Saqqara, Memphis and Dahshur: The First Pyramids

1. 

   Chapter 1 · Morning · Djoser's complex

   The first time anyone built in stone at this scale

   A narrow gap in a long panelled wall. You squeeze through, into a corridor of stone.

   Everything here is pretending. Blocks the size of mud bricks, chapels copying pavilions of wood and reed, pillars painted red like timber. Nobody had built in stone this big before.

   Then you come out into the sun, and there it is: six steps, about sixty metres high. The first pyramid.

   The king's name on its walls is Netjerykhet. Djoser is what visitors called him, more than a thousand years later.

   Look for: On the north side, the serdab: a stone box with two eyeholes, through which the king's statue watched the stars that never set.

   Sources: Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (1997), pp. 84–92; Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (2018), p. 100; Ian Shaw and Elizabeth Bloxam (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Egyptology (2020), pp. 432–435.

2. 

   Chapter 2 · At the edge of the desert

   The first architect with a name

   Imhotep's name appears beside his king's on a statue base. The Step Pyramid is the first great building in history credited to a known person.

   Later Egyptians made him a sage. Later still, a god of healing, whom the Greeks matched with their own Asklepios.

   One hall belongs to Jean-Philippe Lauer, who came in 1926 for eight months, and stayed seventy years putting the complex back together.

   Sources: Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2011), p. 57; Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (2018), pp. 158–159; Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (1997), p. 62.

3. 

   Chapter 3 · Midday · Mit Rahina

   A capital under the palms

   This was the White Wall, Egypt's early capital. Its temple of Ptah may have given the whole country its Greek name: Aigyptos.

   Almost all of it is now under fields, palm groves and a village. What stays above ground is a king.

   Ramesses the Second, in limestone, nearly thirteen metres from head to knees. He once stood outside the temple.

   Sources: Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt (2000), pp. 114–115; Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (1997), p. 78.

4. 

   Chapter 4 · Afternoon

   Where Sneferu learned to build a pyramid

   Two shapes on the horizon, about a kilometre apart. Between them, a king learning the hard way how to build a pyramid.

   Sneferu's first try began steep, about fifty-five degrees. The ground shifted. Partway up, they changed the angle to forty-three.

   “a completed pyramid, but a seriously botched job”

   So he started again, at the gentle angle from the first stone. The Red Pyramid rose clean and true, probably as his tomb.

   His son Khufu built Giza on what was learned in this desert.

   Look for: On the Bent Pyramid, much of the smooth casing is still in place, stripped only from the corners.

   Sources: Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (1997), pp. 101–105; Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2011), p. 64.

Times of day set the scene; your written quote confirms the timetable. Facts come from the sources named under each chapter, and where we give an opinion, it reads as ours.