EGYPTIAN TALES (2) The Step Pyramid

EGYPTIAN TALES (2) The Step Pyramid

Believe it or not, when I was a spudlet, I took Architecture for “O” Level and one of the buildings we had to learn about was The Step Pyramid, the Pyramid of Djoser designed by the ancient architect Imhotep - a name sadly hijacked for a Hollywood villain when we should be honouring his memory every time we go upstairs - back in a time when my own ancestors were still trying to work out whether a cave was a better option for sleeping in safely in than a hole in the ground was.

It is considered to be the first true example of what we recognise as a Pyramid today and a massive leap forward in the history of structural engineering, being a stepping stone on the way towards the possibility of the achievement of building of the more famous cluster of Pyramids on the Giza plateau.

I’ll admit that on my own visit there, I’d managed to remain slightly underwhelmed by the more famous “classic” three Pyramids at Giza. I’m still quite shocked at myself for this. How is it possible to be underwhelmed by one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and the only one we still get to see? It’s not that I don’t appreciate how wonderful they are, and the sheer magnificent fact that they are there at all, it’s just that somehow the experience left me feeling slightly let down. Maybe it was the huge car park sitting pretty much adjacent to one of them, or perhaps the vast amount of traders desperate to get my attention (and my hard-earned currency) or it could have just been the fact that I was feeling slightly miffed that I had been stuck for rather too long inside our minibus.

Having arrived slightly ahead of the crowds, it was a source of great irritation to me to be obliged to sit inside the thing watching all the other coaches arrive whilst we were given an archaeological lecture on the history of these wonderful structures, when all that I wanted to do was get out there and photograph the living daylights out of them before too many people and vehicles got themselves in the way. I should have had more patience. It’s not as if they were likely to be going anywhere soon, and the guide was being paid to give me all that hard learned knowledge.

I can be so ungracious at times.

There are choices to be made when you’re on a schedule and have limited time. Is it worth seeing the Pharoah’s solar barge? Is it worth going inside one of the Pyramids? Would I rather spend the time walking over to the far corners of the structure beyond where the traders and other visitors don’t tend to bother to go and snap away with the old camera? I think you can probably guess the option I chose. Maybe next time for the other stuff. If there is a next time, of course…

In many ways the Pyramids at Giza remained more inspiring from a distance. The evening before my visit I’d been up to the roof garden café of our hotel and they’d been visible, rising up above the skyline of the traffic and the buildings of the city and I’d just sat there drinking my lemonade and couldn’t take my eyes off them, with my mind in a constant loop every time I tried to look away – “There are Pyramids at the end of the road… There are PYRAMIDS… at the END of the ROAD…”

Anyway, the hustle and bustle of Giza was well behind me as we trundled up towards Saqqara. Having a pleasant enough lunch had made me much calmer and I was happy to listen patiently to the history of the Step Pyramid without so much as a single (if you’ll pardon the pun) tut. Our little bus bounced and swayed its way up the rocky road, giving us the occasional glimpse of the top of it as it rose above the line of the dunes. The bus was eventually parked in another busy car park, this time more wisely positioned outside the compound of the Pyramid itself. Across the car park, beyond another sand dune stood the Pyramid itself, rising majestically above its current companion, a workman’s metal hut that happily the Pyramid will long outlast. That metal hut will rust to nothing, and the stones will endure.

To get into the complex itself you have to pass through a roofed colonnade, which on that day was very busy, the narrow passage with its battened floor having to deal with tourists both arriving and leaving at the same time. Whilst I know it’s easy to assume that everything you see in Egypt is from a more ancient time, the flooring is a modern addition to help preserve the monument and to make it safer for we latter-day explorers to navigate, so I was tickled pink to hear an elderly lady marvelling to her friend at how well preserved the “ancient” wooden floor was.

Another right turn into a vast open courtyard, and there it was. Right in front of me. All those years on from sketching away in my Architecture notebook and I was there, right next to it. I could hardly stop taking pictures of it. It’s just so beautiful, and so there and it had been there at Saqqara for over four thousand years. 62 metres tall, on six levels, considered to be the first human-made, large-scale monumental cut-stone structure in history and it’s still there, outlasting anything and everything built after it. Admittedly nowadays it’s looking a bit battered and it’s got a fair amount of scaffolding where it’s being restored, but just being next to it, standing next to something that has survived from the dawn of history, a big old chunky symbol of something we like to call civilisation, well, it just moved me in a way I find difficult to understand fully. I don’t get awestruck very often, but I believe that for the all-too-brief hour or so I was there, that’s precisely what I was.

It is just such a beautiful, mesmerising building. It is a bit wounded and the scaffolding around it is rather essential it seems but, during that one short hour, I was magically transported back and started thinking about my fifteen-year old self, scribbling away with my pencils in a long lost exercise book. I wish I could have travelled back and told myself that one day I’d actually be there, that one day all those facts and figures would actually have a purpose and a meaning and a context, that one day those dry old days of lessons and learning would strike me with such a resonance and a profound sense of history, and would quite simply astound me in ways my cynical, teenage younger self could never have imagined possible.