Age of Pyramids; Egypt’s Old Kingdom
Photographs by Kenneth Garrett
When the subjects of Pharaoh Djoser first looked upon his giant tomb more than 46 centuries ago, they probably trembled. Rising more than 200 feet above the stark sand, it designed to awe the ancient Egyptians, to impress them with their ruler’s godlike strength. At the time, it was the biggest and finest monument any monarch had ever commanded. Its bold shape—six great tiers of decreasing size—announced a divine truth that the humblest passerby in Djoser’s time understood. The Step Pyramid was a ladder. Not the symbol of a ladder but an actual one, by which the soul of the dead ruler might climb to the sky, joining the gods in immortality.
Like the Step Pyramid, ancient Egypt seemed to rise out of nothing. Only a few generations before Djoser’s reign, the civilization crowded along the Nile amounted to a mere patchwork of nomes—small regional chiefdoms, each with its separate gods and government. Experts today only dimly grasp the forces that prompted those quarreling provinces to become one of the most advanced civilization of its time, but many believe that the building of Djoser’s pyramid complex, accomplished by hundreds of workers from across the land, served to join those provinces into the world’s first nation state—Egypt’s Old Kingdom.
NGM 1995/01