This National Geographic article examines some of the new theories archaeologists have developed about Egyptian civilization during the period of history called the Old Kingdom. Their findings are based on excavations near the Egyptian pyramids. Although reliable dates are available for later periods, dates cited for events during the Old Kingdom remain rough estimates. Also note that English spellings are used for some Egyptian words in this article.

Age of Pyramids: Egypt's Old Kingdom

By David Roberts

On the dusty Saqqara plateau, ten miles south of the Sphinx and the three Pyramids of Giza, the Step Pyramid of Pharaoh Djoser rises like a grand mirage, shimmering more than 200 feet above the stark Egyptian sands. The sight took my breath away. And that, of course, was its purpose.

When Djoser's subjects first looked upon this giant tomb more than 46 centuries ago, they probably trembled. This colossal monument, begun around 2630 bc, was designed to awe the ancient Egyptians, to impress them with their ruler's godlike strength.

At the time, it was the biggest and finest monument any monarch had ever commanded; indeed, it was the world's largest building. Its bold shape—six great tiers of decreasing size—announced a divine truth that the humblest passerby in Djoser's time understood. The Step Pyramid was a ladder. Not the symbol of a ladder but an actual one, by which the soul of the dead ruler might climb to the sky, joining the gods in immortality.

Like the Step Pyramid, ancient Egypt seemed to rise out of nothing. Only a few generations before Djoser's reign, the civilization crowded along the Nile amounted to a mere patchwork of nomes—small regional chiefdoms, each with its separate gods and government. Experts today only dimly grasp the forces that prompted those quarreling provinces to become, with Mesopotamia's Sumer, the most advanced civilization of its time—Egypt's Old Kingdom.

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Many believe that the building of Djoser's pyramid complex, which was accomplished by hundreds of workers from across the land, served to join those provinces into the world's first nation-state. During the Old Kingdom, which began around 2700 bc and lasted some 550 years, each pharaoh after Djoser marshaled a vast portion of his country's manpower and wealth to build his own tomb and ensure his immortality.

To construct such monuments required a mastery of art, architecture, and social organization that few cultures would ever rival. The kingdom developed a funerary tradition so comprehensive and compelling that the religion, art, and thought of the people coalesced around the worship of their divine pharaohs, both living and dead. Every aspect of life was affected. The Egyptians dug a network of canals off the Nile to transport stone for the pyramids and food for the workers, and a simple, local agriculture became the force that knit together the kingdom's economy. The need to keep records of the harvest may have led to the invention of a written language.

Yet after five and a half centuries this flourishing civilization collapsed, plunging Egypt into disorder. Scholars today puzzle over the cryptic records that testify to this breakdown. Perhaps the seeds of the collapse were planted in the soil of a civilization that, for all its grandeur, seemed obsessed with the idea that its dead rulers must live forever.

The conventional view of this distant age as a period of prosperity and self-assurance, as a society governed by godlike pharaohs, has been influenced by two factors. First, because the stone pyramids and other funerary architecture were built for eternity (the ordinary villages of mud brick crumbled or were washed away), archaeologists have paid more attention to royalty than to the common people. Second, although hieroglyphic writing has recently been traced back to 3200 bc, making ancient Egyptian one of the world's first written languages, during the Old Kingdom Egyptian script was used primarily for titles, epithets, and bureaucratic records. We have almost no records of history, myths, legends, or any other written glimpse into the human side of that epoch.

We know of no literature until around 2400 bc, near the end of the Old Kingdom, and that literature is in the form of braggart autobiographies of officers, inscribed on their tombs, and poetic incantations to ensure the dead king's eternal rebirth with the gods. In consequence the pharaohs, whom the ancients worshiped as gods, come down to us as one-dimensional ciphers.

Mention ancient Egypt to the average person, and he usually thinks of the Sphinx and the three Great Pyramids at Giza, which today make up the most famous Old Kingdom site. That familiarity makes it easy to forget that basic questions about the Old Kingdom have remained unanswered. Only within the past two decades have Egyptologists begun to fill in the gaps, sifting the Egyptian sands and reexamining tales of the kingdom, which were often written as many as 2,000 years later, for clues to the texture of ancient life.

