Archaeology Magazine - Egypt Special Issue - 48

The vast enclosure and Step Pyramid of Djoser, a 3rd Dynasty (2584–2505 B.C.) ruler, along with the smaller pyramid of Unas (2312–2282 B.C.), a 5th Dynasty pharaoh, far left, and other tombs, foreground.

Whether people actually lived there is in dispute. And despite all the Old Kingdom (2584–2117 b.c.) royal tombs, no mummies of rulers have been identiﬁed. At the same time, excavators have found tens of thousands of mummies of cats and dogs, ibis and ﬁsh, baboons and crocodiles. No concrete evidence of the workshops one would expect at such a vast funerary metropolis has been found, and, despite the richness of individual tombs, there is as yet no completed modern survey of the site. The gaps in knowledge leave many archaeologists frustrated. “It’s a pretty sad picture,” says Miroslav Barta, an archaeologist at Charles University in Prague who has dug at the site since the 1970s. That is slowly changing. Instead of treating the site as a vast mine of mummies and artifacts, archaeologists now are starting to take a more comprehensive view of it. One team is near to completing a detailed survey of the area, ﬁnding both new sites and those discovered in the last century but lost in the drifting desert sands. And researchers are beginning to see Saqqara as a vast layered sacred space, rather than simply a huge collection of tombs spread across the plateau. Hawass’ council is also sprucing up the place. A young native-born Egyptologist proudly gives me a tour, as construction workers put the ﬁnishing touches on a new, white-painted museum, administrative center, and secure storage facilities, while work on guest houses and labs for foreign researchers is well under way, neatly hidden from view beneath the plateau in deference to the ancient structures nearby.
Dated about 2,600 years ago, this 26th Dynasty mummy with a beaded face was found at Saqqara in 2005.

aqqara’s name comes from that of a nearby village, and is perhaps derived from an ancient funerary god. The area is bordered to the north by the necropolis of Abusir and to the south by Dashur and the Bent Pyramid. Saqqara’s unique wealth of royal tombs is due to its proximity to Memphis. On the Nile ﬂoodplain just east and below Saqqara, Memphis was the ﬁrst capital of uniﬁed Egypt and a bustling center of religion, administration, and trade for three millennia. Unlike Thebes to the south, with its remarkably intact temples, Memphis today is invisible. Remains of the royal palaces, the temple of its patron god Ptah, and grain storehouses, as well as quarters for the priests of Saqqara, Syrian and Greek merchants, and common laborers, are now buried deep under Nile alluvium. Much of what was still above ground in early medieval times was carted oﬀ to build the new capital of Cairo, 16 miles to the northeast. In addition, the gradual movement of the Nile eastward over millennia makes Memphis a diﬃcult target. “The whole city moved around,” says Aidan Dodson, an anthropologist at Britain’s Bristol University. Yesterday’s river bed became today’s row of warehouses and temples. And with Cairo’s suburbs creeping south, new construction threatens to destroy or seal oﬀ Memphis’ remains. “In another 10 or 12 years, there will be nothing left,” says Alain Zivie, a French archaeologist who has worked for more than two decades at Saqqara. Memphis’ vanished life, however, is reﬂected in its necropolis. One of the earliest artifacts from the site is a porphyry bowl found beneath Djoser’s pyramid bearing the name Narmer, who ruled circa 3100 b.c., at the end of the late Predynastic period. Starting with the 1st Dynasty, senior court oﬃcials built a line of large mud-brick tombs overlooking the capital. Called mastabas, each of these buildings consist of a central room for funerary objects, a burial chamber, and additional rooms. Kings were still interred in Abydos far to the south. Starting in the 2nd Dynasty (which ends circa 2584 b.c.), however, most of the kings as well as nobles were buried at Saqqara. By Djoser’s day, Egyptian architects were ready for a

Archaeology Magazine - Egypt Special Issue

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