Ancient Egypt

Egyptian Pyramids

The Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara

Explore the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the world's first large stone building, designed by Imhotep for the pharaoh Djoser at Saqqara.

The Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara

The Step Pyramid of Djoser, built c. 2670 BCE at Saqqara on the west bank of the Nile about 30 km south of modern Cairo, is the world’s first large stone building. Designed by the architect Imhotep for the pharaoh Djoser of the Third Dynasty, it is the first of the great pyramids and the structure that began the entire tradition of stone building in Egypt. For the broader pattern, see our guide to the step pyramids and to the Old Kingdom of Egypt.

Djoser and the Third Dynasty

Djoser, sometimes called Zoser, was the second or third king of the Third Dynasty of Egypt, a period in the early Old Kingdom (c. 2686–2613 BCE). The Third Dynasty is the dynasty in which the Egyptian state, with its centralized government and monumental art, really begins to take shape. By the time Djoser came to the throne, Egypt was already one of the most powerful states of the ancient world.

The choice of Saqqara as the royal necropolis was deliberate. It was near the new capital of Memphis, which lay just to the north, and it was on the west bank of the Nile, the side associated with the realm of the dead. The plateau at Saqqara, with its low ridges of limestone, was a natural place for a great tomb.

There is a real question, which the king’s-list tradition has not fully resolved, about whether the Step Pyramid was built by Djoser or by his predecessor Sanakht. The king-list evidence (the Saqqara King List, the Abydos King List, the Turin King List) is incomplete, and the Manethonian tradition makes Sanakht the founder of the Third Dynasty and Djoser his successor, but several modern authorities have argued that the Step Pyramid’s architecture looks more like the work of a mature dynasty than a first-generation king. I find the conventional Djoser attribution more defensible, but a reader should know that the alternative view is held by serious scholars, not just amateurs.

The Architect: Imhotep

Imhotep, Djoser’s architect and chancellor, is the world’s first known architect by name. The design of the Step Pyramid is attributed to him in a set of texts carved on a stone base near the pyramid itself. He is also credited with a series of innovations in stonework, including the technique of building with fine limestone rather than mudbrick.

In his own lifetime, Imhotep was honored as a great architect and wise man. Within a few generations, he was worshipped as the son of the god Ptah and the god of wisdom, medicine, and architecture. The Greeks later identified him with their own god of medicine, Asclepius. The cult of Imhotep continued for more than two thousand years, and he was the only mortal Egyptian ever to be officially deified.

The Pyramid

The Step Pyramid of Djoser is, in its basic design, an enlarged version of the mastaba, the flat-roofed rectangular tomb that had been the standard royal tomb of the Early Dynastic Period. The architect Imhotep started with a single mastaba, then stacked five more, each smaller, on top of it. The result is a six-stepped monument about 60 meters (197 feet) high and 121 by 109 meters (397 by 358 feet) at the base.

The construction was a tour de force of stonework. The Egyptians had built smaller structures in stone before, but the Step Pyramid was the first large-scale stone building the world had ever seen. The techniques that Imhotep developed (fine limestone masonry, the use of columned halls, the design of underground burial chambers) would be used, in ever more ambitious forms, for the next 2,000 years.

The Burial Chamber

Below the Step Pyramid, a vertical shaft leads down 28 meters (92 feet) to the burial chamber, lined with granite imported from Aswan. The king’s mummy was placed in a granite sarcophagus at the very bottom of the shaft, sealed inside a chamber cut from the living rock. A system of tunnels, including a 1.6-kilometer (1-mile) gallery, connects the burial chamber to the rest of the complex.

In the New Kingdom, the pharaoh Amenhotep III and his father, the high priest of Ptah Menkheperreseneb, visited Djoser’s burial chamber and left behind votive offerings. The mummy of Djoser, however, was never found. It was probably destroyed in antiquity, or robbed at a date before the New Kingdom. The empty granite sarcophagus is still in the burial chamber.

The South Tomb

Beside the Step Pyramid, on the south side, is the South Tomb, a smaller, symbolic tomb that served as the eternal residence of the king’s ka, his spiritual double. The South Tomb is reached through a tunnel that runs under the Step Pyramid complex and emerges into a second underground chamber, lined with pink granite and decorated with relief carvings.

The South Tomb is one of the strangest features of the complex. It is small (about 28 meters on a side), and it duplicates, on a smaller scale, the design of the main pyramid. The king’s heart, or some other sacred object, may have been placed in the South Tomb. The Egyptological joke is that no one knows whether the South Tomb was a “dummy” for the real tomb above or whether the main pyramid is the dummy and the South Tomb is the real tomb; the question has been open since Petrie and is still genuinely open. Whatever the purpose, the dual tomb was a feature of the Step Pyramid design that other pharaohs would imitate for a thousand years.

The Complex

The Step Pyramid is at the center of an enormous ceremonial complex, designed by Imhotep, that covers about 60 acres. The complex is enclosed by a massive, finely cut limestone wall 10.5 meters (34 feet) high, with one opening in the south and one in the north. The wall is decorated with niches that imitate the facades of royal palaces. Inside, the buildings are decorated with delicate relief carvings of the king, of gods, and of ritual scenes.

The complex contains:

  • The Great South Court, an enormous rectangular open space used for ritual purposes.
  • The Sed Festival Court, where the king celebrated his jubilee, the Heb-Sed ceremony, in which the pharaoh’s fitness to rule was renewed.
  • The Heb-Sed courtyard, with dummy buildings and shrines, including a “dummy palace” whose facade imitates the royal residence.
  • The serdab, a small sealed room on the north side of the pyramid, containing a life-size statue of the king, through which a slit allows the king’s ka to look out at the offerings.
  • A series of dummy buildings, including dummy palaces and dummy shrines, designed to provide a complete set of buildings for the king’s afterlife.
  • The South Tomb, described above.

The dummy buildings are some of the most fascinating features of the complex. Several of them, including a dummy “palace” of the south, are designed to be viewed only from the inside; they have detailed exteriors, but blank, unfinished interiors. They are, in a sense, stage sets for the afterlife.

The Sed Festival

The Step Pyramid complex was also designed to host the king’s Heb-Sed festival, the jubilee ceremony that renewed the king’s vitality and his right to rule. The Heb-Sed was an important royal ritual in the Old Kingdom, and the Step Pyramid complex has two distinct Heb-Sed courts.

The festival itself involved a series of rituals in which the king ran between two markers and shot an arrow into a target. The point was to demonstrate, both physically and ritually, that the king was still fit to rule. The presence of two Heb-Sed courts in the Step Pyramid complex is unique.

The Visit to the Site

The Step Pyramid of Djoser was first excavated in the nineteenth century, when the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette uncovered the main temple of the complex. The site was then largely neglected for the better part of a century. In the 1920s, the British archaeologist Cecil Mallaby Firth began a systematic excavation, and the work was continued by his successor, the French Egyptologist Jean-Philippe Lauer.

Lauer worked on the Step Pyramid for more than fifty years, between 1926 and 1979, and is the person most associated with its modern restoration. In recent years, a new phase of restoration led by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has been in progress, and the Step Pyramid is now a major tourist destination. The most recent published work on the site is the 2024 Saqqara Survey Project report from a Waseda University team, which has used ground-penetrating radar to map structures in the South Cemetery that have never been excavated.