One of those researchers, Mark Lehner, an archaeologist from the University of Chicago, guided me around the Saqqara site.

“The real mystery is why the Old Kingdom happened,” he said as we stood before Djoser's monument. “This pyramid was the start of it all. But we've focused too much on how the pyramids were built. I'm less interested in how the Egyptians built the pyramids than in how the pyramids built Egypt.”

Lehner calls the Step Pyramid the world's first great construction project. (Pharaohs after Djoser invented the “true” pyramid, with smooth sides instead of steps.) For 15 years Lehner has studied the Giza site, which was built later than Saqqara, gradually uncovering evidence of how the workers lived.

“Imagine yourself as a 15-year-old kid in some rural village of about 200 people in the 27th century bc,” said Lehner. “One day the pharaoh's men come. They say, ‘You, and you, and you.’ You get on a boat and sail down the Nile. You don't know where you're going, or why. Eventually you come around a bend and you see this huge geometric structure, like nothing you've ever known. There are hundreds of people working on it. They put you to work. And someone keeps track of you: your name, your hours, your rations. All this was a profoundly socializing experience. You might go back to your village, but you would never again be the same.”

Lehner and I lingered on the plateau, within sight of Djoser's tomb. “You might expect such an unprecedented monument to have a tentative look,” he said, gesturing toward the pyramid. “But look at it! The pyramid implies a supreme self-confidence on the part of the ancient Egyptians.”

Perhaps most confident was Imhotep, the architect who probably conceived of building Djoser's tomb completely from stone. Known also as a sculptor, a priest, and a healer, Imhotep is considered the preeminent genius of the Old Kingdom. He assembled one workforce to quarry limestone at the cliff of Tura, across the Nile, another to ship the crude blocks by boat to Saqqara, and yet another to haul the stone to the site, where master carvers shaped each block and put it in place.

On a granite boulder above the Nile's First Cataract, the formidable rapids at Aswan, a sculptor who lived much later chiseled out in hieroglyphs the story of how Imhotep had even saved his country from famine. The annual Nile flood, which inundated surrounding fields every autumn before farmers sowed their seed, failed seven years in a row. Djoser asked Imhotep where the source of the great river lay. The pharaoh intended to travel there to interrogate the river gods and to beg them to show mercy on his people.

But Imhotep replied that sacred books had given him the answer. Khnum, the god of the First Cataract, had caused the famine, out of pique at the neglect of his temple. Imhotep invoked Khnum, and the god relented: The floods returned, and the famine was over.

Jean-Philippe Lauer, a 92-year-old Frenchman who is the dean of Egyptologists, arrived at Saqqara in 1926 to find the Step Pyramid complex becalmed in a sea of sand. With only a few interruptions Lauer has returned to dig, study, and restore the site for 68 years—more than twice as long as it took Djoser to build his giant tomb.

As workmen gradually cleared away the sand surrounding the pyramid, the wreckage of an intricate complex of subsidiary buildings emerged: temples, crypts, courtyards, and a colonnade. Flouting the custom among early Egyptologists of simply crating up the finest relics and shipping them off to various European museums, Lauer is rebuilding the complex in place.

When I joined Lauer at Saqqara a few weeks after my first visit, I was struck by the strangeness of Djoser's complex. Everything about the place bespoke illusion. Towering limestone columns had been shaped to mimic the sway and droop of leafy plants. Immovable doors hung on great carved hinges. Facades called false doors, through which the pharaoh's ka, or vital force, was presumed to pass, lay recessed within walls. The interiors of dummy temples were packed with rubble.

No one knows why the Egyptians created this fantastic scene, but some archaeologists speculate that there was an Old Kingdom belief that a work of art, a building, even a chanted phrase had power and utility in the afterlife in direct proportion to its uselessness in the real world. In this view, each false door, each dummy temple “worked” in the afterlife precisely because it could not function in this one.

On the north side of the pyramid we paused before a small stone cubicle, canted toward the north, with a pair of tiny holes in its facade. Lauer said, “Look inside.” I peered through one of the holes and was startled to see two eyes returning my stare, the blank gaze of a life-size statue of Djoser sitting on a throne. He had the same imperious look I had seen in much Egyptian art. The eyes of the original statue, now in Cairo's Egyptian Museum, had probably once been inlaid with quartz crystal but had been gouged out by thieves, giving the pharaoh a chilling demeanor.

