A Third Dynasty pyramid which was discovered at Saqqara in the 1950s18 was found to be of one of Nerjerykher’s successors, the King Sekhemkhet; his complex is also 536 metres long (presumably there is some significance in the figure) but only 187 metres wide. When the pyramid, or what remained of it, was excavated a beautifully made sarcophagus, evidently unopened, was found in the tomb. The flowers which had been laid on the stone from which the sarcophagus was carved were still lying there. The opening to the sarcophagus when it was found, sealed as the priests had left it, was a curious portcullis type of device; nothing quite like it had been found before. It may be imagined with what tense anticipation and excitement the opening, and the intact burial evidently contained within it, excited: alas, for nothing. The sarcophagus was empty. What was more it had evidently always been empty; no dead man was ever lain to rest within it. The reason why this should have been so is an enigma. Netjerykhet did have two alternative burial places available to him apparently, though both were contained within his great funerary complex. The complex itself was a microcosm of Egypt; it is possible that this is also the explanation for Sekhemkhet’s otherwise rather weirdly empty coffin, in an empty pyramid. This enigma is if anything compounded by the possibility that Sekhemkhet’s pyramid complex, though uncompleted, may have been designed by Imhotep himself.
THE STEPPED PYRAMID AS ROYAL SYMBOL
The central building in the complex at Saqqara, though it is by far the most majestic and extensive, is not the only stepped pyramid in Egypt. There are several other examples, at Edfu, at Kula near Hierakonpolis, Naqada, Zawyet el-Meiyitin, Abydos and Elephantine,19 in addition that at Sela, near Fayoum, has been associated with one of Netjerykhet’s most distinguished successors, King Sneferu. It is not clear why there should have been this crop of much smaller stepped structures erected at this particular time in Egypt although it has been suggested that they may have been set up in various parts of Egypt as a form of propaganda for the royal power. They tend to be prominently sited in the places where they were built, though not invariably so.20 It may be that the potent symbolism of the terraced mound was their inspiration, once the monument at Saqqara had come into being.
The pyramid at Kula, north of Hierakonpolis, excited interest when it was first identified because it was oriented in the same directions as were Mesopotamian ziggurats. However, just as the stepped profile of Third Dynasty pyramids, from Netjerykhet’s onwards, is the product of a time long before the Mesopotamians built ziggurats another explanation than direct influence from Mesopotamia to Egypt must be sought, despite the fact that the great fortress at Hierakonpolis shares the same orientation as Kula. Hierakonpolis reveals many factors which seem to echo or to anticipate Mesopotamian forms. The enigma therefore remains.
The great sunburst of creative genius represented by the erection of the Netjerykhet complex is an extraordinary incident in the life of man. Nothing could have prepared the world for the Step Pyramid; yet those who later followed him on the thrones of Egypt managed to universalize the burial of Egyptian Kings to the extent that they have become a virtual commonplace, familiar to generations who would never see them, as expressions either of the triumph of the human spirit or as monuments to wilful selfaggrandizement.
The soaring terraces of the Step Pyramid represented an apotheosis of the rectangular brick mastaba of the early kings. The creation of the true pyramid, the three-dimensional linked triangles, which is so perfect and so satisfying a shape, coincided with the beginnings of the solar cult; as was suggested earlier, the pyramid’s shape may well have been inspired by the shafts of sunlight piercing through the winter clouds in the vicinity of Heliopolis, in the startling triangular formation that they sometimes adopt, thrusting downwards from the heavens to the earth. The pyramid reverses the process, reaching up from the earth into the heavens.
World History
