Saqqara

← Encyclopedia

A flight of stone steps, each smaller than the one beneath it, climbing in six stages to a height of sixty meters above the desert floor — and built so that a dead man might walk up them into the sky. That is the literal proposition of the oldest large building on earth, and it stands on a low ridge of limestone west of the Nile, at the edge of the cultivation, where for more than three thousand years the people of Memphis carried their dead. The ridge is called Saqqara. It runs roughly seven kilometers along the escarpment and a kilometer and a half back into the desert, and almost every part of it is hollow with tombs.

The name itself is uncertain. It is most often connected with Sokar, the hawk-headed god of the Memphite necropolis and of the dead, whose festival was kept in this very ground; a medieval Arabic source instead calls the place Ard as-Sadr, the land of the buckthorn. Whatever the word holds, the function is plain. Saqqara was the cemetery of the first capital of unified Egypt — the burial field that served the city below the escarpment from the dawn of the dynasties until the temples finally fell silent under Rome.

The burial field of the White Wall

Memphis, the city Saqqara served, stood on the floodplain a few kilometers to the east. By tradition it was founded at the unification of the Two Lands around 3100 BCE under the name Inebu-hedj, the White Wall — and its dead went up onto the dry ridge to the west, beyond the reach of the inundation, where the bodies would keep. The earliest tombs on the high northern plateau at Saqqara belong to the First Dynasty: large rectangular mudbrick structures with flat tops and sloping sides, their underground chambers stocked with grave goods, their superstructures paneled in the recessed-niche “palace facade” style. Archaeologists call this form the mastaba, from the Arabic word for the low mud bench it resembles. For the first two dynasties of Egyptian history, the mastaba was what a great tomb looked like: brick, low, earthbound.

Saqqara never stopped being used. Tombs were cut here under every dynasty that followed — the towering pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, the painted mastabas of Old Kingdom officials, Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom burials, the deep shaft graves of the Saite and Persian periods, and finally the sprawling animal cemeteries and human burials of Ptolemaic and Roman date. Sixteen kings raised pyramids somewhere along this ridge. The necropolis of Memphis was, for the whole long span of pharaonic Egypt, the most continuously sacred ground in the country, and it remained a working cemetery for more than three thousand years.

But the thing that changed the history of building — and, in a sense, the history of how human beings imagined eternity — happened here at a single moment, around 2670 BCE, in the reign of a Third Dynasty king named Djoser.

The leap from brick to stone

The Step Pyramid of Djoser, c. 2670–2650 BCE — six diminishing mastabas stacked into the oldest large stone building in the world. Photograph by Berthold Werner, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Step Pyramid began as a mastaba like any other — a single flat-topped block of stone over the burial shaft. Then it was enlarged, and enlarged again, and at some point the plan changed entirely: a second, smaller mastaba was set on top of the first, then a third, then more, until the structure had grown into six stacked stages diminishing as they rose. The finished monument stood about 62.5 meters high on a rectangular base of roughly 109 by 121 meters, faced in dressed white limestone, the single largest building anyone had ever made. Beneath it, a network of shafts and galleries runs more than five kilometers, the central shaft dropping to a granite-lined burial vault.

What is revolutionary is not only the height but the material. Before Djoser, monumental Egyptian construction had been mudbrick, reed, and timber; stone was used sparingly, for thresholds and linings. The Step Pyramid complex is the first mass use of quarried limestone in the history of architecture — the moment a people decided that a tomb should be made not of the perishable stuff of houses but of the permanent stuff of mountains. The man Egyptian tradition credits with the design is Imhotep, Djoser’s vizier and high priest of Ptah, the patron god of craftsmen at Memphis. His name and titles were found inscribed on a statue base in the complex itself, beside the king’s — an architect remembered by name from the very dawn of monumental building, which is itself almost without parallel. Later ages would deify him as a healer and a sage; the Greeks would identify him with Asclepius, and the Hermetic dialogue named for that god would borrow his shape. The scholarly identification of Imhotep as architect of the Step Pyramid is widely accepted, though the precise scope of his role is reconstructed rather than documented in his own words.

