Boat Trip Through History: Imhotep and the Step Pyramid at Sakkara
Day two in Egypt: The stepped pyramid at Sakkara, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and the Sphinx. (Plus some tombs with amazing wall paintings and a close encounter with a camel)
I don’t have much to say about the Great Pyramid or the Sphinx. My takeaway was that the Great Pyramid is more imposing in real life and the Sphinx less so.[1]
The Step Pyramid is another story. Or more accurately, it has a story attached to it.
Most architects of the ancient world remain anonymous. We are more apt to know the name of the king who ordered a building than the man who designed it. In ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, kings had their names impressed in the brick used in the great buildings they commissioned. The first architect whose name was recorded was an Egyptian, Imhotep, the man who designed the Step Pyramid at Sakkara.
Egypt’s first major monuments, built during the First and Second Dynasties (3200-2780 BCE), were mud-brick tombs known as mastabas. Mastabas were rectangular structures with sides that sloped inward toward a flat top, built above burial chambers cut through the desert sand and into the bedrock below. Each tomb contained a chapel that held offerings for the deceased to use in the afterlife and a secret room where a statue of the deceased was stored. The interiors of the mastabas themselves were little more than narrow corridors surrounded by a solid core of rubble
In 2780 BCE, the Pharaoh Zoser founded a new dynasty and a new era of Egyptian history: the Old Kingdom, possibly the most brilliant period in pharaonic Egypt. When the time came for him to plan his funeral monument, he wanted something larger and grander than the mastabas of his predecessors. He turned to Imhotep, his chief officer and vizier, to build it for him. Imhotep took the basic form of the mastaba and transformed it something new and thrilling.[2]
Zoser’s Step Pyramid is generally considered to be the beginning of true stone architecture. It is the first building known to have been constructed with stones shaped into precise rectangular blocks. In earlier stone walls, the shape of each stone can be separately identified; Zoser’s pyramid was built with limestone blocks that were carefully fitted together with minimal joints into a smooth continuous surface. The Step Pyramid itself can be seen as a stack of stone mastabas: six immense tiers tower 200 feet high over the granite-lined burial shaft beneath it. It was more like a Mesopotamian ziggurat in shape than the classic Egyptian pyramid.
The shape was new, but many of the details were familiar. In creating Zoser’s pyramid, Egyptian builders, under Imhotep’s direction, took designs, details, and techniques previously used in buildings made from wood, reed, and mud brick and rendered them in stone. They set stone blocks in the same mortar pattern they had previously used for brick buildings. They copied the bundles of papyrus reeds that gave added strength to mud brick walls, creating engaged stone columns–one of later architecture’s basic components. The shaft of each column imitated the plant’s triangular stem. The capital at the top of each shaft was shaped like the open cluster of papyrus flowers or a lotus leaf.
In recognition of his achievements, Zoser gave Imhotep an honor no artist had received before him: a place in history. At Zoser’s order, Imhotep’s name and titles, including “chief of sculptors,” were carved on the base of a statue of the pharaoh.
In addition to being an innovative architect, Imhotep was a scholar, priest, astrologer, magician, and physician. His skill as both an architect and a physician led him to be recognized as a deity. During his lifetime, he was named the son of Ptah, the patron god of craftsmen who created the universe. Two hundred years after his death, Imhotep was worshiped as the god of medicine in Egypt and in Greece, where he was identified with the Greek god of medicine, Aesculapius.
Image of Imhotep from the 5th century BCE. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
[1] You’ll have to take my word for it. The impact doesn’t come through in my photographs.
[2] With the help of who knows how many hundreds of thousands of hard-working laborers sweating in the heat and dust. According to Herodotus, it took 100,000 men working in three-month shifts twenty years to complete the Great Pyramid at Giza (ca. 2550 BCE). Since he was writing 2000 years after the fact, we have to take the number with a pyramid-sized grain of salt.
Boat Trip Through History: Muhammad Ali (No, Not the Boxer)
I recently got back from two weeks in Egypt with my BFF from graduate school: a river cruise on the Nile with many shore expeditions to see the things a card carrying history nerd would expect to see, and some things that were totally unexpected.[1] I have stories to share—probably more than I will actually manage to tell because it gets harder to channel the excitement with the passage of time. Let’s go!
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Our first expedition was a visit a site known as Citadel Cairo, which includes the citadel built in the twelfth century by Saladin to protect Cairo from the Crusaders,[2] and a mosque built by Muhammad Ali Pasha in the mid-nineteenth century. I was looking forward to seeing Saladin’s citadel and learning more about him. Instead, the focus was the mosque and Muhammad Ali, an Albanian mercenary in the employ of the Ottoman Empire who became the defacto ruler of Egypt and is often described as the father of modern Egypt.[3]
I remembered a few disconnected stories about Muhammud Ali from my dissertation days.[4] (He fascinated European painters and poets during his reign.) But I didn’t have a feel for the bigger story. Once I got back home, I pulled my Big Fat Islamic History Books off the shelf and dove in.
Muhammad Ali Pasha, ca 1840, by Auguste Couder
The short version: It’s complicated.
