'beloved of Atum', Ancient Greek: Μοι(ε)θυμις)[1] is an archaeological site in Lower Egypt.

This severely compromised the stability and is likely to have caused the collapse of the Meidum Pyramid in a downpour while the building was still under construction.

The burial chamber inside the pyramid itself is uncompleted, with raw walls and wooden supports still in place which are usually removed after construction.

Finally, the first examinations of the Meidum Pyramid found everything below the surface of the rubble mound fully intact.

It is commonly assumed the pyramid still had five steps in the fifteenth century and was gradually falling further into ruin, because al-Maqrizi described it as looking like a five-stepped mountain, but Mendelssohn claimed this might be the result of a loose translation and al-Makrizi's words would more accurately translate into "five-storied mountain",[5] a description which could even match the present state of the pyramid with four bands of different masonry at the base and a step on top.

[8] Borchardt´s interpretation as a trace of a straight long ramp is widely rejected and contradicted by the fact the recess at the third step is narrower than that of the fourth.

The Meidum Pyramid was excavated by John Shae Perring in 1837, Lepsius in 1843 and then by Flinders Petrie later in the nineteenth century, who located the mortuary temple, facing to the east.

Flinders Petrie was the first Egyptologist to establish the facts of its original design dimensions and proportions.

Petrie wrote in the 1892 excavation report [11] that "We see then that there is an exactly analogous theory for the dimensions of Medum [sic] to that of the Great Pyramid; in each the approximate ratio of 7:44 is adopted, as referred to the radius and circle ..." These proportions equated to the four outer faces sloping in by precisely 51.842° or 51°50'35", which would have been understood and expressed by the Ancient Egyptians as a seked slope of 51⁄2 palms.