Exhibitions and Debates Reframe Pyramid Stories

The Fitzwilliam Museum is exhibiting four decades of research and loans that spotlight anonymous ancient Egyptian craftsmen—stonecutters, painters, metalworkers and glassmakers—showing their tools, techniques and occasional signatures to highlight everyday production rather than royal patrons. Off Japan’s Yonaguni island, stepped, pyramid-like underwater formations are the subject of debate, with some researchers arguing they are a 10,000‑year‑old manmade complex and others attributing them to natural sandstone formation and tectonics, leaving their origins unresolved. Photographer Ian James has spent a decade documenting more than 75 pyramid-shaped buildings across North America and argues in a new book that these structures reflect a mix of capitalist metaphysics and new‑age symbolism in contemporary architecture. Art D’Égypte’s Forever Is Now will return to the Pyramids of Giza in November–December 2025, presenting works by ten international artists and running parallel to the Cairo International Art District, which this year names South Korea as Guest Country of Honour. Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, with massive T‑shaped pillars carved by hunter‑gatherers around 9,000–11,000 years ago and deliberately buried by its builders, remains the world’s oldest and most puzzling temple complex, challenging assumptions about the origins of organized ritual and construction.