Gunter Dreyer has found Djoser’s sealings at Khasekhemwy’s Abydos tomb, which suggests that Djoser succeeded the last king of the 2nd Dynasty and finished his tomb. There is also a similarity in plan between Khasekhemwy’s Abydos funerary enclosure in mud-brick and the initial design of Djoser’s Step Pyramid complex in stone (see 5.6 and Plate 6.1).
From Djoser’s reign onward, kings of the Old Kingdom were buried in the north, and with his pyramid complex royal mortuary architecture takes a more monumental form, representing a new level of royal control of the state. This was the earliest large monument built in stone, an architectural feat much more labor intensive than the mud-brick construction of the earlier royal funerary enclosures and tombs. So impressive was this great monument that Djoser’s architect Imhotep (also the royal seal bearer and high priest of the cult of the sun god Ra) was later deified as the son of the god Ptah.
Exploration of the Step Pyramid complex began in the early 19th century, and in the 20*h century its main excavator was Jean-Philippe Lauer, a French architect who also reconstructed key portions of the complex. Covering an area of over 15 hectares (545 m X 278 m), the rectangular complex is about 2.5 times as large as the Old Kingdom town of Hierakonpolis. Niched limestone walls surrounded the complex, with only one entrance gateway near the southeastern corner, leading into a roofed passageway with 40 columns. The pyramid is not square but rectangular, and is not situated in the center of the complex. According to Lauer, it was built in six stages. It began as a rectangular, low flat structure termed a mastaba (meaning “bench” in Arabic), which was expanded twice. Only in its fourth stage was a four-stepped pyramid constructed.
During the last two building stages the pyramid was enlarged to six steps. Although the three mastabas had been built with rough stone cores covered by finer limestone casing stones, the later stepped structures were built with stone blocks in accretion layers that leaned inward. The final pyramid was 121 meters x 109 meters in area and 60 meters high.
The design of Djoser’s complex is unlike the plan of later Old Kingdom pyramid complexes (see Figure 6.2). The pyramid temple is located on the north side of the pyramid, where the king’s limestone statue (now in the Cairo Museum) was found in a small enclosed chamber termed the serdab. Two eye holes were cut for the statue through the serdabs northern wall. At the north end of the pyramid complex is a very large courtyard, still not fully cleared of debris, with an altar near the northern wall. Underground galleries along this wall contained real food - granaries of wheat and barley, but also figs, grapes, and bread. An extensive system of underground galleries, mostly inaccessible, is also located to the west of the pyramid and southern court.
To the east of the pyramid are two “dummy” buildings, filled with solid rubble, the so-called Houses of the North and South (possibly symbolic of Upper and Lower Egypt). To the southeast of the pyramid are more dummy buildings facing onto the sed-festival court, designed with the facades of shrines for provincial deities. According to Lauer, the “dummy” buildings were partially buried soon after construction, for the king’s use in his afterlife. Also partially buried was the so-called South Tomb at the southern end of the complex, with a small chapel along its northern wall. A stairway leads to a series of underground corridors and chambers, including a granite burial vault at the bottom of a large vertical shaft. This vault is too small for the king’s burial and it was possibly used to bury his viscera, which would have been embalmed separately. One room in the South Tomb has three niches with finely carved reliefs of the king, including one showing Djoser running the sed-festival race (see Figure 6.3).
Beneath the pyramid are more corridors and chambers, and a burial vault of granite blocks at the bottom of a vertical shaft 28 meters deep. The huge granite plug which blocked the vault’s ceiling weighed about 3.5 tons. There is also evidence of an earlier burial vault with travertine walls, and a limestone ceiling decorated with five-pointed stars. The original staircase to the underground rooms was covered over by the later pyramid, and a second descending passageway had to be cut to the north of the pyramid temple. Entered from 11 vertical shafts, some of the subterranean corridors lead to long narrow storerooms for an astonishing number of carved stone vessels (about 40,000!), many of which were made in the first two dynasties. Four galleries were also used for other burials - including an 18-year-old female whose hip bone was found. As in the South Tomb, there were three niches with reliefs of Djoser, and walls decorated with blue-glaze (faience) tiles.
In the large South Court, between the South Tomb and the pyramid, are curved stone cairns, which have been called territorial markers and are believed to be associated with the sed-festival, an important ritual for Egyptian kings known from Dynasty 0/late Predynastic times. The sed-festival (heb-sed) is sometimes translated as “jubilee”: it was a ceremony to ritually renew the powers of the king. In later tradition the sed-festival was ideally conducted after a king had reigned for 30 years. Scenes of the sed-festival
Evidence of ramp over northeast corner of enclosure wall
Western
Massifs
Boundary
Markers
Pyramid cut away to show stages of construction Northern temple
The South Tomb
The South Court
Pavilion of the South
Colonnade entrance
Area north of the pyramid Enclosure wall with not yet fully cleared Pavilion of bastions and dummy Court of the North doorways
The serdab
Temple T
Figure 6.2 Djoser’s Step Pyramid complex, Saqqara. Source: Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, p. 85
Figure 6.3 Relief of Djoser running the sed-festival race, from the so-called "South Tomb” at his Step Pyramid complex, Saqqara. © Roger Wood/CORBIS
Depict the king running between curved markers, and then seated on a double throne (symbolic of Upper and Lower Egypt) on a canopied dais and wearing a knee-length robe. The stone cairns in the Step Pyramid’s South Court were for the king’s sed-festival, symbolizing the king as the territorial claimant of all of Egypt. At the southern end of the complex’s sed-festival court is a real throne dais with two ramps (for a double throne?), also a constituent part of the festival. According to Barry Kemp, the whole Step Pyramid complex symbolizes, in an eternal form, the royal palace enclosure (in its most elaborate design) in which the king performed rituals associated with Egyptian kingship.
