History

Saqqara became Egypt’s royal necropolis during the 1st Dynasty, around 3100 BC, when pharaohs began constructing massive mud-brick mastaba tombs here. The decisive moment came under the 3rd Dynasty pharaoh Djoser, whose chief architect Imhotep transformed a standard flat-topped mastaba into six tapering stages of cut limestone — a stepped pyramid rising 62 metres. It was the first time human beings had deliberately built a large structure from quarried stone, and the logic Imhotep devised — column architecture, corbelled ceilings, dressed ashlar blocks — cascaded forward through every subsequent tradition of stone construction on earth.

Over the next two and a half millennia, Saqqara never lost its prestige. Old Kingdom pharaohs of the 5th and 6th Dynasties clustered their pyramids around Djoser’s, filling their interior chambers with the dense hieroglyphic inscriptions now known as the Pyramid Texts — spells, hymns, and astronomical observations that constitute the oldest religious literature known to survive. The Mastaba of Ti, a 5th Dynasty official buried here around 2400 BC, preserves painted reliefs of hunting, farming, and butchery scenes whose freshness of observation still surprises visitors who round its internal corridors.

In 1851 the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette followed a half-buried sphinx’s head through the desert sand and excavated his way to the Serapeum — a subterranean labyrinth begun under Ramesses II around 1280 BC. Inside, the sequential burial vaults of the sacred Apis bulls held twenty-four monolithic granite sarcophagi, each weighing between sixty and eighty tonnes, transported from Aswan along the Nile and manoeuvred underground in an engineering feat scholars still struggle to fully explain. Saqqara has been excavated continuously since Mariette’s first season, and in 2023 a joint Egyptian-European mission uncovered 250 mummies along with gilded wooden coffins in a shaft tomb complex that had lain sealed since the Late Period.