Pyramidion of Ptahemwia (c.1325 BCE)

You are looking at a miniature limestone pyramid, roughly the size of a large breadbox, that once crowned a private tomb at Saqqara. Carved around 1325 BCE, the Pyramidion of Ptahemwia was the finishing touch on a mud-brick pyramid that marked the grave of a priest of Ptah in Memphis. On its faces the deceased stands in adoration, his family joins him, and the gods Re-Horakhty and Osiris watch over the solar cycle of death and rebirth. Today this quiet little monument lives in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden.

From a Memphite Priest’s Tomb to a Dutch Museum Collection

The pyramidion was made in the late Eighteenth Dynasty, during the years of Tutankhamun and Horemheb (roughly 1333–1292 BCE), for a man named Ptahemwia, a priest of Ptah in Memphis. His wife Amenemopet, a singer of Amun, and their three daughters appear with him on the stone. Like other well-to-do non-royals of the New Kingdom, Ptahemwia’s family built a temple-style chapel at Saqqara topped by a small mud-brick pyramid; the limestone pyramidion was its capstone. The object entered the European market through Giovanni d’Anastasi, a merchant and consul who assembled large collections in Egypt in the 1820s and sold them to museums. The Leiden museum acquired it in 1828–1829. For decades the exact tomb remained unlocated, but the style, the Memphite titles, and the Saqqara provenance place it firmly in the post-Amarna return to traditional religion.

Stories Carried by the Stone and by Its Modern Scan

One quiet anecdote lives in the hieroglyphs themselves: the text beside the adoring Ptahemwia asks the gods to let his soul leave the tomb every day so he can see the sun. It is a practical, almost everyday wish for solar regeneration rather than a grand royal declaration.

The name Ptahemwia itself (“Ptah is in the barque”) also links the owner to solar-barque imagery that appears throughout New Kingdom funerary art.

Solar Symbolism and the Private Pyramid Tradition

From the Eighteenth Dynasty onward, private tombs at Saqqara and Deir el-Medina often carried small pyramids that echoed the great royal monuments and the sacred benben stone of Heliopolis. The pyramidion condensed that solar theology into four carved faces. The front, oriented east toward the tomb entrance, shows Osiris and Re-Horakhty with the rising sun; the deceased stands in adoration beneath the jackal-headed Anubis; the wife and daughters appear in worship; and additional female figures occupy the remaining side. The imagery fuses the underworld god with the sun god so that the dead can join the daily cycle of death at sunset and rebirth at dawn. In short, the little pyramid was both a status marker and a ritual machine meant to keep the owner’s soul moving with the sun forever.

Limestone, Size, and the Details of the Carving

The object is carved from fine limestone and measures 42 × 28 × 28 cm (16.5 × 11 × 11 inches). All four sloping faces carry raised or sunk relief and columns of hieroglyphs. Typical New Kingdom pyramidion features—adoration scenes, solar disks, and short offering or prayer texts—are present and readable. The base is square, the apex intact enough for the overall pyramidal form to remain clear, and the surface retains sufficient detail that a photogrammetry or structured-light scan could capture the hieroglyphs and figures with high fidelity.

From the Saqqara Sands to a Permanent Home in Leiden

The pyramidion was excavated or collected somewhere in the Saqqara necropolis in the early nineteenth century, passed through Giovanni d’Anastasi’s commercial collection, and was purchased by the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden in January 1829. It has remained in that museum’s Egyptian and Nubian department ever since and is listed among the institution’s highlight objects.