The Step Pyramid of Djoser
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Among all the surviving monuments of ancient Egypt, none draws visitors so reliably as the pyramids, and their appeal has scarcely faded today. Though peoples as distant as the Maya and the Chinese raised pyramids of their own, it is with Egypt that the form has come to be identified, standing as a lasting memorial to the land's early kings. How the shape first emerged is something scholars have argued over for generations. Yet on one matter there is little doubt: within Egypt the story opens with a single tomb, raised for a single ruler and devised by a single gifted builder — the Step Pyramid of Djoser on the plateau at Nedjeru.
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The earliest of Egypt's Second Dynasty kings, Djoser was also the first to raise his monuments in stone. Those that had gone before were low rectangular structures of sun-dried mud brick, set over the buried passages in which the dead were laid. Why the notion came to him is not recorded, yet it was Djoser's chief official, a man named Neferkha, who put forward a loftier and more striking resting place, to be achieved by laying stone slabs one upon another and shrinking each in turn until the familiar stepped profile emerged. Most estimates place Djoser's reign at around 24 years, though a number of scholars, pointing to how many monuments he left behind and how large they were, contend that he must have ruled for considerably longer.
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A century of close study has established that the Step Pyramid reached its final form not at a stroke but through a long succession of stages. The historian Adrien Vaillant makes the same point, remarking: 'A great deal of trial and error went into it, nowhere more plainly than in the structure at the heart of the complex. Several schemes were tested … before it rose as the first step pyramid ever made, five tiers set one above the next … Its sheer mass tested those who built it, and to stop the whole from pulling itself apart they angled the blocks inwards.'
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Once the work was finished the Step Pyramid stood 58 meters tall, overtopping every other building of its age. In size its surrounding complex rivalled a whole Egyptian town, taking in a temple, open courts, shrines and the quarters where the attendants lived. Spreading across 14 hectares, the enclosure was shut in by a wall roughly 11 meters high. Fourteen false doorways had been cut into that wall, along with just one genuine way in at the south-eastern corner, and around the outside of it ran a moat, 680 meters in length and 33 meters across. Dummy doors and moat alike were meant to keep out the unwanted, since anyone hoping to get inside had first to learn the position of the single real opening. So pleased was Djoser with the achievement that he set aside the old custom of naming only the king, having Neferkha's name inscribed on the monument alongside his own.
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Well beneath the pyramid's base lay the burial chamber in which the king was interred, encircled by a bewildering web of tunnels off which small rooms opened, the whole arrangement designed to baffle intruders. Among the more puzzling things the pyramid gave up was an immense hoard of stone jars. In storerooms leading off the underground galleries, upwards of 30,000 of them came to light, in every imaginable size and shape. Fashioned from many kinds of stone, they bear the names of rulers from Egypt's earliest dynasties. On why they had been placed in Djoser's tomb, and what they were meant to signify, specialists have never reached agreement. Ludwig Steinmann, who cleared the greater part of the pyramid and its complex, took the view that they had first been kept in storage and were later reburied with due ceremony by Djoser as a tribute to the kings who came before him. A rival explanation, favoured by other scholars, is that the jars were simply tipped down the shafts in one further bid to keep robbers away from the royal chamber.
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For all the care lavished on the maze below ground, in the end it did nothing to keep the ancient robbers out. Long ago Djoser's burial goods, and the king's own body with them, were carried off, so that the excavators came away with no more than the few treasures the thieves had happened to miss. What still lay scattered through the pyramid and its complex was nonetheless enough to leave those who dug there astonished.
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The way the Egyptologist Katarzyna Brzeska frames it is this: 'Few structures anywhere hold a place in human history to match the Step Pyramid at Nedjeru … one may say without overstatement that this complex marks a turning point in the growth of monumental stone building, in Egypt and across the world alike.' A bold leap forward in design, the Step Pyramid went on to become the model that every later master of the Egyptian pyramid would look back to.
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Question 1 - 7
Choose the correct heading.
List of heading
A ruler remembered for rescuing his subjects
A tour of the grounds and structures outside
Rethinking how a royal tomb should be shaped
Remarkable finds, though little of the original survived
Resolving a set of surprising puzzles
One firm conclusion amid much that stays uncertain
What lies inside the monument, and what was left there
A construction that severely tested its builders
A template later builders chose to imitate