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About 2670 BCEReputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Djoser's Vizier Imhotep Builds the First Monumental Stone Structure at Saqqara

On the timeline · around About 2670 BCE · The Old KingdomThe Old KingdomDjoser's Vizier Imhotep Builds the First Monumental Stone Structure at Saqqara3,000 BCE2,900 BCE2,800 BCE2,700 BCE2,600 BCE2,500 BCE2,400 BCE

What happened

Djoser, first king of Egypt's Third Dynasty, had his vizier Imhotep design a new royal tomb at Saqqara. Every prior royal burial had been a mastaba, a low rectangular monument built from dried mudbrick. Imhotep instead stacked six mastaba-like stone levels on top of each other, shrinking each one going up, and built the whole thing from limestone blocks shaped like large bricks. The finished Step Pyramid rose 204 feet (62 meters), the tallest structure in the world at the time, inside a walled complex covering 40 acres and enclosed by a stone wall 30 feet high, with a temple, courtyards, shrines, and priests' quarters. It was the first monumental building made entirely of stone anywhere in the historical record.

Why it matters

Imhotep's stone-building method is what made the true pyramids possible a century later. Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza, and every large-scale stone monument that followed it, descend directly from the construction techniques Imhotep worked out at Saqqara. Djoser also broke royal precedent by having Imhotep's name carved into the monument alongside his own, an honor no architect had received before. Centuries later Egyptians deified Imhotep as a god of medicine and wisdom, and Greeks equated him with Asclepius, their own god of healing, a cult that lasted so long that Roman emperors Tiberius and Claudius still had temples inscribed with praise of him.

How we know

The Step Pyramid complex still stands at Saqqara and has been extensively excavated and measured, giving the height, wall dimensions, and layout directly from the physical structure. Imhotep's titles, including vizier and chief architect to Djoser, come from inscriptions, and his deification is dated by Egyptologists to around 525 BCE, based on later religious texts and Greco-Roman era temple inscriptions equating him with Asclepius.

Sources

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Part of a timelineAncient Egypt26 events · Three thousand years of pharaohs, from the first unification of the Nile valley to Cleopatra's death, and the two nineteenth and twentieth-century discoveries that let the modern world read and see it all again.View all →