Saqqara is where Egyptian monumental architecture began. The Step Pyramid of Djoser — built around 2650 BCE by the architect Imhotep — was the first large stone structure ever built. Around it grew the largest necropolis in Egypt, used for over three thousand years by pharaohs, officials, priests, and sacred animals. And inside several of Saqqara's later pyramids are the Pyramid Texts: the oldest religious corpus in human history, covering the walls in spells for navigating the afterlife.
The Step Pyramid of Djoser (c. 2650 BCE) is the oldest large-cut stone structure in the world — six mastabas of decreasing size stacked into a six-stepped pyramid rising 62 metres above the desert floor. Its architect, Imhotep, was so revered for this achievement that he was eventually deified — worshipped as a god of medicine and wisdom, identified by the Greeks with Asclepius. He is one of the very few non-royal Egyptians whose name survived into posterity.
The Step Pyramid complex is surrounded by an elaborate enclosure wall with 14 false doors and one real entrance — a symbolic architecture of passage and restriction that anticipates the theological preoccupations of Egyptian religion for the next three millennia. The underground galleries beneath the pyramid are decorated with blue faience tiles imitating reed matting, and contain the remains of Djoser and members of the royal family.
What makes Saqqara particularly significant is what came after. The pyramid of Djoser began a tradition — every Old Kingdom pharaoh built at or near Saqqara, and the plateau became a palimpsest of burial monuments: mastabas, pyramids, shaft tombs, animal necropolises, and processional causeways accumulated across three thousand years of continuous use.
Imhotep came as near to being a universal genius as Egypt ever produced. He was architect, physician, chief minister, and scribe — and the Egyptians knew it. They made him a god.
— James Henry Breasted, A History of EgyptIn 1881, the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero entered the pyramid of Unas — last pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, c. 2375 BCE — and found the internal chambers covered floor to ceiling with columns of hieroglyphic text painted in blue-green pigment on white limestone. They were the Pyramid Texts: 228 spells (or utterances) designed to ensure the safe passage of the dead pharaoh through the Duat (underworld) and his union with the sun god Ra in the eternal sky.
Similar texts were subsequently found in the pyramids of Teti, Pepi I, Merenre, and Pepi II — pharaohs of the Sixth Dynasty. Together they constitute the oldest religious corpus in the world, predating the Sanskrit Vedas, the Hebrew scriptures, and the Mesopotamian epic traditions in their written form.
Beyond the Step Pyramid complex, Saqqara extends for miles in every direction — a vast field of tombs, mastabas, and shaft graves representing every period of Egyptian history from the First Dynasty to the Christian era. Major highlights include the Serapeum — vast underground galleries housing the burials of the sacred Apis bulls in enormous granite sarcophagi, each weighing 60–70 tonnes — and the mastaba tombs of Old Kingdom nobles decorated with some of the finest relief carving in Egypt.
Recent excavations — ongoing as of 2024 — continue to produce remarkable discoveries. A sealed shaft tomb found in 2020 contained over 100 intact coffins from the New Kingdom, undisturbed for 2,500 years. Saqqara is not an exhausted site. It is a site where the ground itself is still speaking.
Imhotep's tomb: The tomb of Imhotep has never been found. He was deified and worshipped for centuries, and a temple to him existed at Saqqara — but where he was actually buried, if he was buried in the necropolis at all, remains unknown. The discovery of his tomb, when and if it occurs, would be one of the major Egyptological finds of the century.