Saqqara, south-west of the Step Pyramid, Egypt

Pyramid of Unas

End of the Fifth Dynasty (the first Pyramid Texts)

In the burial chamber of Unas, a flashlight held almost flat to the wall brings up a large profile figure on the calcite. In ordinary light the same wall reads as a painted palace façade. The pyramid around that wall is the first to be inscribed with the Pyramid Texts.

Why this is extraordinary

A lamp held low against the wall of the burial chamber picks out a large profile figure that the light of the room leaves faint. The wall is Egyptian alabaster, which is calcite, and it is already carved and painted with the palace façade, the panelled pattern of a royal exterior. The figure's outline crosses that pattern. Clips of the lamp are circulating widely. The publications that describe the same surface call the figure a king with a harpoon.

This is the pyramid of Unas, last king of the Fifth Dynasty, set a short walk south-west of the step pyramid. It is the smallest royal pyramid of the Old Kingdom on the usual surveys, and it is the first whose chambers carry the Pyramid Texts, the oldest large body of Egyptian religious writing. The sarcophagus is still in the room. The causeway that leads to it bends twice and runs over older tombs.

The figure can be an earlier relief, shaved back before the façade and the texts were cut. It can be low relief of this reign, the kind of edge a raking light is meant to find. It can be asked of the calcite itself, whose crystal really does split a transmitted image. Those three readings can be right in different parts, and this room keeps them apart so each one can be weighed. A name for the figure, if the name holds, would date the first carve. It would leave the reign of Unas where the texts put it.

Why it matters

If the figure is an earlier king, shaved down and built into this room, then a decorated block from a previous reign lines the burial. If the figure is Unas's own low relief, the lamp is a way of seeing, and the chamber is one program. If the picture is in the crystal rather than in the carve, the test is optical and it has not been run on these panels. The reign itself is the name in the texts.

Unas, also written Unis, Wenis, and Ounas, is the last king of the Fifth Dynasty, in the 24th century BCE on the usual clock. His pyramid stands at North Saqqara, between the complexes of Djoser and Sekhemkhet, a short walk south-west of the step pyramid. The ancient name is read as "Beautiful are the places of Unas." Lehner's survey gives the finished pyramid a base of 57.75 metres, a height of 43 metres, and a slope of about 56 degrees, which makes it the smallest royal pyramid of the Old Kingdom. The ground it sits on was already full. The causeway bends twice along a wadi, a stretch of Djoser's causeway was used as embankment, and Second Dynasty tombs were paved over beneath it. The entrance is on the north, under a small chapel. A descending passage leads to a short vestibule, then a level passage closed by three granite portcullises. That passage opens on an antechamber. To the east is a room of three niches, left uninscribed. To the west is the burial chamber, with the sarcophagus at the west end. The published plan gives the antechamber about 3.75 by 3.08 metres and the burial chamber about 7.3 by 3.08 metres. The sarcophagus is a dark stone. Guidebooks long called it basalt. The geological description calls it greywacke. It was found with its contents gone. Fragmentary remains, an arm, a skull, and a shin, were recorded from the burial and have been displayed in Cairo as Unas, along with two wooden knife handles from the opening of the mouth. The walls around the sarcophagus are sheathed in white Egyptian alabaster, incised and painted as a palace façade, with a band of the diamond pattern where that façade meets the gable. The other wall surfaces, the gables, the antechamber, and part of the corridor carry the Pyramid Texts, sunk and painted blue-green. The ceilings are painted as a night sky. Lehner's count is 283 spells in this pyramid, the smallest and best-preserved Old Kingdom copy. James Allen's reading of the corpus is that many of the spells are older than the wall they were cut on. Gaston Maspero entered the chambers in 1881, after finding the same kind of text in the pyramids of Pepi I and Merenre, and recognised this copy as the earliest. On the east wall of the antechamber, one spell has the king consume the gods and take in their power. Readers call it the Cannibal Hymn. The words for the stars that do not set, used of the two holes at the step pyramid, were first cut in this building. A son of Ramesses II, Khaemwaset, left a restoration text on the south face in the Nineteenth Dynasty. The monument was still a named pyramid then, and someone repaired it.

Photo tour

5 photographs, unedited. On a phone, swipe the row. Choose one to look closely.

