The Step Pyramid of Djoser

The story

A tomb that climbs towards the sky

If you had visited Saqqara in the time of the pharaoh Djoser, around 2650 BC, you would have seen a building site like no other. In the middle of a great enclosure of white stone, more than five hundred metres long and surrounded by walls over ten metres high, a stepped tower was rising. In the end it would be about sixty metres tall, with six steps one above the other, each narrower than the one below, like a staircase for giants. It was the first great stone building in human history, and it was designed by a man whose name we know: Imhotep.

From bench to staircase

Before Djoser, the kings and nobles of Egypt were buried under mastabas. The word is Arabic and means “bench”: they were low structures with a flat top and sloping sides, made of mud brick. Underground was the burial chamber. Djoser himself, too, at first had a mastaba in mind, but of stone and not of brick. The stone, a pale limestone quarried nearby and at Tura, lasted far longer than mud.

Then, during the work, the plan changed several times. The mastaba was enlarged on every side, then another was built on top of the first, and another again. In the end they arrived at the stepped shape we still see today. Archaeologists worked out this story by studying cross-sections of the building: inside the pyramid are the traces of several successive designs. It was an experiment that developed as it went along, not a perfect plan from the start.

The blocks are small, like bricks, because the builders had not yet learned to move large stones. They were laid in layers sloping inwards, to make the structure more stable. Beneath the pyramid is a maze of galleries and chambers kilometres long, and in one of them thousands of stone vessels from earlier times were found, perhaps inherited from the oldest kings. Some chambers have walls decorated with blue ceramic tiles, which imitate the reed mats of palaces.

A city for eternity

Around the pyramid Imhotep designed a true complex of buildings. In the enclosure there are courtyards for ceremonies, false buildings with stone fronts carved to imitate tents, reeds and wood, and a funerary temple to the north. Many buildings are solid: they were for the ka, the king's spirit, for the jubilee festivals (the Sed festival) that the pharaoh would go on celebrating in the afterlife. The columns are carved in the shape of bundles of reeds and papyrus. It is a stone building that tells in stone the story of the Egypt of wood and mud.

In a small sealed room, called a serdab, archaeologists found a statue of the king, seated, with his eyes looking out through two holes in the wall. The original statue is now in the Cairo Museum; at Saqqara you can see a copy: even today the pharaoh watches, in silence, whoever comes near.

Who was Imhotep

Imhotep, whose name means “the one who comes in peace”, was not a king. He was a high-ranking official, perhaps the son of an architect, who served Djoser as vizier and head of works. His name appears on a statue base found in the Saqqara enclosure itself, with titles describing him as chief of sculptors and priest. We do not know for certain that he designed the pyramid, but tradition and the clues point to him.

Centuries later, Imhotep was remembered as a wise man: scribes attributed proverbs and medical texts to him. From the Late Period and then in Ptolemaic times, more than two thousand years after his death, he was worshipped as a god of medicine and the Greeks identified him with their Asclepius. Shrines in his honour arose at Saqqara. His tomb has never been found, and archaeologists are still looking for it.

A doubt about the date

Djoser reigned from about 2670 to 2650 BC (some date him a little later). What is certain is that the pyramid was built in a few decades, and that it was the tallest structure in the world of that time, while in Mesopotamia buildings were still of mud brick.