Lauer smiled. “Of course the holes are not for you to look in but for the pharaoh to look out—perhaps at the stars in the northern sky called the Imperishables because they never set.” Here, once again, was the Old Kingdom obsession with immortality in the sky. A mere statue of the pharaoh staring at the stars aided his flight to the heavens.

Two generations after Djoser's reign, the center of the Old Kingdom moved north to the barren plateau of Giza. New pharaohs often moved to a new place, perhaps to outdo the splendor of their predecessors' monuments. The Great Pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu (or Cheops, as the Greeks called him) was built around 2550 bc, and at 756 feet square by 481 feet tall it remains one of the largest buildings ever erected.

I would often walk up Pyramid Road, fending off camel hustlers and postcard vendors. I strolled the causeway past the Sphinx, or stopped to visit the royal boat of Khufu. Just as I began to feel that I knew the place, Lehner gave me a whole new vantage.

One day he led me to the site from the southeast, where crowded tenements of the Cairo suburb of Nazlet el Simman creep across the sands. We strolled past stable owners leading tourists on afternoon horseback rides to the pyramids and came to an ancient stone wall half-buried in the dunes, half a mile southeast of the Sphinx. The wall opens into a massive gateway capped with a gigantic block of limestone.

Several years ago Lehner and Zahi Hawass, director general of the Giza Pyramids and Saqqara, began to excavate two sites just outside the wall in their search for signs of commoners—the ordinary people who built the pyramids. Within months they uncovered the remains of many mud-brick buildings. Lehner found a pair of back-to-back rooms—the oldest bakery yet discovered in Egypt.

Meanwhile, Hawass unearthed a cemetery of some 600 tombs nearby—the graves of workers. He discovered the evidence of their toil in their skeletons, their vertebrae compressed and damaged by years of carrying heavy loads. Some were missing fingers and even limbs. A few of the tombs were adorned with mini-pyramids several feet high, made of mud brick. Nothing like them had been found before.

In the past, scholars believed that the form of the pyramid was invented—perhaps by Imhotep—as the shape for a royal tomb. But Hawass argues the pyramid form may have arisen among the common people. He believes that the mini-pyramids evolved from sacred rectangular mounds found in tombs long before Imhotep's time. The pyramids built for the pharaohs may have been, as Hawass puts it, “just more enduring examples of traditional folk architecture.”

In the work of these archaeologists and others may lie the origins of a whole new way of seeing the Old Kingdom: Not just as the brilliant civilization of a pharaonic elite trickling down to the masses but also as a culture built from the bottom up, standing on the daily toil of the workers and the very beliefs and values of ordinary men and women.

From recent excavations and from scenes carved on the walls of tombs, researchers have begun to fill in the details of daily life in the Old Kingdom. Much of the emerging picture is one of arduous and repetitive toil. On wooden sledges across the sands, workers hauled the giant stones—the largest granite blocks weighing as much as 70 tons—that built the pyramids. Egypt created a vast agricultural empire, yet all the irrigation was done by hand. Farmers filled two heavy jars from the canals, then hung them from a yoke over their shoulders.

Oxen dragging simple wooden plows tilled the fertile soil along the Nile, followed by lines of sowers who sang in cadence as they cast grains of emmer wheat from baskets.

The villages were crowded and dirty. Huts were made of thatch and mud brick. Men wore loincloths; women dressed in long sheaths with wide shoulder straps usually attached just below the breasts; and children went naked into adolescence. In the alleys outside their huts, women traded spices, garlic, and onions for fish and other goods. Money would not be used in Egypt for another 2,000 years.

What tied the country together geographically was the Nile, with its network of hand-dug canals. Boats made of wood or papyrus and caravans of donkeys launched adventurers on expeditions into the Eastern Desert or south into Nubia, from which they brought back gold, ebony, ivory, rare stone for statues, incense, panther skins—and a menagerie of wild animals that the Egyptians tried to domesticate. They may have succeeded with the crane, the ibex, the gazelle, and even the baboon, but scholars doubt that Egyptians ever tamed hyenas, which are shown in vivid relief scenes lying on their backs with their legs tied, being force-fed lumps of meat.

