Saqqara

The first stone building that survives

Around 2 670 BC the Egyptian architect Imhotep designed and built the Step Pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser at Saqqara, on the desert plateau overlooking the old capital of Memphis.

It was the first monumental structure on Earth built entirely of dressed stone. Every earlier monument — from the megaliths of Atlantic Europe to the ziggurats of Mesopotamia — had used rubble, mudbrick or roughly broken blocks. Imhotep introduced cut limestone blocks held by their own weight without mortar. The technique persisted for the next three thousand years of Egyptian building.

A pyramid that started as something else

Djoser's tomb was not designed as a pyramid.

The earliest plan was a single mastaba — the flat-topped rectangular tomb shape used by Djoser's predecessors. Imhotep first enlarged the mastaba, then stacked a second smaller mastaba on top of it, then a third, and so on, ending with six distinct steps rising 62 metres above the desert.

Inside, a vertical shaft 28 metres deep ends at a pink granite burial chamber sealed with a 3.5-tonne granite plug. Tunnels around the chamber extend for nearly six kilometres and store thousands of stone vessels reused from earlier dynasties.

The architect who became a god

Imhotep's name was carved on a statue base at the entrance of Djoser's funerary complex. Almost unheard-of recognition for an Egyptian commoner.

Imhotep was the chief vizier, the high priest of Heliopolis, the chief physician, and the master architect. He left no other surviving buildings — but his reputation grew, and by the Late Period (about 700 BC) he had been formally deified as the god of medicine. By the time the Greeks arrived in Egypt with Alexander in 332 BC, they identified Imhotep with their own god of healing, Asclepius.

He is the only human commoner in Egyptian history known to have been worshipped as a god across more than two thousand years.

A complex larger than the pyramid

What surrounds the Step Pyramid is as interesting as the pyramid itself. A 15-hectare walled funerary city, with a 545-by-277-metre perimeter wall of fitted limestone. Fourteen dummy gates carved into the wall, with only one real entrance. Full-size buildings that look like chapels but were carved solid for the king's afterlife. A Heb-Sed court with two rows of stone chapels representing the provinces of Egypt — the pharaoh would re-enact his royal jubilee here for eternity, running between two markers to demonstrate continued vigour.

The mortar-free fitted-limestone enclosure wall survived long enough that Imhotep's signature method was studied by every Egyptian architect who came after.