The explanation for such similarities that there are between pyramid and ziggurat may be that they both originated in the same archetype, common to peoples in the Near East five thousand years ago, at an earlier stage of social development. There are many such symbols: the familiar triangular pyramids are clearly a more particularly Egyptian form though even these were to be repeated coincidentally in other cultures, distant in time and clime. Perhaps at the beginning of the third millennium men felt they had, for whatever reasons, to build imitation mountains and to give them a markedly terraced appearance. In Mesopotamia the idea prevailed; in Egypt it did not and the familiar colossal stone triangles evolved.
To the Egyptians, with their belief in the divine order represented by the king, it was a witness to the unique bond which existed between their land and the heavens. Indeed, mysterious and gleaming, it must have seemed like part of the immortal mansions brought down to earth. So the complex seemed to tourists who visited it during the New Kingdom, more than a thousand years after it had been built. The buildings were still then, it seems, intact; visitors left admiring graffiti on the walls which can still be seen, recalling perhaps some second millennium Memphite family’s outing to this numinous place.
From time to time, during the early centuries of its existence when it was still a living temple, the sound of chanting and of music, essential components of all rituals in Egypt, would have been heard across the silent spaces between its lonely eminence and the city of Memphis which lay below it. The sounds must have seemed like the echoes of the stars singing as the priests went about their business of perpetuating the life of Egypt through the ceremonies of giving life to Netjerykhet. Its mystery would have been compounded by the fact that all but the king, his courtiers, and the priests would be excluded from the temple precincts.
The achievement represented by the Step Pyramid complex is far greater than that for which the later pyramids, of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure stand. They are remarkable, certainly, but they show a clear line of descent from other monuments, including this first pyramid of all at Saqqara. Neither Khufu’s pyramid nor those of his successors are sui generis; that of
Netjerykhet undoubtedly is. Every element in it is original; it is a compendium of architectural invention. It is also remarkable for what it reveals about the development of large-scale sculpture, a technique which began with the statue of Ninetjer and Khasekhem-Khasekhemwy. Netjerykhet’s complex contained evidence of large statues of the king and, no doubt, of the gods. Most of these are lost but one unfinished limestone figure of the king and parts of others survive.
There is however one point of contact between pyramid and ziggurat. Both were obviously forms of the ‘sacred mountain’, an archetype of the highest antiquity, representing the place on which divinities were accustomed to manifest themselves. It is notable that neither Egypt nor Sumer are really well supplied with anything that could be dignified with the term ‘mountain’, other than Egypt’s Red Sea mountains and the Zagros range to the east of Sumer. It may well be that the reverence with which both peoples regarded the idea of the mountain represents the recollection of a land which had a special significance — it has been suggested that it was their original mutual home — which was itself mountainous; again, the question must remain entirely speculative at this stage. It is interesting nonetheless that the hieroglyph for ‘foreign country’ is a sign showing mountain peaks.8
It is probably unrewarding to seek for other explanations of one of the most perfectly satisfying shapes in relation to its environment that architecture, sacred or profane, has ever evolved. The Greeks, who had a faculty when dealing with the works of foreigners of reacting either with superstitious awe or with startling banality, called the pyramids (in Egyptian, met) ‘little cakes’, pyramidoi, a description of quite overwhelming inappositeness but one which has given them their name today.
World History