The population of Old Kingdom Egypt was probably between a million and a million and a half. Less than one percent were literate. The Egyptians believed that writing had been invented by the god Thoth, usually pictured as a scribe with the head of an ibis; words, whether written or spoken, had a magical power. Thus the scribe played a special role in the kingdom, as he sat and recorded the daily quotas of workers' rations and the results of their sweaty toil on his papyrus roll. Each scribe was taught to write by his father, who gave him stones and potsherds on which to practice his hieroglyphs before he was allowed to set brush to papyrus. Noblemen and priests would hire the young men as apprentices.

“The Satire of the Trades,” a poem written several hundred years after the fall of the Old Kingdom, tells how the scribes lorded themselves over barbers, potters, arrow makers, and other rival tradesmen. “It's the greatest of all callings, / There's none like it in the land,” wrote the anonymous poet. “Set your heart on books!/ ... There's nothing better than books!/It's like a boat on water.””See, there's no profession without a boss,/ Except for the scribe; he is the boss.”

Many people think of the Old Kingdom as an austere, ascetic age. In reality its elite were devoted to excess and delight. Various sources depict royal banquets, where guests sat on the floor on beautifully woven mats as servant girls poured water over their hands before the food was brought in. Great piles of grapes, figs, and doom palm fruit weighed down the table, along with bread slathered with honey. Guests poured down bowl after bowl of red wine and ate gargantuan helpings of fish, beef, and fowl with their fingers.

Meanwhile, musicians appeared, playing flutes, harps, and bone clappers to accompany beautiful young dancers, naked but for bejeweled collars and short skirts tied around their waists, who performed arabesques and mingled with the guests.

An old legend recorded in the fifth century bc by Herodotus, although probably apocryphal, captures the self-indulgence of the Old Kingdom. In the tale Pharaoh Menkaure—Khufu's grandson and the builder of the third Giza pyramid—receives an oracle that predicts he will live only six years longer. The pharaoh, says Herodotus, “had innumerable lamps made, by the light of which he set himself every evening to drink and be merry, and never ceased day or night from the pursuit of pleasure.... His object in this was by turning night into day to extend the six remaining years of his life to twelve, and so to convict the oracle of falsehood.”

Despite such hedonism, life for most ancient Egyptians was grim and tedious. Society was built around the oppressive preoccupation with the pharaohs' immortality. One day over lunch at Giza, I asked Rainer Stadelmann, director of the German Institute of Archaeology in Cairo, why the kingdom's citizens were willing to devote their lives to worshiping their leaders.

“What held the Old Kingdom together,” he said, “was not so much a belief in the divine nature of the king as a belief that through the king was expressed the divine nature of society itself. Much later, after the fall of the Old Kingdom, Egypt would become something like a police state. But in the Old Kingdom, the people really believed in the importance of building a pyramid. It's like a small town that builds a huge cathedral in the Middle Ages. Faith is the spur.”

To gauge the extent of that labor, Mark Lehner and a team built a 30-foot-high pyramid near Giza out of the same Tura limestone used by the ancient Egyptians. The men who built Khufu's pyramid, hauling and positioning an estimated 2.3 million limestone blocks, most weighing 2.5 tons, would have had to set a block in place every two and a half minutes. Using a helical ramp winding upward around their pyramid, Lehner's team found that just ten to twelve men could slide a block up the ramp, using desert clay and water as a lubricant, and lever it into place. Herodotus declared that 100,000 men were needed to build one of the Pyramids at Giza. Lehner calculates that as few as 10,000 could have pulled off the job.

As he puts it, “A pyramid turns out to be a very doable thing.”

Lehner loves showing people the mysteries of the Old Kingdom. One he revealed to me at Maidum, an unfinished pyramid to honor the pharaoh Snefru, Khufu's father, that stands in isolation 35 miles south of Saqqara. Flashlights in hand, we crawled along the cramped passage that leads to the burial chamber deep in the center of the pyramid. Cedars from Byblos, now in Lebanon, 4,500 years old, braced the walls. The chamber itself was surprisingly small, topped by a rudely built vault.

