Saqqara and the Step Pyramid of Djoser

Saqqara is the necropolis of Memphis, the first capital of a unified Egypt. It is about half an hour south of Giza and it gets a fraction of the visitors, which is one of the better anomalies in Egyptian tourism.

Its centrepiece, the Step Pyramid of Djoser, is the oldest large-scale cut-stone structure anywhere. Everything at Giza is its descendant.

If Giza shows you the pyramid perfected, Saqqara shows you the pyramid being invented. Djoser's monument began as a flat-topped mastaba and was enlarged upward in stages into six diminishing tiers — you can read the design changing its own mind in the masonry.

The tombs are the other reason. Several Old Kingdom mastabas here keep their painted and carved wall scenes, and they are among the best-preserved anywhere: cattle being counted, boats being built, fish being gutted, musicians playing. After the bare interiors of the Giza pyramids, the contrast is startling.

And Saqqara is quiet. On a normal morning you can be alone inside a 4,400-year-old tomb, which almost never happens at Giza.

Djoser's complex was built in the 27th century BC and is traditionally credited to Imhotep, his chief official — one of the very few non-royal Egyptians whose name survived to be worshipped as a god in his own right.

The site did not stop there. Saqqara kept receiving burials for over three thousand years, through the Old Kingdom, the New Kingdom, the Late Period and into Ptolemaic and Roman times. That long occupation is why excavation here still produces new discoveries almost every season, including large caches of sealed coffins found in recent years.

The Serapeum, a rock-cut gallery of enormous granite sarcophagi that held the mummified Apis bulls, was cleared in the 19th century by Auguste Mariette. The scale of the boxes — each cut from a single block and weighing many tonnes — is the thing visitors remember.

A niched limestone wall roughly 545 metres by 275 enclosed the whole precinct, with fourteen false gateways and one real entrance at the south-east corner. The Heb-Sed court chapels inside were built solid — stone copies of reed and timber buildings, never meant to be entered.

Much of what stands was put back by hand. Jean-Philippe Lauer, a French architect, arrived in 1926 and spent some seventy years re-erecting Saqqara's fallen blocks; the entrance colonnade is largely his. The pyramid itself was stabilised from 2006 and its interior reopened in 2020.

• The Step Pyramid of Djoser and its restored enclosure wall and entrance colonnade
• The Serapeum, with its galleries of colossal granite bull sarcophagi
• The Mastaba of Ti — some of the finest Old Kingdom relief anywhere
• The Tomb of Mereruka, the largest non-royal Old Kingdom tomb on the site
• The Pyramid of Unas, with the earliest known Pyramid Texts carved on its chamber walls
• The Imhotep Museum at the entrance, small and genuinely good
• The Heb-Sed court, lined with dummy chapels built solid in stone
• The serdab against the north face, where a copy of Djoser's seated statue looks out through two holes