Alabaster in the burial chamber, lit so a large profile shows across the palace-façade pattern. The file's title names Khufu. That name is a reading, weighed below.Nate Loper, CC BY 4.0

A line drawing that separates the faint figure from the palace façade, names the wall, and is free to show here, is not among the open photographs. Youssef's plate is in the 2011 conference volume.

What is still unexplained

These sit beside the consensus account, with the same visual weight. None of them is marked solved.

Open Figures the flat light misses The alabaster beside the sarcophagus carries the palace façade in ordinary light. A lamp held low, so the beam rakes the surface, picks out a large figure in profile whose outline crosses that pattern. Mohammad M. Youssef published the scenes in 2011, in the Abusir and Saqqara conference papers, as a hippopotamus hunt from this burial chamber, and again in Sokar in 2014. Tomoaki Nakano, citing that paper in Orient in 2024, writes that when light is shone on the side walls a figure of the king appears, harpooning a hippopotamus, and that the wall is calcite. The notices place the figure on those side walls, the north and south, in the façade around the sarcophagus. This room has not found a published claim of the same figure in the antechamber. The antechamber is the room of texts to the east. The photograph here is one such raking light. It shows the façade pattern and, crossing it, a standing profile. It does not, by itself, label the wall or read a name. Nate Loper, CC BY 4.0. Shown unedited.

Observed Two stages on one surface Where the large outline runs through the façade, the wall has been worked more than once. A first carve can be shaved back, and a second carve cut over the stump. The two stages can fall in one reign, or in two. The photograph shows the crossing. It does not show which reign held the chisel first.

Open A caption read more than one way The English Wikipedia, citing Miroslav Verner's 2020 book at page 275, states that the blocks come from one of Khufu's constructions, possibly his complex at Giza, and that the earlier scene is that king, named by his Horus name Medjedu, fishing with a harpoon, visible at certain angles and in dim light. Nakano's sentence is a hippopotamus and a harpoon, and he records the further point that an investigator has suggested the stone was taken from another royal pyramid. Later citation of Youssef's three pages has also left room for a Fifth Dynasty king, Djedkare among the names proposed. Medjedu is Khufu's Horus name. A faint sign read as that name, and a name left open, are both in the citation chain. The open sources do not print one sentence of Youssef's that settles it, so this room keeps the spread.

Location and dating

Location

North Saqqara, on the desert edge west of Memphis, south-west of the step pyramid and inside the same necropolis. The Saqqara pin is the necropolis. The step pyramid, the bull boxes, the bird, the disc, and the stone vessels are the other rooms gathered there.

Period label

Current consensus — open to revision

The king is the last of the Fifth Dynasty. The reign sits in the 24th century BCE. The decades move with the chronology. The king's name is in the texts on the wall, which is what dates the chamber to him.

If the faint figure is an earlier king, the first carve is older than those texts. The pyramid that holds the slab remains Unas's.

How this dating was done

The chamber is dated by the royal name in the Pyramid Texts, and the building by its place in the sequence of kings and of pyramids, a typology. Radiocarbon is not the clock for this stone. Maspero's entry in 1881 is the modern finding of the texts, not their date.

What could change it

An agreed Horus name on the faint scene would date the first carve, and it would leave Unas's reign where the texts put it. A surface cast that is blank, with a figure that appears only in polarized light passed through the stone, would move the figure off the carve. A line drawing, checked by more than one epigrapher and tied to a wall, is the record the name still needs.

Published ranges, drawn as bars. A bar is a claim about a span, not a point.

Unas, Fifth Dynasty

The faint figure, if it is KhufuContested

2600 BCE2450 BCE2300 BCE

Unas, Fifth Dynasty. The reign sits in the 24th century BCE. Regnal years move by decades with the chronology. The bar is that century.
The faint figure, if it is Khufu. Only if the caption is Khufu's Horus name. The same century is the one this museum uses for Khufu. The wall the scene was recut into is Unas's.

What is actually there

Unas is the last king of the Fifth Dynasty. The pyramid is the smallest royal pyramid of the Old Kingdom on Lehner's figures, 57.75 metres on a side and 43 metres high.
It stands between Djoser and Sekhemkhet, south-west of the step pyramid. The causeway bends twice, and older tombs lie under it.
The burial chamber and the antechamber have gabled ceilings painted as a sky. Three granite portcullises close the passage from the north.
Egyptian alabaster, a calcite rock, sheaths the walls around the sarcophagus and is carved as a palace façade. The Pyramid Texts cover the other inscribed surfaces. Lehner's count is 283 spells, the first large copy.
A raking light on that alabaster picks out a large profile that crosses the façade. Youssef published it as a hippopotamus hunt. A handbook citation names Khufu by the Horus name Medjedu.
Khaemwaset left a restoration text on the south face in the Nineteenth Dynasty.

