Meidum pyramid

Verner, 2002, p. 165. Accretion layers were a common form of construction suited to making a tomb as large as possible yet ready for an uncertain death. This is not the soundest structure. The Meidum pyramid (2600 bc) had catastrophic design flaws. Although the weakness of in-built slip-planes could... 

There may be a tendency for us to think that large scale structural failure is a phenomenon of the last 150 years or so. In fact Mendelssohn, a physicist, has described [105] what he believes was an immense disaster which occurred almost 5,000 years ago. He was led to this conclusion by the nature and distribution of the debris surrounding the pyramid at Meidum in Egypt. Tiiis apparently indicates, along with other evidence, that there was a sudden failure in which masonry was broken up as it cascaded down the pyramid (Fig. 8.1). 

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