For nearly two thousand years, Egypt’s kings expressed their hopes for eternal life through one of the most recognizable forms ever created: the pyramid. Yet at the beginning of the New Kingdom, the pyramid disappeared from royal burial. In its place came the hidden, rock-cut tombs of the Valley of the Kings and a radically different sacred landscape on the west bank of Thebes (modern Luxor). What was lost in this transformation—and what survived?

At the center of this story is King Ahmose, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, whose monuments at Abydos include Egypt’s last royal pyramid complex as well as striking innovations that anticipate the funerary traditions of the New Kingdom. Drawing on his own excavations and research at Abydos, archaeologist Stephen Harvey will explore how Egyptian architects and artists transformed older traditions to create new expressions of kingship, death, and rebirth. Although the visible pyramid disappeared from royal burial, important architectural, ritual, and textual elements of the pyramid tradition endured. And in a remarkable reversal, just as pharaohs abandoned pyramids, elite non-royal Egyptians adopted them to mark their own tombs at Thebes and elsewhere. The transition from pyramids to hidden royal tombs was thus not an abandonment of the past, but a complex transformation of one of Egypt’s most enduring traditions.