Egypt's 4,600-year-old pyramid of Zoser: a history of cities in 50 buildings

We kick off our new, 50-part series with a building that changed the course of human history. Erected in Memphis, one of the world’s first purpose-built cities, the step-pyramid of Zoser is the oldest large-scale stone monument still standing

No building underlines Memphis’s significance in the annals of urban life as much as the step-pyramid of Zoser. Photograph: Chronicle/Alamy

The talk in Egypt these days is of a brand-new capital. The government wants to build a new seat of power to the east of Cairo, entirely from scratch. A city that, if finished, would in terms of population be the world’s biggest-ever purpose-built capital. “A place,” Egypt’s housing minister said this week, “that would unite all the sections of Egyptian society.”

It is a bold claim – but not a new one. The story of early urban life in Egypt is a story of capitals shifting from one new city to the next. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, rulers changed capitals to enforce a sense of national renewal or unity – a trend that began with the first purpose-built capital of a united Egypt, some 5,000 years ago.

Little is left of Memphis now, its few ruins lying just beyond the southern limits of modern-day Cairo. But in the centuries after its founding in around 2900 BC, Memphis became by some estimates the biggest settlement in the world. Erected in a strategic location between the newly unified northern and southern Egypt, it is arguably one of the first purpose-built cities in human history.

“We know of other earlier [Egyptian] cities,” says Ana Tavares, an archaeologist who spent years researching parts of Memphis. “But this was the first city that was built very deliberately, to make a statement about the new country.”

Perhaps no building underlines Memphis’s significance within the annals of urban life as much as a huge tomb on its outskirts: the 4,600-year-old step-pyramid of Zoser (or Djoser), one of the early Egyptian pharaohs.

The pyramids at Giza are infinitely more famous than Zoser’s. The pyramids at Dahshur are bigger. But none of them might have been built had Zoser’s not come first, in about 2600 BC.

The pyramid of Zoser: a ‘revolutionary idea that changed the course of human history’. Photograph: Danita Delimont/Alamy

For his step-pyramid is not only the first of its kind. It is also the world’s oldest large-scale stone monument to survive more or less intact (the nearby Gisr el-Mudir may have been even broader, but did not survive antiquity). Its experimental construction was therefore a major turning-point in the evolution of stone architecture.

As the Egyptian actor Omar Sharif remarks in a video now shown at the site, Zoser’s pyramid “was this revolutionary idea that changed the course of human history”.

In the early years of the pharaonic era, dead kings were buried in vast rectangular slabs, made of mud-bricks, and known as mastabas. The point was to preserve the king’s soul for the afterlife. Zoser’s pyramid was the first finished attempt at something much grander – a storied stone structure that could send the soul towards the heavens.

Built a few hundred years after the establishment of Memphis, the pyramid was the product of considerable advances in construction techniques at the time. Instead of making just one mud-brick mastaba, Zoser’s builders built six limestone ones, each smaller than the last, and placed them on top of each other. The result was a series of six huge steps, 62 metres high, that formed the Burj Khalifa of their day. Or in Sharif’s words, “an ascending passage towards the beyond, a revolutionary conception that would influence the entire history of Egyptian architecture”.

Inside the mastaba of Idut, a tomb in the shadow of the step-pyramid.

Like the mooted new capital of modern-day president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, there was a hint of nation-building to Pharaoh Zoser’s grandiose creation. The northern part of its enclosure was an extension – and some think it represents northern Egypt, which had only recently come under the firm control of the southern kings. “The significance may be that it reflects the consolidation of the ‘unified’ Egypt,” says David Jeffreys, who directed the Egypt Exploration Society’s survey of Memphis.

But the pyramid had practical as well as symbolic significance. Stone has become the defining feature of any city. But at that time buildings were largely made with reeds, mud-brick and wood, using what are now forgotten techniques. The step-pyramid was one of the first times architects dabbled with stone on such a monumental scale – and their attempts to experiment can be seen in the building itself.

“The way the complex develops shows how they were getting more sure of themselves,” says Tavares. “They start with one [stone] mastaba, and they realise that it holds. So they build another [on top], and that holds. And so they build another mastaba on top of that. And so on. They don’t set out with a specific idea – it evolved as the building went on.”

Despite working in a new medium, Zoser’s builders seem to have been reluctant to let go of the aesthetics of the old one. A stone fence is carved to look like it’s still made from reeds. Columns evoke bundles of papyrus. And here and there you can find the charming mistakes of builders unused to working with this new material of stone. If a bit of stone needed replacing, instead of removing the whole slab, it seems the builders would swap only the damaged part of it – as if they were working with wood.

“Eventually, when they get more sure of their use of stone, they move on to different kinds of architecture, and that results in the pyramids at Giza and Dahshur,” says Tavares. “But the Zoser pyramid is at the cusp between the earlier tradition of mud-brick and reed, and a later tradition of stone. It’s a glimpse onto a different kind of architecture.”

The company tasked with preserving the pyramid of Zoser was instead recently accused of ruining it. Photograph: Mohamed El-Shahed/AFP

It’s also a glimpse, perhaps, of the world’s first starchitect. No one was ever explicitly named as the pyramid’s designer, but the widely-held belief is that it was a man called Imhotep, whose name is found on a statue near the entrance to the pyramid. Imhotep’s abilities appear to have been extraordinary: other records show he was a doctor and high priest, as well as the king’s chief carpenter, head sculptor, and second-in-command. Years after his death, he was given the status of a god.

As Jeffreys says: “Imhotep becomes himself an iconic figure, not only architect – and possibly not one at all in the technical sense – but an early power merchant. How else could the labour for the pyramid be arranged and organised on a national scale?”

The ambition of his creation nods to the growing power and bureaucracy of the world’s first nation-state. To build Zoser’s pyramid, Egypt needed not just workers, but managers and civil servants. In previous generations, historians think the royal family might have dealt with most of the country’s administration. But the expansion of Memphis’s burial grounds forced the creation of “a more structured bureaucracy, opened up, for the first time, to career professionals drawn from a wider section of society and promoted on merit”, writes Toby Wilkinson in The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. “As Egypt embarked on pyramid-building, the pyramids were building Egypt.”

That the step-pyramid survives today tells us much about the glory of the city it was built in. But that little else of Memphis remains alongside it is also testament to one of the earliest versions of urban decay.

Memphis lasted for over three and a half millennia. But it was abandoned in the seventh century AD, when Fustat – the precursor to modern Cairo – rose on the opposite bank of the Nile. Its biggest monuments endure to this day, while the smaller buildings of the city lie mostly under sand.

Jeffreys worries that within 30 years, many of these buried and unexamined ruins will be lost forever. The rate of local construction has left him fearing that much of the old site will soon be built over. The fate of Dahshur, where in 2013 villagers built a modern cemetery above the remains of an ancient one, is an example of what could be to come.

Even the attempts to restore Zoser’s now-crumbling pyramid highlight the transient nature of urban glory. The company tasked with preserving it was instead recently accused of ruining it. A concerned watchdog said it had smothered its ancient stones with too modern a new surface.

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Egypt’s 4,600-year-old pyramid of Zoser: a history of cities in 50 buildings

We kick off our new, 50-part series with a building that changed the course of human history. Erected in Memphis, one of the world’s first purpose-built cities, the step-pyramid of Zoser is the oldest large-scale stone monument still standing

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