Open questions

Question	Status
Where, wall by wall, is each faint figure, and what does a measured drawing show?	Open. The notices say the side walls of the burial chamber. A signed facsimile is not in the open photographs used here.
Is a Horus name Medjedu on the slab?	Open. One citation reads it. Another leaves the king unnamed, or names a Fifth Dynasty king.
Were the panels cut for an earlier monument and then shaved?	Open. Two stages of carving are on the surface. Two reigns are a further step.
Does a cast or a reflectance scan keep the figure once the crystal is out of the path?	Open. That is the test that separates a carve from an image in the stone.

The current narrative

Where publication stands today. It is the best-supported reading, and it is open to revision. It is not a verdict.

The current narrative — open to revision

An earlier relief, cut back

The panels were taken from an earlier royal monument. An older scene, a king with a harpoon, was shaved down, and the palace façade, and the Pyramid Texts on the neighbouring limestone, were cut for Unas. Some readers name that king Khufu, by the Horus name Medjedu, and some leave the name open. This is the leading historical reading of the faint scene. It is not a closed one.

What supports this

The large profile crosses the façade, which is what a first carve looks like after a second has been cut over it.
Youssef published a hippopotamus hunt on this chamber's alabaster. Nakano cites him for a figure that appears when light strikes the side walls, and notes that the stone may have been taken from another royal pyramid.
Verner's 2020 book, at the page the pyramid's Wikipedia article cites, identifies the king by the Horus name Medjedu and places the block with Khufu's constructions, possibly at Giza.
A harpooning king is a known royal subject. Userkaf's temple has one, and Pepy II's complex has one later. A known pose is a harder thing to invent from a stain.
This complex already reused older masonry. The causeway runs on Second Dynasty tombs and uses a length of Djoser's causeway as embankment. That reuse is of the ground and the fill. It shows the builders took earlier stone. It does not, by itself, name the alabaster.

What pushes back

The citations of Youssef's three pages do not print one name. Khufu, another king, and a Fifth Dynasty monument, Djedkare's among them, have all been offered.
Two stages of carving can be two campaigns of one reign. A shaved scene is not yet a second king.
A flashlight photograph is not a facsimile. No reflectance survey in the sources used here ties a drawn sign to the Horus name and to a wall.
The causeway's older blocks are fill and embankment. They are a different fact from a figured slab in the burial chamber.

What would settle it

A line drawing of the caption, agreed by more than one epigrapher, with the wall named, would settle the name. A join to a known block from Giza, or from another complex, would settle the monument. Until that drawing is published, the reuse reading stays the one the notices lean to, and the name stays open.

Emerging narratives

Other published readings. Each may be right. None is adopted here unless the evidence carries it.

An emerging narrative

Low relief cut for Unas

The figure is shallow relief of this chamber, cut for Unas, and the surprise is the light. Raking light, a lamp held almost parallel to a wall, is how epigraphers have long read an edge too low for a frontal lamp. The same lamp on the sunk hieroglyphs of this pyramid throws a shadow in the signs. Limestone does it. Calcite does it. The technique does not require an earlier king, and it does not require a special property of the crystal.

What supports this

Any matte surface with a low edge casts a shadow when the light skims it. That is ordinary optics of a relief, and it is the standard way to record a worn or shallow carve.
Reflectance transformation imaging was built for this case. A dome of lamps, or a moving light, stores the surface so a reader can set the rake later. A silicone peel or a scan of the shape would keep the figure if the figure is topography.
The palace façade on the same wall is visible without a special angle. The chamber already has a carved program. A hunt in very low relief can be part of it.
The hippopotamus hunt is a royal motif of the Old Kingdom. Unas's sculptors had the subject, whether or not they inherited the slab.

What pushes back

An outline that crosses a finished façade still asks for a sequence. "Cut low on purpose" and "shaved, then recarved" are both compatible with the shadow.
If a caption really reads Medjedu, this reading has to explain another king's Horus name in Unas's burial room.
Publishing the scene as easy to miss is compatible with both histories. The lamp shows that the relief is low. It does not say who ordered it.