Around the pyramid lies a vast walled enclosure — a rectangle some 545 by 277 meters, ringed by a limestone wall once over ten meters high, paneled with the recessed niches of the palace facade and punctuated by fourteen gateways, only one of them real. Inside is a stone landscape that no one was ever meant to use. There are dummy chapels with solid stone doors carved as if standing ajar; a colonnade of ribbed columns shaped like bundled reeds and plant stems, freestanding stone made to remember the lightweight materials it had replaced; a court for the heb-sed, the royal jubilee in which the king renewed his power by running a ritual course — built here in indestructible stone so that Djoser could run it forever, in the afterlife, among shrines that were facades with nothing behind them. Against the north face of the pyramid sits a sealed stone box, the serdab, with two small holes bored through its front wall. Inside it a life-sized seated statue of the king stares out through the holes toward the northern stars. The whole complex is a model of the world of the living, rebuilt in eternal stone for the use of one dead man.

The stairway and the oldest words

Within the Egyptian frame the form of the monument is not decoration but a means. The king is not merely buried; he is launched. The diminishing steps are a stair — in one ancient image the dead king “treads these his rays as a stairway under his feet, whereon he goes up to his mother” the sky-goddess. The body is held in the granite vault below; the ka, the vital double, is fed by offerings; and the transfigured spirit, the akh, ascends to join the imperishable circumpolar stars that never set, or to sail with Ra across the day-sky, or to enter the kingdom of Osiris among the dead made righteous. The architecture is an engine for that ascent. (For the soul-parts the structure was built to serve, see the ka and the ba; for the journey through the underworld, the Duat.)

Two centuries after Djoser, that machinery was put into words and carved onto the walls. In the pyramid of King Unas — the last ruler of the Fifth Dynasty, who died around 2350 BCE — the burial chamber and antechamber were covered, floor to ceiling, with columns of hieroglyphs painted blue against white. These are the Pyramid Texts: the oldest body of religious writing known anywhere on earth, a collection of spells, hymns, and ritual recitations meant to protect the king, to feed him, to ward off the dangers of the road, and above all to drive his transfiguration into a star and a god. The Unas corpus runs to some 283 utterances; the practice continued through the Sixth Dynasty, in the pyramids of Teti, Pepi I, Merenre, and Pepi II, and even in the smaller pyramids of three of Pepi II’s queens — Neith, Iput, and Wedjebetni — which broke the old rule that such texts were the king’s alone.

Columns of Pyramid Texts in the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Unas, c. 2350 BCE — the oldest religious writing in the world. Brooklyn Museum Lantern Slide, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The voice of the texts is startling in its directness. The dead king demands, threatens, and commands his way past every obstacle; he eats the gods to take their power; he calls on the ferryman of the celestial waters and the ladder set up between earth and sky; he announces that he will not rot, will not decay, will not be turned back at the horizon. The spells assume a cosmos in which the right words, correctly spoken, are themselves a power that compels — the same conviction that runs through all of Egyptian funerary practice, where to name a thing rightly is to govern it. This is the domain of heka, the activating force of effective speech and rite; the Pyramid Texts are its first great written deposit. Modern scholars rediscovered these inscriptions only in 1880, when Gaston Maspero opened the texted pyramids of Saqqara; the Egyptians themselves had composed them more than four millennia earlier as the surest words a person could be given for the passage out of life. From this royal corpus descend the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom — the same logic moved down onto the coffins of nobles — and from those, in turn, the spells gathered into the Book of the Dead. The chain of funerary literature that runs through the whole of Egyptian religion begins on these walls. Saqqara also holds the most famous of the painted private tombs — the mastabas of Ti, of the vizier Mereruka, of Kagemni, of Ptahhotep — whose reliefs of marsh-fowling, plowing, brewing, and feasting are among the richest pictures we have of how the living actually lived. These were not decoration either. A relief of a man fishing in the reeds, or of cattle fording a canal, was a provision: rendered on the tomb wall and named in its caption, the scene could be made to feed and serve the tomb-owner forever, the offering kept perpetually fresh by the act of depicting it. The mastaba of Ptahhotep is associated with the famous book of maxims that bears the name — the counsel of an aged vizier on how a man should conduct himself, one of the earliest works of wisdom literature anywhere — so that the necropolis preserves not only how the Egyptians buried their dead but how they thought a life should be lived.

