Construction of the Step Pyramid
Djoser's architect Imhotep built the Step Pyramid at Saqqara around 2650 BC, and it is the oldest large stone building in the world. Egyptian royal tombs before it were mastabas — flat-roofed rectangular structures of mud brick over a shaft. Imhotep built one in stone, which had not been done at that scale, and then enlarged it four times, ending with six diminishing mastabas stacked to a height of about sixty metres. The blocks are small, roughly the size of the mud bricks they replaced, which is the mark of masons working out a new material by imitating an old one. The complex around it covers fifteen hectares inside a limestone wall over a kilometre long, and much of it is theatre rather than architecture: chapels with no interiors, doors carved permanently open, fluted columns engaged in walls because nobody yet trusted a free-standing one, all built for the king's use in an afterlife rather than for anyone living. Beneath it runs about six kilometres of shafts and galleries, with chambers lined in blue faience tiles imitating reed matting. Imhotep is the first architect whose name survives anywhere. He was also a physician and the king's chancellor, and was deified some two thousand years later as a god of medicine — one of very few non-royal Egyptians to be worshipped. The Greeks identified him with Asclepius. The pyramid was restored over thirteen years and reopened in 2020, after part of it collapsed. Every Egyptian pyramid that followed descends from this experiment, and the true pyramid arrived within a single generation.
- Year: 2650 BCE
- Category: Cultural
