The Oldest Pyramid in Egypt - Saqqara

This here is the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the oldest stone structure of its size, about 30 kilometers from Cairo. This is of course the first ever built pyramid with these dimensions, commissioned by an Egyptian third dynasty king. But let's first back up a little. Much of the Egyptian architecture that is preserved, much of the Egyptian art, the production of cultural artifacts that have survived to these days, have to do with funerary architecture and funerary art. That's probably because most of the everyday architecture and everyday artifacts weren't built for eternity. The Egyptians took river weeds and weaved them together to make a basket. They took papyrus shaft and weaved them together to make a hut. But these things decay and get swallowed up by the flooding Nile and new ones take place. But when you're building something to last forever, you make a big effort to build them out of permanent materials. Hence the baked brick and stone clad funerary architecture, hence the mummy. You're taking the body and you're trying to find some way to take the transience and the ephemerality of human flesh and preserve it in the same way that stone preserves shelter that would have otherwise been made of decaying materials. The earliest kind of tombs we have from the Egyptians are called mastabas, and that's the same word as the Arabic word for bench. They were rectangular structures with sides sloping at an angle of 75 degrees and having flat roofs. They're haptic solids with small chambers inside. Here's the plan of a mastaba. This is the outer chamber in which were placed the offerings to the Ka, the spirit. Having its walls decorated with representations of festal and other scenes, which are valuable from a historical standpoint. These are the inner secret chambers known as the serdaps, containing statues of the deceased and members of his family. And this is a shaft of great depth leading to the chamber containing the sarcophagus with its mummy. With the idea of mastaba we come to the idea of type, and associated with type is typology. These are words that architects use all the time, because one of the big tasks in architecture is how can you make something as mute as built form carry meaning and be legible and understandable. And one way is through type, which is a class or a group of buildings distinguished by short formal characteristics and derived from the same So in ancient Egypt anybody seeing a mastaba would immediately know that's a tomb. In ancient Rome anybody seeing this type of building would immediately know that's a Roman temple. In the Renaissance anybody seeing this type of building would know it's a church. Today anybody seeing this type of building would know it's a car dealership, or this is a gas station, or this is a coffee shop. Typology is the study of types and formal organizations, and for the purposes of architecture you can use typology to connect to this body of historically embedded meaning. Here we can see a transformation of this type of mastaba into the type of pyramid. Here's the basic bench-like mastaba, and this here is the step pyramid of Zoser. It actually started out as a mastaba with its underground shaft, but for some reason he decided to build smaller mastabas on top of the original mastaba. Not happy with the result he added several rows of mastabas, until he finished with a building with this aspect. So we can see that the mastaba has become a stacking of mastabas so that it begins to resemble a kind of pyramid, or a kind of ziggurat. It almost reminds me to the Mexican pyramids made by the Aztecs and the Mayans, and many other pre-Hispanic civilizations in Mexico. But it's an easy shift from this to this, and it's also an easy shift from the step pyramid of Zoser to one of the classical Giza pyramids that we're all familiar with, where it really is this kind of tapered geometry. Let's look more closely to the 62 meter high Zoser's pyramid in Saqqara, 3rd dynasty 2630 BC. It's a great thing in the same way that the ziggurat in Ur is a great thing. It really marks itself as a point of difference. You have this large extending surface of the desert, you get a precinct that already makes it special, and within that precinct you begin to create concentric terraces and celebrate one point. It's also mountain-like, as if nature itself was being replicated in the architectural gesture. An interesting thing about the pyramid of Zoser is that we know the architect, Imhotep, the first architect in history about whom we know something. He is regarded as the father of stone-built architecture, since he translated for the first time the wooden or mud-brick forms of the early dynastic period into stone masonry. This was thought to be so amazing that the architect was deified for conceiving of this thing. He was elevated to the realm of the gods. When we look at the Zoser complex, the thing we notice first, of course, is this giant step pyramid. But there are also festival courtyards in the precinct down here, with a few small temples called Hepset Court, which are very interesting to look at, especially