What would settle it

This reading and the reuse reading can share the lamp. What divides them is the name and the sequence. A peel that matches the photograph, and a caption that is Unas's or nobody's, would keep the figure in this reign. A caption that is Medjedu would end it.

An emerging narrative

An image held in the calcite

A further reading, carried with the circulating clips, treats the calcite as the carrier of the image. The crystal's birefringence, or its translucency, is said to hold or reveal a hidden picture, sometimes described as an information surface. The mineral does have the optical properties the claim starts from. Those properties and a stored picture are two different sentences, and the second is the one a test would have to show.

What supports this

Egyptian alabaster is travertine, a rock of the mineral calcite, not the gypsum that geologists call alabaster. James Harrell's survey of ornamental stones makes that distinction, and names Hatnub among the quarries. A thin piece of the banded stone passes light. Vessels of it glow. Nakano's own note stays with that glow, and with the old sense of the serekh, "to make known," as a reason a king's presence might be put in this stone. That is a symbolic reading of a real translucency.
Clear calcite, the variety called Iceland spar, splits one image into two. Erasmus Bartholin described the doubling in 1669. The two refractive indices are about 1.658 and 1.486, and the difference, the birefringence, is about 0.172, which is high for a common mineral. The effect is in light that travels through the crystal.
The figure is hard to see until the light is right. A claim that starts from a real optical mineral, and from a picture that comes and goes with the lamp, is starting from the wall in front of the visitor.

What pushes back

The doubling is a transmitted effect. It shows when you look through a clear crystal at something beyond it. The burial-chamber slabs are wall blocks, lit from the room, and the profile in the photograph is a shadow on the face.
The palace façade on the same surface is paint and carve, readable in ordinary light. A hidden image in the lattice would have to explain a façade that is not hidden.
Banding in travertine is the growth of the stone. It is not, by itself, a drawing of a king.
A cast, a peel, or a reflectance scan takes the crystal's optics out of the path. If the figure survives on the cast, it is relief. If the cast is blank and the figure appears only between crossed polarizers, or in a thin section under a petrographic microscope, the crystal reading has its evidence. That pair of tests is not in the sources used here.

What would settle it

Run both tests on the same panel. A figure on the peel is a carve, and the birefringence remains a property of calcite without being the picture. A blank peel and a figure that moves under polarized transmitted light would be the crystal reading's result. The Hatnub ramp in the Great Pyramid room is a quarry road for this kind of stone. It is not a provenance for these slabs.

An emerging narrative

A door on every side of the body

The alabaster façade and the Pyramid Texts are the decoration cut for this room, whatever the faint figure turns out to be. Harold Hays reads the palace-façade false doors on the north, west, and south as ways out, complementing the passage at the east end of the sarcophagus chamber, so that portals stand all around the body. Angela De Trafford reads the same façade and the texts, by the way they are set on the walls, as the boundaries of the cosmos. The two readings disagree about the boundary. They agree that the façade is a made thing, with a job in the tomb.

What supports this

The façade is on the three sides that are not the door, and the passage is on the east. Hays's description matches that plan.
The diamond band at the top of the façade, where it meets the starry gable, is the feature Nakano reads as a line between earth and sky, and De Trafford's paper is the one he cites for a cosmic reading of this chamber.
False doors and palace-façade panels are a long royal and private tradition, on sarcophagi from the Fourth Dynasty onward and in burial chambers of officials. A known door-form is the ordinary account of a panel that looks like a palace front.
This reading can sit beside either history of the faint figure. It is an account of the decoration a visitor sees without a special lamp.

What pushes back

Hays argues that "cosmic boundary" is scarcely a phrase of the Pyramid Texts, and that texts with the same sky-words move from wall to wall in later pyramids, which sits against a single map of the rooms.
De Trafford's case is that the format carries the meaning, including the vertical columns and the vertical façade. A reader who wants the meaning to be stated in the spell will not find a caption that says "this wall is the edge of the cosmos."
Neither paper is a publication of the harpooning figure. They weigh the façade. The figure that crosses it is a later notice.

What would settle it

The door reading and the cosmic-boundary reading are both published accounts of the façade, and a new survey of the faint figure would not retire either one. What would retire one of them is a showing that the motif in this chamber lacks the feature that paper uses, the three-sided door or the shared format with the texts.

Should the current view be reevaluated?

