Egypt’s Pyramid Failure: What Happened to the Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III?

Egypt is famed for its incredible array of pyramids, and although they are long standing symbols of the ingenuity of the ancient architects and builders, one pyramid really stands out as a great pyramid disaster.

I’m talking about the badly weathered and eroded Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III, the lob-sided monstrosity of the Egyptian skyline.

All that remains today of this Middle Kingdom pyramid is a ruinous mound of mudbrick, with most of the outer backing and casing stone taken and re-used. But why is it like this?

The project was a disaster right from the start and in this video, I'll tell you example what happened.

All images are taken from the below sources, Google Images and Google Earth for educational purposes only. Please subscribe to Ancient Architects, Like the video, and please leave a comment below. Thank you.

Contents:
0:00 Introduction
1:43 The Black Pyramid
3:33 The Dilapidated Superstructure
5:18 The Pyramidion of Amenemhat III
7:01 How the Pyramid Became a Ruin
8:03 The Bedrock & the Floodplain
11:11 After the Pyramid was Complete
12:01 Concluding Remarks

Sources:

#ancientarchitects #pyramid #pyramidsofegypt

[AncientArchitects]

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[HistoryCave]

Pov:you bought a pyramid from Temu😂😂. Great video as usual! Been watching for a while😁

[palladen]

Ancient Architects and History for Granite are the best ancient Egyptian channels 😊 👌
Love the detail and graphics in this...😊😊

[richardastley]

They probably built a moat around it. 😂

Why didn't anyone think to take a picture of it when it was new? 😛🤓

[Mandarintoenail]

Built sandcastle too close to the tide… I’ve seen those effects before 😂

[antibrevity]

I just wonder how the pharaoh's court explained the slumping during his lifetime. The religious leaders would have had an impossible challenge to come up with a story explaining how their perfect god-king's pyramid cracked apart and had to be replaced. I'd *love* to know how that went and whether people had to suffer for it.

Other than the military defeat of your capital city, there's probably not much worse that could happen to a pharaoh than for their holy pyramid to destroy itself. The pyramids were real manifestations of their namesake's divinity and without a better story, I wonder how many "unrighteous" architects and builders had to be fired or executed to purge the darkness from their midst. Do we know enough about the culture during Amenemhat III's rule to estimate any of this?

Humans' first choice is always to blame someone we deem less righteous than us. In fact, as some politicians show us today, even if the pharaoh had selected that exact location himself, he could simply lie and say someone else had done it; no one can fact-check a god-king... successfully ;).

If something bad happens, it's the obviously the result of evil-doers, for the same humans that are capable of building tremendous pyramids without engines and sending people to the Moon with only primitive computers are also unbelievably dumb and gullible. Many brands depend on it.

[itsnot_stupid_ifitworks]

The same channels who claim ancient egyptians couldn't carve and polish Basalt go and stand beside the cap stone in the museum and wonder what it says

[phoneguy]

most pyramids from old kingdom look so badly today because of stone robbery during late antiquity and arabian times. the middle- and new kingdom pyramids were cheap copies made of mudbricks, making it even easier to mine them down for building materials. the rest was, of course, erosion by elements. I always wonder how many pyramids were destroyed down to their cores and are now lost for good.

[LordDustinDeWynd]

Lived in arid desert Southwest in U.S., lots of adobe used. Worked great, lasted forever... until rain could get at it.

[Eyes_Open]

Now that looks like the result of something that I attempted to build.

[redwoodcoast]

uh... you covered all of the requisite info with the exception of the material used to build it. In all of the discussion there is hardly any mention of what it is made of in contrast to all of the other pyramids built of stone. You examine several possibilities and factors that may have contributed or caused its collapse but without examining the innate limitations of building to the sky with a material as weak as mud brick. What we see is not a collapsed mass of limestone blocks but a ruin of mud detritus. You would have done well to connect that to the waters of the Nile and its flooding. Mud doesn't do well in water, so there's that factor to think about.

[iggyzorro]

yeah, it sure is ugly. but that's what you get when you hire non-union workers. Amenamhat should have contacted the International Brotherhood of Stonecutters, Artisans and Desert Plasterers local 1.

[hobocreativeco]

Could the casing stones have been put in place during the entire construction and not at the end, explaining why we can find casing stones in the rubble even if the pyramid collapsed during construction, and never fully finished?

[weeroger]

Bit of a disaster
Im sure the pharoe fed a few of the architects to his crocodiles
I wouldnt want to have been in those guys shoes giving the pharoe the bad news

[terryenglish]

Wooden connectors, surprising. They're also metal, poured metal or rock.

[MartinCHorowitz]

They needed to watch the Ancient geologists and Ancient civil Engineer channels before construction....

[justalaborer]

This is exactly the kind of poor planning and workmanship I would expect from a pyramid project being led by interstellar aliens. Never trust the engineering capabilities of a lizard man.

[weeroger]

Academia is such a site lads
Check it out if you havent
It has everything pitries book
Legend dr lehner

[DarrenHiles]

"But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand." Matthew 7:26

[aalhard]

6:25 I am shocked they let everyone rub their oils, acids, lotions, and perfume into the artifact! It won't be shiny for long!!