Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara: Egypt's First Pyramid

The Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, built around 2670 BC, is the oldest of Egypt’s pyramids and one of the earliest large buildings made entirely of cut stone. Raised for King Djoser of the Third Dynasty and traditionally credited to his official Imhotep, it began as a simple tomb and grew into a six-step pyramid about 62 metres high. The pyramid and its huge walled complex marked a turning point in architecture and launched the age of pyramid building.

Background: royal tombs before the pyramid

Egypt’s first kings were buried at Umm el-Qa’ab in Abydos, in pits lined with mud brick under low mounds. Officials and some royal family members were buried in rectangular mud-brick tombs called mastabas, from the Arabic word for a bench, many of them at Saqqara overlooking the capital, Memphis.

Kings of the Second Dynasty were already experimenting with stone, using it for floors, door frames and burial chambers. Huge rectangular enclosures were built at both Abydos and Saqqara. Djoser’s architects combined these traditions on an entirely new scale, translating buildings of brick, wood and reed into durable limestone.

The choice of stone mattered for religious reasons. The Egyptians believed that the king’s spirit needed a lasting home and a lasting supply of offerings. Mud brick crumbled within generations, whereas stone promised eternity, and a monument visible from the capital also proclaimed the power of the living king and his dynasty.

Djoser and his builder

Djoser, whose name on his own monuments is the Horus name Netjerikhet, “divine of body”, reigned for about 19 to 30 years in the early 27th century BC. The name Djoser comes from later sources, including graffiti left by visitors to his complex in the New Kingdom, more than a thousand years later.

Little is known about the events of his reign. Fragments of a shrine he built at Heliopolis, now in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, show the king with members of his family, and rock inscriptions in Wadi Maghara in Sinai record expeditions to mine turquoise and copper. His complex at Saqqara is by far the most important source for his kingship.

The design is traditionally credited to Imhotep, one of the king’s highest officials. A statue base of Djoser found in the complex in the 1920s carries Imhotep’s name and titles, confirming that he served this king. Egyptians later honoured him as the inventor of building in stone, and Manetho, writing in the 3rd century BC, linked that invention to Djoser’s reign.

How the pyramid was built

The monument was not planned as a pyramid from the start. Archaeologists have identified at least six building phases. It began as a square, flat-topped mastaba of stone about 63 metres on each side and 8 metres high. This was enlarged twice by adding new casings around the sides.

Then the builders changed plan. They raised a four-step pyramid over the mastaba and finally enlarged it again to six steps, with a rectangular base of roughly 121 by 109 metres. The finished height was about 62 metres.

The structure is made of limestone blocks laid in sloping layers that lean inwards, a technique that gave stability. The blocks are relatively small, close to the size of mud bricks, suggesting that the builders were still thinking in terms of brick construction.

The core stone was quarried locally on the Saqqara plateau, and the quarries can still be traced around the complex. Workers used copper chisels, stone hammers and wooden levers, and moved blocks on sledges up ramps of mud brick and rubble. No document records the size of the workforce, but it must have included thousands of quarrymen, masons, haulers and support staff, probably organised in rotating teams.

Why the plan changed is not recorded. Historians suggest that the king wanted a monument visible from Memphis across the valley, or that new religious ideas made a towering shape more meaningful. Later texts describe the dead king climbing to the sky, and a stepped pyramid may have been understood as a staircase to the heavens. The outer casing was of fine white limestone from Tura across the river, most of which has since been robbed.

The burial chambers and galleries

Beneath the pyramid a central shaft about 7 metres square descends some 28 metres into the bedrock. At its bottom lies a burial chamber built of pink granite blocks, sealed with a granite plug weighing several tonnes. The chamber had been robbed long before modern times; fragments of a mummified foot found there in 1934 may or may not belong to the king.

Around the shaft extends a maze of corridors and galleries, totalling several kilometres. Some rooms were decorated with blue-green faience tiles imitating reed mats, and with relief panels showing the king performing rituals. Galleries under the east side contained the burials of royal family members and a vast store of stone vessels, estimated at around 40,000, many inscribed with the names of earlier kings.

The funerary complex

The pyramid stands within an enclosure of about 545 by 278 metres, surrounded by a limestone wall roughly 10.5 metres high. The wall is decorated with recessed niches in the “palace façade” style and has fourteen false gateways, but only one real entrance, at the south-east corner.

Inside, the complex reproduced in stone the buildings of a royal residence and its ceremonies. A colonnaded entrance hall leads into a great court with markers for the king’s ritual run during the sed festival, a jubilee celebrating his renewed power. Beside it a separate court is lined with dummy chapels: solid buildings with false doors, intended for the king’s spirit rather than for living people.

Stone columns copy bundles of reeds, and ceilings are carved to imitate wooden logs. A sealed chamber called a serdab, on the north side of the pyramid, housed a seated limestone statue of Djoser that looked out through two small holes. The original statue is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and a replica stands in its place. A second tomb, the “South Tomb”, built into the enclosure wall, may have held the king’s canopic equipment or served a symbolic purpose.

On the north side of the pyramid stood a temple for the king’s daily offerings, unlike later complexes where this temple faces east. Two buildings known as the House of the South and the House of the North, decorated with stone columns in the form of plants, are thought to stand for the two halves of the country, Upper and Lower Egypt, united under the king.

Excavation and restoration

The burial chambers were entered in the 19th century, including by the Prussian expedition of Karl Richard Lepsius in the 1840s. Systematic excavation began in 1924 under Cecil Firth for the Egyptian Antiquities Service. From 1926 the French architect Jean-Philippe Lauer worked at the site, and he devoted some 75 years, until his death in 2001, to studying and rebuilding parts of the complex.

An earthquake in 1992 damaged the pyramid, and concern grew about falling stones inside. A restoration project lasting more than a decade strengthened the interior and the outer faces, and the pyramid reopened to visitors in March 2020.

Influence on later pyramids

Djoser’s successors tried to copy and surpass him. Sekhemkhet began a larger step pyramid nearby that was never finished, and the Layer Pyramid at Zawyet el-Aryan follows the same idea.

At the start of the Fourth Dynasty, Sneferu turned a step design into a true, smooth-sided pyramid at Meidum and then built the Bent and Red Pyramids at Dahshur. His son Khufu raised the Great Pyramid of Giza less than a century after Djoser’s monument. A popular belief holds that the pyramids were built by slaves. There is no evidence of this for Djoser’s monument; studies of later pyramid sites show that the work was done by organised crews of skilled workers and labourers who were fed and housed by the state, many of them probably serving as a form of labour tax. Without the experiment at Saqqara, the pyramids of Giza would hardly have been possible.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 2700 BC: Second Dynasty kings build large enclosures and use stone for parts of their tombs.
• c. 2670 BC: Djoser comes to the throne; work begins on a stone mastaba at Saqqara.
• c. 2660-2650 BC: The tomb is enlarged into a four-step and then a six-step pyramid.
• c. 2600 BC: Sneferu completes true pyramids at Meidum and Dahshur.
• 3rd century BC: Manetho credits the reign of Djoser with building in hewn stone.
• 1924: Cecil Firth begins systematic excavation of the complex.
• 1926-2001: Jean-Philippe Lauer studies and restores the site.
• 1992: An earthquake damages the pyramid.
• 2020, March: The restored interior reopens to visitors.

Why it matters

The Step Pyramid is where monumental stone architecture in Egypt began. It turned the royal tomb into a mountain of stone and the king’s palace into an eternal monument, creating the model that led directly to the pyramids of Giza and influenced Egyptian architecture for millennia.