Step Pyramid of Djoser built at Saqqara

Date

c. 2670 BCE

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Lower Egypt (Egypt)

Era

Ancient Civilizations

Significance

During the Third Dynasty the pharaoh Djoser commissioned a monumental tomb at Saqqara that became the first large-scale stone building in the world and Egypt's first pyramid.

Credited to the vizier and architect Imhotep, the structure evolved from a flat mastaba into six diminishing terraces rising about 60 metres, conceived by stacking mastabas atop one another. The complex was the first to combine mortuary and ritual buildings within a single enclosure and pioneered dressed-stone construction on a vast scale, replacing the mudbrick and timber of earlier tombs. As a feat of engineering and a statement of royal power and afterlife belief, it inaugurated the tradition of pyramid building that would culminate at Giza, and Imhotep's later deification reflects the monument's enduring prestige. It remains a landmark in the history of architecture and one of the oldest monumental stone structures on Earth.

Empires active in c. 2670 BCE

• Egyptian Old Kingdom
  2686 BCE – 2181 BCE
• Elamite Kingdom
  2700 BCE – 539 BCE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Great Pyramid of Giza built for Khufu
  c. 2560 BCE
• Planned Cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa Built
  c. 2600 BCE
• Mohenjo-daro's Great Bath and Urban Sanitation
  c. 2600 BCE
• Lothal Dockyard and Dholavira Water Works
  c. 2300 BCE
• Sintashta culture and the first spoke-wheeled war chariots
  c. 2100–2000 BCE
• Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions: the first alphabetic writing
  c. 1850 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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