The catacombs of the living Ptah

One of the giant granite sarcophagi in the vaulted side-chambers of the Serapeum, each cut for a mummified Apis bull. Photograph by Ovedc, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

To the northwest, under the same sand, runs a different kind of tomb. The Apis was a living bull — a single animal, recognized by sacred markings, kept and worshiped at Memphis as the bodily manifestation of Ptah, the creator-god who, in the Memphite teaching, brought the world into being by thought and by the word of his tongue. While it lived the bull was the god made flesh; when it died it became “Osiris-Apis,” a fusion of the dead bull with the lord of the dead, and was mummified and entombed with the rites of a king. The compound name Osiris-Apis would pass, in the Hellenistic age, into the great syncretic deity Serapis.

The burial place of these bulls is the Serapeum: an underground complex of rock-cut galleries where, for some fourteen hundred years, each successive Apis was laid to rest. The oldest individual burials go back to the reign of Amenhotep III in the Eighteenth Dynasty, around 1400 BCE. The system of communal galleries was begun in the Nineteenth Dynasty by Khaemwaset, the learned, antiquity-loving son of Ramesses II, who is sometimes called the world’s first archaeologist for his care of the old monuments; the so-called Greater Vaults, a single tunnel running about 350 meters with side-chambers opening off it, continued in use down to the Ptolemaic period and the end of pharaonic Egypt. In those side-chambers stand the sarcophagi: monolithic boxes of polished granite and basalt, the largest of them roughly four meters long and over three meters high, weighing on the order of seventy tons with their lids — cut, hauled underground, and maneuvered into place with a precision that has never ceased to astonish visitors. The bull’s massive coffin was a god’s coffin, and was treated as such.

Mariette, the buried sphinxes, and the unending dig

By the nineteenth century all of this lay under the sand, lost. But the Greek geographer Strabo, writing around the turn of the era, had recorded something: a temple of Serapis at Memphis approached by an avenue of sphinxes so deep in drifting sand that some were buried up to their heads. In 1850 the young French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, sent to Egypt to buy Coptic manuscripts, saw the head of one sphinx protruding from a dune at Saqqara, remembered Strabo’s line, and began to dig. The half-buried avenue led him to the entrance of the Serapeum, which he opened the following year — finding, among the plundered galleries, one Apis burial still intact and undisturbed since the day the priests had sealed it, the very footprints of the last workmen still in the dust. It was one of the great finds of the heroic age of Egyptology, and it made Saqqara a name.

The digging has never stopped. The ground here is still giving up its dead. Excavators have traced enormous animal catacombs — galleries of mummified ibises, falcons, baboons, and cats offered to the gods, and a dog catacomb estimated to hold close to eight million mummified animals. In recent years the site has yielded the lavishly preserved Fifth Dynasty tomb of a priest named Wahtye, painted in fresh color; great caches of intact, sealed wooden coffins of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, more than a hundred at a time; gilded mummy masks; embalming workshops with their jars still labeled; and the funerary temple of Queen Naert, wife of King Teti, previously unknown. Saqqara is among the most actively excavated sites on earth, and it has surrendered only a fraction of what it holds.

In 1979 the whole necropolis of Memphis, the chain of cemeteries running along the desert edge from Giza in the north through Saqqara to Dahshur in the south, was inscribed on the World Heritage List as “Memphis and its Necropolis – the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur.” The listing recognizes a continuous landscape of the dead some thirty kilometers long. At its heart stands the stairway that started it all — the structure with which a vizier of the Third Dynasty first decided that a king’s house of eternity should be cut from the bone of the earth, and built upward, step by step, toward the stars he meant his master to join.

→ In the library: The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani), tr. E. A. Wallis Budge · Egyptian Magic, E. A. Wallis Budge (1899)

→ Related: Memphis · Imhotep · Ptah · Pyramid Texts · Coffin Texts · Ancient Egypt · The Egyptians · The Egyptian Priesthood · Abydos · Thebes · Heliopolis · Osiris · Ra · Atum · Anubis · Duat · Ka Egyptian Soul · Ba Egyptian Soul · Opening Of The Mouth · Weighing Of The Heart · Heka Egyptian Magic · Serapis · Thoth