre, which is also the best preserved, Neferirkare Kakai and Sahure. The site is also home to the incomplete Pyramid of Neferefre. Most of the major pyramids at Abusir were built using similar construction techniques, comprising a rubble core surrounded by steps of mud bricks with a limestone outer casing. The largest of these Fifth Dynasty pyramids, the Pyramid of Neferirkare Kakai, is believed to have been built originally as a step pyramid some 70 m (230 ft) high and then later transformed into a “true” pyramid by having its steps filled in with loose masonry.

Saqqara

Major pyramids located here include the Pyramid of Djoser – generally identified as the world’s oldest substantial monumental structure to be built of dressed stone – the Pyramid of Userkaf, the Pyramid of Teti and the Pyramid of Merikare, dating to the First Intermediate Period of Egypt. Also at Saqqara is the Pyramid of Unas, which retains a pyramid causeway that is one of the best-preserved in Egypt. Together with the pyramid of Userkaf, this pyramid was the subject of one of the earliest known restoration attempts, conducted by Khaemweset, a son of Ramesses II.[17] Saqqara is also the location of the incomplete step pyramid of Djoser’s successor Sekhemkhet, known as the Buried Pyramid. Archaeologists believe that had this pyramid been completed, it would have been larger than Djoser’s.

South of the main pyramid field at Saqqara is a second collection of later, smaller pyramids, including those of Pepi I, Djedkare Isesi, Merenre, Pepi II and Ibi. Most of these are in a poor state of preservation.

The Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Shepseskaf either did not share an interest in, or have the capacity to undertake pyramid construction like his predecessors. His tomb, which is also sited at south Saqqara, was instead built as an unusually large mastaba and offering temple complex. It is commonly known as the Mastabat al-Fir’aun.

A previously unknown pyramid was discovered at north Saqqara in late 2008. Believed to be the tomb of Teti’s mother, it currently stands approximately 5 m (16 ft) high, although the original height was closer to 14 m (46 ft).

Dahshur

This area is arguably the most important pyramid field in Egypt outside Giza and Saqqara, although until 1996 the site was inaccessible due to its location within a military base and was relatively unknown outside archaeological circles.

The southern Pyramid of Sneferu, commonly known as the Bent Pyramid, is believed to be the first Egyptian pyramid intended by its builders to be a “true” smooth-sided pyramid from the outset; the earlier pyramid at Meidum had smooth sides in its finished state – but it was conceived and built as a step pyramid, before having its steps filled in and concealed beneath a smooth outer casing of dressed stone. As a true smooth-sided structure, the Bent Pyramid was only a partial success – albeit a unique, visually imposing one; it is also the only major Egyptian pyramid to retain a significant proportion of its original smooth outer limestone casing intact. As such it serves as the best contemporary example of how the ancient Egyptians intended their pyramids to look. Several kilometres to the north of the Bent Pyramid is the last – and most successful – of the three pyramids constructed during the reign of Sneferu; the Red Pyramid is the world’s first successfully completed smooth-sided pyramid. The structure is also the third largest pyramid in Egypt – after the pyramids of Khufu and Khafra at Giza.

Also at Dahshur is one of two pyramids built by Amenemhat III, known as the Black Pyramid, as well as a number of small, mostly ruined subsidiary pyramids.