Egypt’s Most Clever Pyramid Locks

Pyramid security did not stop with giant stone plugs and vertical portcullis slabs. Over time, Egyptian engineers experimented with increasingly clever ways to seal royal burial chambers, and by the Middle Kingdom some of those systems became far stranger than the famous granite blocks of the Great Pyramid.

In this video, I look at a series of obscure and often forgotten Middle Kingdom pyramids, including Hawara, Southern South Saqqara, the Mazghuna pyramids, Khendjer’s pyramid, and the “Lost Pyramid” at Dahshur, to understand how their horizontal and nearly horizontal portcullis systems may have worked.

Unlike earlier vertical portcullises, these later systems appear to have used massive stone blocks sliding across or down shallow ramps, sometimes weighing around 20 tons or more. The big question is not simply how they were closed, but whether they were designed as one-way locks: mechanisms that could be activated during burial and then made almost impossible to reverse.

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