because of how they are articulated. So, when we look at these small temples, we see a series of verticals that begin to create a system of bays. A bay is a space between two columns, and so instead of saying this is one big lump, like you would with a mastaba, we can say this is four bays, for it's been articulated. But the method by which these things have been articulated is mimetic of nature. Mimesis means imitation, and the forms in Saqqara at the Hepset Court are all derived from river weeds, derived from all these ephemeral grasses that would have been used in ordinary architectural construction. So, there's some kind of idea here of preserving the body of the architecture in the same way that the mummy preserves the body of the human, petrifying the ephemeral and making it last forever. So, these are some of the column capitals that you get in Egyptian architecture, and they pick up on these forms like the lotus and the papyrus that would grow along the bank of the delta of the Nile. These are some frescoes of papyrus inside of tombs. You can see that the papyrus and the papyrus column capitals are not so different. So, the appearance and typical details of the original materials are imitated in stone, reed bundle and papyrus stock columns, log ceilings, even a stone hinge for an immobile stone door. We also begin to see a constructional system that's a little bit more sophisticated than taking lumps of heavy stuff and stacking them up, which is maybe what's going on with the step pyramid of Zoser, and that is tribiation. Tribiation is another word for post and beam architecture. So, for tribiation what you need are some vertical supports and some horizontal things to span, and that's simple, that's easy, it's a kind of intuitive thing to do, but the tricky thing with tribiation is what materials can you use. As you can see, there are not so many trees here in the middle of the desert in Egypt, and the ones near the Nile are very far away, very difficult to transport. So, you can't make a truss or you can't use a wooden beam. So, what you can use to span is stone. So, Egyptian architecture uses stone beams called lintels to span, and that is not a great material for making a beam, because stone is brittle. Stone is excellent in compression, but really bad in tension. That's why concrete beams need metallic rod to support the tension, which is what you have with a beam. So, because of that, you get a very narrow spacing in Egyptian architecture between the columns, because you're spanning with stone. This is one of the Hafsat small temples in Saqqara complex, and you can see this kind of elaborate system of tribiation that recalls the weaving together of reeds of a river hut. And here's a river hut. Like most of the Egyptian tombs, the steppe pyramid of Djoser has a serdab, but in this case, the statue of a pharaoh is looking outward through a little hole to the outside world. Saqqara, just like the Giza complex, contains many Egyptian funerary elements like causeways and mortuary temples. Under the steppe pyramid is a labyrinth of tunnel chambers and galleries that total nearly six kilometers in length, and connect to a central shaft 28 meters deep. These spaces provide room for the king's burial, the burial of family members, and the storage of goods and offerings. I spoke about the mastaba as a type, and how that type transformed over time, and finally gave us a pyramid. The pyramid had various incarnations though. Djoser's successors tried to find a way to build a perfect pyramid. So this is Djoser's pyramid that we've seen before. These are the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid of Sneferu in Dasheru. And finally, the Pyramid of Cheops in Giza. It's an interesting march toward perfection. What happened with Djoser is that the type was identified. You look for the type, and once you've asked the right question architecturally, you can then begin to perfect the type. So Sneferu's pyramid is getting toward the answer, but it bends, because the angle was too steep and they could not continue executing at that angle. Then to make sure they didn't have a steep angle, they made a pyramid with a very wide base and a much lower height. That is why we have this kind of flattened pyramid. And by the time you get to Cheops, the question was asked, the type was identified, and the type was perfected. It wasn't until 100 years after the reign of Djoser, when a new dynasty, the 4th dynasty, ascended to the throne that the Egyptians finally learned to build perfect pyramids. Pyramids that had four smooth faces, that had a relationship between width and height, and that constitute the best-known monuments of Egyptian architecture, the Great Pyramids of Giza. Thanks for watching! I hope you're all enjoying this Egyptian architecture series. If you want to see more of this in the channel, let me know in the comments, and like this video to help me get to more people. I also wanted to thank you because we just hit 60,000 subscribers, which to me that's unbelievable, how fast this channel is growing. So thank you so much for your support, and I'll see you in the next one. Goodbye!