Many of the design elements carved in stone throughout the Step Pyramid complex mimic architecture in organic materials. The blue faience tiles in the niches below the pyramid and South Tomb resemble painted matting attached to wooden frames of shrines with curved roofs. Shrines in the sed-festival court have been reconstructed as replicating portable tent shrines, with a curved roof and open front, sitting on top of a platform. Some of the columns on the shrine facades have capitals of fluted leaves. The Houses of the North and South are a variation of this type of shrine. Attached to their facades are fluted lotus(?) columns symbolic of southern Egypt and papyrus columns for northern Egypt. The flat roof and facade of Temple T to the west of the sed-festival court represents an enclosed tent shrine. Ceiling stones in this temple are carved to look like wooden beams, as are those in the entrance colonnade, which has columns that resemble bundles of reeds. The translation into stone of architecture in perishable
Figure 6.4 Aerial photo of the Step Pyramid complex and three unfinished rectangular pyramid complexes at Saqqara, from old RAF aerial photographs taken in 1947. Courtesy of the Saqqara Geophysical Survey Project
Materials is also symbolic of the eternal nature of this monument. It was the tomb and palace in which royal ritual was to be performed for eternity.
More royal monuments are known for the 3rd Dynasty, but they were never completed. To the southwest of Djoser’s complex is the unfinished step pyramid complex of King Sekhemkhet, excavated by an Egyptian archaeologist, Zakaria Goneim, in the 1950s. This complex has a rectangular enclosure, but only the base of the pyramid was constructed. Also unfinished are galleries beneath the pyramid and a south tomb, in which the remains of a two-year-old child were found. An empty travertine sarcophagus was also found beneath the center of the pyramid. Some Egyptologists think that a large walled enclosure to the west of Sekhemkhet’s complex, called the Gisr el-Mudir, was built by a king named Nebka, but no tomb has been found there. Another 3rd-Dynasty step pyramid (generally called the “Layer Pyramid”), also unfinished, is located to the north of Saqqara at Zawiyet el-Aryan. It probably belonged to King Khaba.
Although the 3rd-Dynasty kings who succeeded Djoser began to construct pyramid complexes, they were unable to complete them. According to the king lists, Djoser had a longer reign than either Sekhemkhet or Khaba, allowing the grandiose plan for his pyramid complex to be completed during his lifetime. But Djoser also seems to have had greater control of resources - both material and human - for the construction of his mortuary monument than the later kings of this dynasty. The history of the later 3rd Dynasty is not well known, it has been suggested that the unfinished royal monuments represent a weakening in the kingship following Djoser’s reign.
The symbolism of the step pyramid form is unknown, but it may be associated with the concept of a royal/state monument. Seven small step pyramids, which are not tombs, were built in the provinces. Five of these are in Upper Egypt, including ones at Elephantine and Naqada. Stephan Seidlmayer has suggested that there may have been plans to build such monuments in each provincial center. Some of them may never have been built, while others may have been destroyed or lost over the millennia. The provincial step pyramids were probably monumental symbols of the crown - especially the royal mortuary cult - and the extraction of resources throughout the country for its support.
The form of the step pyramid, as a royal tomb or monument, did not survive the 3rd Dynasty. With the increased theological importance of the sun-god Ra in the subsequent dynasties of the Old Kingdom, the royal pyramid became a smooth-sided form, possibly symbolic of the rays of the sun. Culminating in Djoser’s pyramid complex, the large walled funerary enclosure, which may have been symbolic of the royal palace and royal rituals there, also did not survive the 3rd Dynasty, as the pyramid complex became symbolic of the king’s connection to Ra.
High officials of the 3rd Dynasty also built tombs at Saqqara, but these were mud-brick mastabas which had evolved from 2nd-Dynasty types. In the 1860s Auguste Mariette examined a number of these tombs, including those of Hesyra and Khabau-Soker. In niches in the western wall of Hesyra’s mastaba, which was 39.0 meters x 17.4 meters, were finely carved wooden panels of the official shown with his writing equipment, with his titles carved in hieroglyphs. The tomb beneath the mastaba consisted of three levels of chambers and galleries, connected by vertical shafts.
Not all of the large private tombs of the 3rd Dynasty were built in the Memphis region, however. In 1900-1 John Garstang excavated several 3rd-Dynasty mastaba tombs at Bet Khallaf, to the northwest of Abydos. The largest of these mastabas (K 1) was truly enormous (85.5 m x 46.2 m, and 8 m high in 1900). Sealings of Djoser were found in this tomb, which contained an elaborate complex of subterranean chambers and galleries entered by a series of stairways and a ramp. Although the last royal burial at Abydos was that of Khasekhemwy (end of the 2nd Dynasty; see 5.6), some very high status persons were still being buried in the Abydos region (at Bet Khallaf and Reqaqna) in the 3rd Dynasty.
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