Open to revision

The pyramid is Unas's, and these are the first Pyramid Texts. That holds. The faint profile is a real relief on the alabaster, published as a harpooning king and visible when the light rakes the wall. Which king, whether the slab served an earlier monument, and whether the crystal adds a picture the carve does not have, are open, and the open part is large enough that this room does not close it.

What drives this

A profile crosses the palace façade on the burial-chamber alabaster, and a low light is what makes it plain.
Youssef's 2011 notice, Nakano's 2024 citation of it, and the Verner page cited on Wikipedia are the publication, and they do not agree on the name.
No peel or reflectance scan in these sources has yet taken the mineral out of the test.

This is the museum’s own weighing of the evidence. It is not a visitor vote, and it is separate from the slider.

Weigh it yourself

Anonymous. Nothing here is stored except on this browser. Your lean does not change the assessment beside it.

An earlier relief, cut back Unsure Low relief cut for Unas

If the contested reading is right

What would follow if a reading that is not the consensus turned out to be true, and what could settle it. This explains the stakes. It does not adopt the reading.

The panels are reused, and the figure is Khufu

A Fourth Dynasty royal relief, cut back, would line a Fifth Dynasty burial. The stone in this room would be older than the texts on the neighbouring walls. The date of Unas would stay. What would move is the biography of the block, from a monument of Khufu, possibly at Giza, into this chamber, and with it one of the scarce in-place figures of that king. The Great Pyramid room is the building those blocks are being asked about.

Why it is still worth a test

A drawing of the Horus name, and a join to a block of known origin. The drawing is the part a photograph of a raking light does not finish.

The figure was cut for Unas, in relief low enough to need the lamp

The chamber would be one program, texts, façade, and hunt together. Another king's portrait would leave the story. The skill on show would be a very low relief, which the lamp reveals and which a frontal photograph misses.

Why it is still worth a test

A peel that matches the photograph, and a caption that names Unas or names no other king.

The calcite holds an image the carve does not

The wall would be doing optical work beyond the relief, and a cast of the surface would be blank where the lamp shows a figure. The palace façade, which is a carve and a paint, would still be on the same blocks and would still need its own account. A picture stored in the lattice would be a new claim about this stone, and it would have to be true of the panel, not only of Iceland spar in a textbook.

Why it is still worth a test

The pair of tests. A peel or a reflectance scan, and the same panel in polarized transmitted light. One result keeps the figure. The other retires it.

Sources

Pyramid of Unas Wikipedia. The plan and Lehner's dimensions, and the citation of Verner 2020, page 275, for the Medjedu scene.
Diamond motif as an image of Egyptian kingship Orient 59, 2024. Tomoaki Nakano. The façade, the side-wall figure under a lamp, and calcite.
Szenen einer Nilpferdjagd in der Grabkammer des Unas Sokar 29, 2014, pages 14 to 19. Mohammad M. Youssef. The illustrated notice of the hunt. The 2011 conference paper is the one later writers cite.
The palace façade motif and the Pyramid Texts as cosmic boundaries Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17, 2007. Angela De Trafford.
Unreading the pyramids Bulletin de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale 109. Harold M. Hays. The façade as doors on the north, west, and south.
Ornamental stones UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. James A. Harrell. Travertine, and why "Egyptian alabaster" is calcite.
Double Trouble, navigating birefringence Mineralogical Society of America. Elise A. Skalwold and William A. Bassett. Calcite's birefringence of about 0.172.
Iceland spar CAMEO, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bartholin in 1669, and the two refractive indices.
Reflectance transformation imaging Cultural Heritage Imaging. The record of a surface that a moving light reveals.
Memphis and its Necropolis — the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur UNESCO World Heritage Centre. The site that holds this pyramid and the step pyramid.

Image credits

The pyramid as it stands. Most of the white casing is gone, and the core reads as a mound.. Darer101, CC BY-SA 4.0. Shown unedited.
Alabaster in the burial chamber, lit so a large profile shows across the palace-façade pattern. The file's title names Khufu. That name is a reading, weighed below.. Nate Loper, CC BY 4.0. Shown unedited.
The burial chamber in a fuller light. The sarcophagus is at the west end, texts fill the gable, and the palace façade is the broad panel below.. Vincent Brown, CC BY 2.0. Shown unedited.
Columns of the Pyramid Texts, the signs sunk into the limestone and still carrying blue paint.. Aidan McRae Thomson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Shown unedited.
The causeway, looking toward the pyramid. It is one of the longest of the Old Kingdom, and it bends to meet the ground.. Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0. Shown unedited.

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