Until now, it has not been quite clear what were the reasons which once determined the choice of a place for the foundation of a pyramid necropolis: the vicinity of a quarry with adequate building materials, the convenient geological subsoil, the presence of an important religious cult place, or other reasons. One of the most mysterious places in this respect is the pyramid necropolis at Abusir and circumstances of its founding. Recent archaeological and geophysical exploration seems to offer an interesting explanation for this question.
Though lying in the heart of the pyramid fields, the necropolis of Abusir had for a long time been neglected by Egyptologists, doubtless due to its archaeologically more attractive neighbouring sites of Giza and Saqqara. Abusir was considered to be only a short-lived cemetery with the pyramid complexes of three kings of the Fifth Dynasty – Sahure, Neferirkare and Niuserre – and, moreover, its archaeological potential seemed to have been exhausted by a German expedition’s work among these pyramids at the beginning of the 20th century.
However, a systematic exploration by the Czech team since the early 1960s, and the use of modern archaeological methods ranging from geoinformatics up to paleoecology, have basically changed the archaeological and historical picture of the Abusir necropolis. A large portion of the Abusir pyramid field, left by the German expedition unexamined, has been explored, including the hitherto unknown pyramid complexes of the King Raneferef, the Queen Khentkaus II and an anonymous 5th Dynasty queen. In addition to that, three large cemeteries of noblemen – one dating from the late Fifth Dynasty, the second from the Third up to the Sixth Dynasties and the third from the late Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period – were archaeologically identified and have been under a systematic, long-standing exploration.
