Dashour Necropolis

This guide to the Dashour Necropolis outside Cairo follows a French mining engineer named Jacques de Morgan, who in March 1894 pried open a decayed wooden chest in an underground gallery here. It traces what ancient robbers took from Middle Kingdom princesses and a queen buried in this pyramid field, and what their haste left behind. It also covers the necropolis's twentieth-century decades sealed inside a restricted military zone, closed to ordinary visitors until 1996. Notice how the site's angle-changed pyramid and corbelled tombs stand apart from the smooth-sided pyramid nearby.