CONSTRUCTION

What Imhotep proposed was that the king should occupy for ever a central place in a great rectangular shrine, built of blocks of limestone finely, even exquisitely, worked, which would simulate the land of Egypt. Its centre was to be a great tower (the result of several developments itself) which would rear up, in six stages, each stage stepped up from the one below it, a veritable stairway to the region of the Imperishable Stars, beyond which the king would reign for all eternity. A stellar orientation for buildings, rather than a solar one, is a characteristic of the Third Dynasty and represents the culmination of what may have been one of the most important aspects of aboriginal Egyptian cults, soon to be subsumed into the worship of the sun.

The dimensions and quantities of what Imhotep eventually created for Netjerykhet are immense. The wall which surrounded the stepped pyramid complex measured 536 metres in length by 272 metres in breadth: it is 10.5 metres high, built of fine limestone, one million tons of which were quarried, dressed and laid in courses of spectacular precision.9 Surrounding the wall was an enormous trench, the purpose of which is unclear. At first Imhotep planned to build a pyramid raised to four steps; then he took the final decision to raise the steps to six. This decision increased the volume of stone from 200,000 tons to 850,000 tons.10 It should be remembered at this point that we are in Egypt around the year 2650 BC.

Of fine white limestone, brilliantly polished, to cover the outer courses, 70,000 square metres were required. These had to be cut, trimmed exactly, polished, and fitted into place over the monument’s entire surface. Within the courtyard Imhotep built dummy buildings, granaries, and store houses, not unlike those on the model estate built during King Aha’s reign not far from the Step Pyramid, but infinitely finer in conception and execution and immeasurably greater in scale.

Netjerykhet is thought to have reigned for nineteen years, though this seems little enough time for so much to have been achieved. Assuming that Imhotep began work on the mastaba which was to become a pyramid on the first day of the king’s reign, he would have needed to excavate, dress, transport, decorate and place in position one hundred and twenty tons of limestone every day for the remainder of the king’s lifetime.

Around the colossal central mountain of stone blocks, beneath which the king’s body and those of his closest family would lie forever the land of Egypt, north and south, would be laid out, that the king might review it when he chose and, at the same time confer the ineffable benevolence of his presence over the lands for ever. Granaries, storerooms, temples, palaces for ‘the Great Ones’, stations for the enactment of the sacred dramas were all laid out — and all built in the same glorious, exquisitely worked stone which, in the brilliant sunlight of Egypt, now takes on a wonderful golden hue.

Imhotep, with the confidence of genius, created this unique building in one lifetime on the rocky escarpment which overlooks the ancient capital of Memphis. His confidence was not overreaching. Throughout the complex, one of the largest as well as one of the earliest consciously designed major projects in history, Imhotep was inspired by natural forms: the tall-standing papyrus, the lotus closed or open, the palm trunk. These he modelled in stone with a divine plasticity; nonetheless he was working with materials the properties of which must largely have been unknown to him. What stresses might a stone lintel bear? How to convey the sense of half opened timber door, or a roller blind, pulled down against the sun, in stone.

Imhotep solved virtually all the problems he set himself, brilliantly. Only in one place did his assurance, perhaps, falter. At the single entrance to the whole complex the visitor, even today, passes through a peaceful colonnade, a small hypostyle hall. Imhotep here wished to use columns to support the roof and sought to simulate the bundles of reeds which served the purpose of strengthening walls and doorways in reed or wattle buildings. He built his columns of elegant rose brick, facing them with finely carved skins of limestone, imitating reeds. But then — who knew what weight the columns might support? If Imhotep was in touch with colleagues in Mesopotamia he may well have received discouraging reports of the effectiveness of columns in, for example, temple structures which showed a disappointing tendency to fall down, slumping inelegantly into rubble heaps, to the peril of both the users of the buildings and the architects’ reputation. Did Imhotep know, perhaps, of the fickleness of columns?

In any event Imhotep supplied his own solution. The columns stand in Netjerykhet’s hall to this day, five thousand years later and with some assistance from archaeology. They were originally engaged columns, bonded to the walls on either side of the entrance area by solid blocks of limestone: they still endure, if a little apprehensively, clinging to the supporting walls. It is this element of dilemma, even more than the sublimity of the design and the construction of the complex as a whole, which demonstrates both the humanity and the genius of Imhotep.

How did he find craftsmen capable of working the stone, train them, devise tools for them, work out the complexities of the spatial divisions, design all the details (or at least, supervise their design) and be on site every day to see that the huge number of men engaged on the project was properly deployed? The site itself at Saqqara presents one of the anomalies which seem always to attend any consideration of the techniques which went into the construction of the pyramids. The subterranean rock from which the galleries were cut linking the various parts of the underground chambers of the tomb itself is so hard that modern investigation of parts of the area has had to be effected by the use of explosives,11 yet the Egyptians in the first half of the third millennium achieved their excavation, presumably without such assistance. We may ask such questions but we cannot supply the answers.