“Sort of small, for a king, don't you think?” Lehner commented. “Remember that no sarcophagus and no body were ever found here. Let's go look at Mastaba 17.”

A mastaba is a flat-topped tomb built of mud brick. This one is near the pyramid on the northeast corner, a short walk from the vault. The mastaba here had long puzzled archaeologists, who for decades could find no entryway into it. The only passage known today is an ancient robbers' tunnel that leads to the crypt. Now I scuttled after Lehner down this narrow, crudely gouged passage. We popped through a narrow aperture. I stood up and gasped.

In the glow of my flashlight I beheld a T-shaped chamber several times larger than the cramped vault in the pyramid. Before us stood a massive sarcophagus hewn out of red granite that had been floated 500 miles down the Nile from Aswan.

“What do you think?” asked Lehner. “If you were a pharaoh, would you choose that crude chamber inside the pyramid or something like this?

“Now this is only speculation,” Lehner paused. No idea about the pyramids is more sacrosanct than that they were always tombs for the pharaohs. “But I wonder if the Maidum pyramid is merely a cenotaph—an empty, symbolic tomb?”

Here, if Lehner's hunch proves correct, was the Old Kingdom principle of illusion as a higher truth at its most stunning. The pyramid itself—at least in the case of Maidum—might be a mere pseudo-tomb, made somehow more powerful in the afterlife of the pharaoh who only pretended to be buried there.

I peered inside the sarcophagus. The lid had been pried loose; a wooden mallet, which thieves had used to prop open the lid, still lay in place, distorted by the pressure of three and a half tons of granite bearing down for more than four millennia.

The robbers had pillaged whatever treasure the tomb once held but had left the body for W. M. Flinders Petrie to discover in 1910, the first archaeologist to enter Mastaba 17. The skeleton of the man had been taken apart, apparently by the officials in charge of the burial. Each bone was wrapped separately in linen; then the body was reassembled. The details of the wrapping showed exceptional care: linen wound in and out of individual vertebrae, inside the kneecaps, around each finger joint. The eye sockets had been filled with balls of paste pressed into linen. The penis was carefully modeled in linen.

Here, it seemed, was an elaborate early attempt to keep a corpse from decaying, several centuries before the Egyptians perfected mummification. Scientists today would give a great deal to reexamine Petrie's find. But the skeleton was shipped to England so roughly that the skull arrived shattered beyond repair. The remaining bones were deposited in a box in the British Museum. Eight decades later, they have been lost: A recent search of that museum produced no trace of the corpse of Mastaba 17.

Around 2465 bc—halfway through the Old Kingdom—pyramids suddenly became less important. No one knows why, but many scholars have suggested that after Khufu's pyramid, which took roughly 23 years to build, the kingdom grew weary with each pharaoh's effort to outdo his predecessor. Several pharaohs died before their pyramids were completed, perhaps a cause of embarrassment or even horror among the populace.

Never again would a king build his pyramid on a truly colossal scale. Instead the religious focus shifted from the pyramid itself toward the mortuary temple that stood just east of it. Here, in columned courtyards, before alabaster altars, sculptors carved vivid semi-mythical scenes on the walls—of a pharaoh smiting his Libyan enemies or hunting bears in Syria. And here high priests carried on an elaborate cult to propitiate the dead king's ka. The funerary culture was growing more sophisticated, even as the pharaoh's omnipotence was beginning to erode.

Some scholars think the pharaohs' decline began just before they moved south from Giza to Abusir. For the past 34 years an archaeological team, now under the direction of Miroslav Verner of the Czech Institute of Egyptology in Prague, has worked at Abusir. In 1982 they discovered the first of a cache of 2,000 pieces of papyrus in a mud-brick storeroom inside the mortuary temple of a pharaoh named Raneferef. These ranged from complete rolls to tattered fragments, all inscribed in the priestly writing of the day.

Together with similar caches unearthed in neighboring temples, the fragile pages make up the most detailed written documents ever salvaged from the Old Kingdom. Known collectively as the Abusir Papyri, the records delineate, with an exquisite fussiness, the rites conducted by funerary priests some 4,400 years ago.

