http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/23/egypt-pyramid-zoser-history-cities-50-buildings
Egypt's 4,600-year-old pyramid of Zoser: a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 1
We kick off our new, 50-part series with a building that changed the course of human history. Erected in Memphis, one of the world’s first purpose-built cities, the step-pyramid of Zoser is the oldest large-scale stone monument still standing
The talk in Egypt these days is of a brand-new capital. The government wants to build a new seat of power to the east of Cairo, entirely from scratch. A city that, if finished, would in terms of population be the world’s biggest-ever purpose-built capital. “A place,” Egypt’s housing minister said this week, “that would unite all the sections of Egyptian society.”
It is a bold claim – but not a new one. The story of early urban life in Egypt is a story of capitals shifting from one new city to the next. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, rulers changed capitals to enforce a sense of national renewal or unity – a trend that began with the first purpose-built capital of a united Egypt, some 5,000 years ago.
Little is left of Memphis now, its few ruins lying just beyond the southern limits of modern-day Cairo. But in the centuries after its founding in around 2900 BC, Memphis became by some estimates the biggest settlement in the world. Erected in a strategic location between the newly unified northern and southern Egypt, it is arguably one of the first purpose-built cities in human history.
“We know of other earlier [Egyptian] cities,” says Ana Tavares, an archaeologist who spent years researching parts of Memphis. “But this was the first city that was built very deliberately, to make a statement about the new country.”
Perhaps no building underlines Memphis’s significance within the annals of urban life as much as a huge tomb on its outskirts: the 4,600-year-old step-pyramid of Zoser (or Djoser), one of the early Egyptian pharaohs.
The pyramids at Giza are infinitely more famous than Zoser’s. The pyramids at Dahshur are bigger. But none of them might have been built had Zoser’s not come first, in about 2600 BC.
For his step-pyramid is not only the first of its kind. It is also the world’s oldest large-scale stone monument to survive more or less intact (the nearby Gisr el-Mudir may have been even broader, but did not survive antiquity). Its experimental construction was therefore a major turning-point in the evolution of stone architecture.
As the Egyptian actor Omar Sharif remarks in a video now shown at the site, Zoser’s pyramid “was this revolutionary idea that changed the course of human history”.
In the early years of the pharaonic era, dead kings were buried in vast rectangular slabs, made of mud-bricks, and known as mastabas. The point was to preserve the king’s soul for the afterlife. Zoser’s pyramid was the first finished attempt at something much grander – a storied stone structure that could send the soul towards the heavens.
Built a few hundred years after the establishment of Memphis, the pyramid was the product of considerable advances in construction techniques at the time. Instead of making just one mud-brick mastaba, Zoser’s builders built six limestone ones, each smaller than the last, and placed them on top of each other. The result was a series of six huge steps, 62 metres high, that formed the Burj Khalifa of their day. Or in Sharif’s words, “an ascending passage towards the beyond, a revolutionary conception that would influence the entire history of Egyptian architecture”.
Like the mooted new capital of modern-day president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, there was a hint of nation-building to Pharaoh Zoser’s grandiose creation. The northern part of its enclosure was an extension – and some think it represents northern Egypt, which had only recently come under the firm control of the southern kings. “The significance may be that it reflects the consolidation of the ‘unified’ Egypt,” says David Jeffreys, who directed the Egypt Exploration Society’s survey of Memphis.
But the pyramid had practical as well as symbolic significance. Stone has become the defining feature of any city. But at that time buildings were largely made with reeds, mud-brick and wood, using what are now forgotten techniques. The step-pyramid was one of the first times architects dabbled with stone on such a monumental scale – and their attempts to experiment can be seen in the building itself.