Djoser

Seal impressions with Djoser's name were found at the entrance to the tomb of Khasekhemwy at Abydos, which shows that he buried his predecessor and most likely succeeded him directly. A seal from Khasekhemwy's tomb calls Queen Nimaathap "mother of the king's children", and in a tomb at Beit Khallaf from Djoser's reign she is called "mother of the dual king". Djoser was therefore probably her son and Khasekhemwy's. The king lists of Abydos and Turin, written some 1,300 years later, put a king Nebka at the head of the dynasty, but most Egyptologists today regard Djoser as its founder.

The most famous man of Djoser's reign was Imhotep. The base of a statue of the pharaoh found in the pyramid complex gives his name with the titles of chancellor of the king of Lower Egypt, administrator of the great palace and high priest of Heliopolis. Most Egyptologists credit him with the design of the step pyramid, and Manetho remembered this reign for the invention of building in hewn stone. The name Imhotep also appears on the enclosure wall of the pyramid of Djoser's successor Sekhemkhet. About two thousand years later he was worshipped as a god of wisdom and medicine, whom the Greeks identified with Asclepius.

Djoser's tomb at Saqqara began as a square stone mastaba about 63 metres long and 8 metres high. It was enlarged several times, then turned into a pyramid of four steps and finally of six. The finished building measured about 121 by 109 metres at the base, rose to about 60 metres and was cased in fine white limestone. Never before had such a large building been raised entirely of stone, and its form prepared the way for the pyramids of the next dynasty. A shaft 28 metres deep led to the granite burial chamber, around which lay nearly six kilometres of corridors and galleries.

The pyramid stands in a complex of about 15 hectares, surrounded by a limestone wall 10.5 metres high and over 1.6 kilometres long, with fourteen false gates and only one real entrance. Inside are courts and stone copies of the buildings of the Sed festival, the jubilee that renewed the pharaoh's power, so that he could celebrate it for ever. Under the pyramid and the South Tomb, rooms lined with blue faience tiles imitate walls of reed mats, and reliefs show the pharaoh running the ritual course of the festival. In the galleries under the pyramid more than 40,000 stone vessels were found, many with the names of earlier pharaohs such as Den, Semerkhet, Nynetjer and Sekhemib.

On the north side of the pyramid, in a small closed chamber called a serdab, stood a painted limestone statue of the seated pharaoh. Through two holes in the front wall it could "look" at the rites performed in the temple. Found in 1924–1925, it is one of the oldest life-size Egyptian statues and is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, while a cast stands in its place at Saqqara. Djoser wears a long ceremonial cloak and a heavy wig under the royal headcloth, and his feet rest on the nine bows, the symbol of Egypt's enemies.

Rock inscriptions at Wadi Maghareh in Sinai show that Djoser sent expeditions there for turquoise and copper. Fragments of reliefs with his name come from Heliopolis and Gebelein, and he may have fixed the southern border of Egypt at the First Cataract. Djoser was remembered for a very long time. On Sehel Island near Aswan, priests of the Ptolemaic period carved the Famine Stela, which tells how in the eighteenth year of his reign the Nile had failed to flood for seven years, how Imhotep sought the cause and how the god Khnum of Elephantine promised that the river would rise again.

Djoser opened the Third Dynasty and the Old Kingdom. In his reign royal building passed from mud brick to stone, and the first pyramid, the model for all later ones, rose at Saqqara. His monuments show a state able to organise work on a scale never seen before, and the pharaoh remained a revered figure for more than two thousand years.