Raneferef died before he was 25, having ruled for little more than two years. At the time only the base of his unpretentious pyramid had been constructed. The officials hastily plastered over the monument with clay, then capped it with a scattering of cobblestones. From the look of the pyramid, it would seem that the king had been little mourned and quickly forgotten.

Not so: Fifty or even 150 years later, the priests of Raneferef's cult still gathered daily to carry out the rituals his ka required. The priests led a daily procession, circling the pyramid three times. Others gathered before a statue of Raneferef: Pulling a covering from it, they sprinkled the statue with perfume, painted it with black eye shadow, waved an incense burner before its nose, and dressed it again in bright-colored cloths—all the while intoning mystical formulas.

Before the principal altar, a priest supervised a line of men bearing loaves of bread of many sizes and shapes—round, flat, conical, pointed. Bread, the most common food in Old Egypt, symbolized prosperity and abundance. As the bearers deposited their loads, the priest might read from a papyrus: “Ten loaves of beset; seven loaves of paadj; 11 loaves of pesen; 62 loaves of hetjat; one loaf of toot; one loaf of khadj....” For perhaps an hour the loaves would sit in a heap on the altar; then they were removed. During that period, the Egyptians believed, Raneferef's ka received and was nourished by the bread.

Another building in Raneferef's temple complex was called the Sanctuary of the Knife. Here, one after another, several large bulls, their legs tied together, were bound to great limestone blocks in the floor. A butcher would seize a flint knife and cut the bull's throat, catching the spurting blood in an alabaster basin. Other men would cut off the left foreleg of the bull and carry it to the altar—another offering for the pharaoh's insatiable ka.

These ancient scrolls may also guide researchers in their future explorations of Egypt's past.

“From these papyri,” says Verner, “we know the names of royal palaces and temples not yet discovered. We know they must be there, somewhere under the sand.”

The greatest figure to emerge from the last years of the Old Kingdom was Pepi I, who ruled for some 34 years. An aggressive pharaoh, Pepi sent armies out to conquer the desert nomads that Egyptians called the Sand-dwellers, in the east, and the Nubians, to the south. A hollow statue of Pepi I, made of hammered copper and now in the Egyptian Museum, is one of only two life-size metal statues from the Old Kingdom ever found. He stands nearly six feet tall, his left hand stretched outward, his left foot forward, looking ready to march off to war.

Since 1966 the Mission Archéologique Française de Saqqara, under the direction of Jean Leclant, has been excavating Pepi's pyramid complex at Saqqara. One day last February I visited the dig, where a team of 60 was hard at work. Leaving the laborers to their sunny toil, project leaders Catherine Berger and Audran Labrousse led me into the dark passages inside Pepi's pyramid.

The walls of every pharaoh's burial chamber discovered prior to 1880 had been bare, with neither reliefs nor inscriptions carved into the stone. But that year Gaston Maspero found in Pepi's crypt column after column of hieroglyphs, each about two inches high, carved with masterly grace.

Berger shone her flashlight on a column directly above the low portal to the burial chamber. Pyramid Texts, as they are called, have been found inside the pyramids of the last five rulers of the Old Kingdom. But Pepi's texts are the most extensive of all.

Berger began to read the glyphs. “Hail to you, Ladder of the God!... Stand up, Ladder of Horus, which was made for Osiris that he might ascend on it to the sky.... Now let the ladder of the God be given to me....”

The Pyramid Texts amount to a vast corpus of poetic spells, all aimed at ensuring the passage of the dead king to the heavens. These are no mere accounting recipes, like the formulas of the Abusir Papyri: They are charged, sacred incantations, originally recited by a priest standing inside the crypt. The performance of these spells was crucial to the ascension of the pharaoh's soul.

We moved on into the burial chamber. “If the god lives, this king will live,” Berger continued. “If he does not die, this king will not die. If he is not destroyed, this king will not be destroyed.”

“All this, the texts and the pyramid itself,” Labrousse explained to me, “is an enormous machine that helps the king go through the wall of the dead, achieve resurrection, and live forever in the happiness of the gods. But there's a kind of anxiety in the repetitious litany. The priests are confident of success, but they are worried at the same time that it will not work.”