The slightly longer version (which requires footnotes and asides because there is a lot of background information) :
Egypt was in political disarray when Muhammad Ali arrived in 1801. The three-year occupation of the country by the French under Napoleon had weakened the power of the Mamluks[5] who had ruled Egypt for more than 500 years, first as an independent sultanate and later as a provincial military and bureaucratic elite as part of the Ottoman empire. Determined to reassert their authority in Egypt, the Ottomans sent an occupying army, including a contingent of Albanian soldiers led by Muhammad Ali. As the Mamluks and the Ottomans duked it out for the control of Egypt, Muhammad Ali played each side against the other, slowly strengthening his position in Egypt at the expense of both.
In 1805, the sheikhs and ulema of Cairo led a revolt against the Ottoman viceroy. In the course of that revolt, the ulema declared Muhammad Ali governor of Egypt.[6] The Ottoman sultan confirmed the appointment several weeks later, perhaps with some hesitation given Muhaammad Ali’s track record of grabbing power whenever he got the chance.
Muhammad Ali was now the Sultan’s man in Cairo, but he still had to deal with the Mamluk forces. In 1811, after several years of political and military fighting with the Mamluks, he organized the death of the remaining Mamluk leadership, an atrocity known as the “Massacre at the Citadel”. He invited some 500 Mamluk rulers to a ceremony at the Cairo Citadel, which remained the military and political center of Egypt in the centuries after Saladin.[7] As they entered the citadel’s massive gateway the gates swung closed and the Mamluks were shot down. [8] The massacre of the leaders was followed by an indiscriminate slaughter of Mamluks throughout Egypt. (They were, after all well-trained, well-organized soldiers, with a history of promotion from within. They could well have risen up against him under new leaders..)
With the Mamluks out of the way, Muhammad Ali began to rebuild Egypt into a regional power, sometimes acting as the agent of the Ottoman empire and sometimes acting against them. He invaded the empire in 1831 and again in 1840—both times England and France intervened on the Ottomans’ behalf. In 1840, he accepted a brokered peace, withdrawing from Ottoman territory in exchange for hereditary rule over Egypt for himself and his sons. His dynasty ruled Egypt for more than a century, until the revolution of 1952, when King Farouk was deposed.
[1] As those of you who get my newsletter know, I was gobsmacked by the sheer size of Cairo.
[2] He used stones taken from some of the smaller temples at Giza—not the first ruler to reuse building materials from an earlier culture.
[3] Personally, I think that title should go to Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian military officer who was a leader in the revolution against King Farouk in 1952 and played a major role in creating the Republic of Egypt.
[4] See link to my newsletter above if for some unimaginable reasons you want to know more about the dissertation
[5] The Mamluks were not actually a dynasty in the way we normally use the word. They were a self-perpetuating military elite made up of freed slave solders. When one sultan died, his inner circle chose his successor from within their ranks. (Perhaps the Mamluks should be the subject of another blog post? Let me know if you’re interested.)
[6] The Ottoman viceroy did not go quietly, but this is still an abbreviated version of events. Assume lots of violence at every stage of the game.
[7] Why let a mammoth stone fortress on the high ground go to waste?
[8] This event captured the European imagination at the time and was the subject of a number of Orientalist paintings. most notably The Massacre of the Mamelukes by Horace Vernet. 1819
Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
For several months now, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Eric Larson has been my traveling book—the one I read on airplanes and city buses. I recently finished it on the last leg of a trip. And I have thoughts.
Isaac’s Storm tells the story of the hurricane that flattened Galveston in 1900. Larson captures the epic scale of the storm while telling us a human story of tragedy and loss.
Larson uses more than half the book to build to what he terms the cataclysm, a combination of unstoppable natural power and bad decisions based on hubris. He opens the book on the night before the storm, introducing us to Galveston and to Isaac Cline, the U.S. Weather Bureau’s resident meteorologist in Galveston. In the second chapter, he introduces us to the other major character of the book, the storm itself, with a breathtakingly beautiful line: “It began, as all things must, with an awakening of molecules.” Moving forward he describes how the storm grew, making the science of hurricanes clear to this non-scientist.[1]—and how new the science of meteorology was at the time. He gives us the history of the Weather Bureau, and a vivid picture of how political infighting within the organization contributed to multiple miscalculations about the power of the storm and where it would hit land. He introduces us to individuals in Galveston. He builds the tension.
The pace picks up when the storm hits Galveston. Using telegrams, newspaper accounts, letters, and later memories of Cline and others, Larson takes his readers back and forth through the city, tracing the experiences of the people to whom he has previously introduced us. Each story is marked with uncertainty, as people make decisions that will determine whether they and those around them will live or die. Larson’s storytelling is masterful in this section, holding the reader is suspense as he moves from vignette to vignette
Isaac’s Storm came out in 1999—not Larson’s first book but his first work of the narrative non-fiction for which he is famous. When compared to his later books of his, it is clear that he is still learning his craft. If I felt any disappointment, it is because I have read later work: early Larson is still better than many books that I read.
*****
A small coda: As those of you who have been following me around for a while know, I adore footnotes. For those of you who ignore the footnote section, Larson opens his notes in this book with a lovely brief essay on exploring “the lives of history’s little men.” I strongly recommend it to readers, and writers, of biography. I think I will return to it in the future.

[1] I will admit, several days after I closed the book, I would not be able to reproduce most of the science if you asked me to do so.