I could not take my eyes off the hieroglyphs, each so precisely carved, each painted green. “Why green?” I asked.

“Green,” answered Berger, “is the color of youth, of rebirth, of spring, of the swamp, of vegetation, of resurrection.”

She then pointed out some hieroglyphs that were only partly depicted; humans and certain animals were never represented whole but only by a disembodied arm or head. “It is a way of ensuring that the creature cannot act,” she said.

To carve the hieroglyph of a lion raised the threat that the beast itself might sabotage the magic—by eating up, for instance, the offerings left for the pharaoh's ka.

By 2200 bc, after five centuries of relative prosperity and political stability, the Old Kingdom was in trouble. Its last known pharaoh, Pepi II, gained the throne as a boy and ruled for more than 90 years, as the state crumbled around him. An inscription from the tomb of one of Pepi's expedition leaders reveals the impulsiveness of an eight-year-old ruler. From Nubia the expedition brought back 300 donkey loads of spoils, ranging from elephant tusks to incense.

What Pepi cared most about, however, was a Pygmy the adventurers had captured. “Come north to the residence at once!” he urged the expedition leader in writing. “Hurry and bring with you this Pygmy whom you brought from the land of the horizon-dwellers.... When he goes down with you into the ship, get worthy men to be around him on deck, lest he fall into the water! When he lies down at night, get worthy men to lie around him in his tent. Inspect ten times at night!”

The causes of the Old Kingdom's collapse are much debated by scholars. For centuries the authority of the pharaoh had been weakening, as the priestly caste and the governors of the nomes gained power and autonomy.

Around 2200 bc, moreover, a climatic crisis may have stunned Egypt, as the life-giving floods of the Nile grew undependable and drought seized the land.

Pepi's very longevity may have drawn the state into stagnation. As Rainer Stadelmann, the archaeologist whom I had lunched with at Giza, told me, “Exceptionally long reigns are disastrous for civilizations. Louis XIV in France—it's he who should have been guillotined, not Louis XVI.

“During Pepi II's reign, I am sure a courtier came out every day and announced, 'He still lives.' Pepi finished his pyramid in his 30th year—then followed six more decades of corruption. The governors of the nomes discovered they could act without instructions from the palace.”

Soon after the death of Pepi II, around 2150 bc, the Old Kingdom came to an end. The ensuing age, which scholars call the First Intermediate Period, remains an enigma.

“The First Intermediate Period was a terrible rupture,” Labrousse said, “a complete collapse of the kingdom. All the pyramids were looted, not secretly at night but by organized bands of thieves in broad daylight.”

We were standing atop the pyramid of Pepi I at Saqqara. Labrousse gestured at our feet, where what looked like a bomb crater in the top of the pyramid still bore witness to the looters of that time.

“The temples were burned. There was widespread violence. And a desperate famine took hold of the land.”

Some of the tomb inscriptions from officials of this period testify eloquently to the famine. “I gave bread to those who were hungry,” claimed one survivor, “and clothes to those who were naked.... All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger, to the point where people ate their own children....”

Egypt would rise to glory twice more, in the Middle Kingdom after 2040 bc and again in the New Kingdom of Akhenaton, Tutankhamun, and Ramses II. As the Old Kingdom receded into the past, it came to seem to latter-day Egyptians a kind of golden age.

In about 1200 bc, fully 1,400 years after his death, Imhotep, the genius architect of Djoser's reign, was deified by the Egyptians, who built cult temples to honor him. Centuries later workmen dug a shaft through the Step Pyramid down to Djoser's burial chamber—not to pillage the grave but to try to decipher the secrets of the tomb.

I said good-bye to Jean-Philippe Lauer in the colonnade of the Step Pyramid complex, where he was directing laborers as they set a stone high in the south wall. To guide their efforts, he clasped the stone and gentled it into place. In the 69th year of his own homage to Djoser, Lauer knew that his life's work would never be finished; no less reason, his hands seemed to say, to get on with it.

Source: National Geographic, January 1995.

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Egyptian Art and Architecture; Pyramids (Egypt); Africa; Ancient Egypt