18. Egypt - Fall of the Pharaohs

Introduction to Abd al-Latif

0:00Around the year 1200 AD, the medieval Arab traveler and scholar Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi departed from his hometown of Baghdad and set out on a journey of

0:35exploration. As a young man, al-Baghdadi had studied law, medicine, and philosophy and was inspired by the works of classical philosophers, in particular Aristotle. At the turn of the 13th century, al-Baghdadi embarked on a series of journeys that would take him to many of the great cities in the region. He traveled to Mosul, to Jerusalem, Damascus, and Aleppo, and eventually, around

1:06the year 1204, his journey took him across the Sinai Desert to the banks of the Nile. On his travels, al-Baghdadi wrote a book that was part travel account and part philosophy, entitled The Book of Edification and Admonition. In it, he recalls the remarkable impression that Egypt made on him.

Description of Egypt

1:31Egypt is a land of wondrous monuments and strange stories. It consists of a valley enclosed by two ranges of hills, one to the east and one to the west. The Nile runs between them until it reaches lower Egypt, where it divides into branches, all of which flow out into the sea. The Nile is unusual for its length. We know of no other river in the inhabited

2:02world that covers a greater distance.

Ancient Remains in Egypt

2:06As al-Baghdadi traveled around Egypt, he was struck by the incredible variety of ancient remains he saw, great temples of stone and tomb complexes, crumbling beside the waters of the Nile. But none of these compared to the most fabled of all Egypt's monuments, which rose over the

2:36horizon, not far from the city of Memphis, at a place called Giza.

The Pyramids of Giza

2:43The ancient monuments in Egypt are such as I have never seen nor heard tell of in other lands. First among them are the pyramids. They are very numerous. All are situated on the Giza side of the Nile and extend in the direction of Memphis, spread out along a distance of about two days' journey. Some are big, others small. Some are of clay and mud brick, but most are

3:16of stone. Some are stepped, but most of them taper smoothly. And of all these pyramids, three stood out for their seemingly impossible immensity. Turning to the pyramids that everyone talks about, points at, and characterizes in terms of their sheer size, there are three, laid out in a straight line at Giza. Two of them are particularly enormous. And it is with these two that the poets have been infatuated. The spectacle is

3:52so awe-inspiring that your sight will falter as you try to take it all in.

Local People and the Pyramids

4:00Al-Baghdadi wrote accounts of the local people who lived close to these vast remains. He describes some who climbed to the tops of these structures, and others who quarried them for their fine-cut stone. Others still became obsessed with exploring the hidden tunnels and chambers that branched out beneath the pyramids. In one of the great pyramids, there is an opening that allows people to gain entry. It leads them

4:33into narrow corridors, labyrinthine passageways, well shafts, pitfalls, and other such features as appear in the accounts of those who venture inside and explore the innermost parts. Many people, obsessed by the pyramid and filled with fanciful ideas about it, are inspired to penetrate its depths. But they always end up at some place beyond which they cannot go. They spoke of how the pyramid was full of bats, and how these bats grow to the size of pigeons. There

5:04are inscriptions on the stones, written in the ancient characters that no one understands. In the entire land of Egypt, I have never found a single person who so much as claimed to have heard of anyone who knew how to read them. He even seems to have visited the Sphinx nearby, which was then buried up to its neck in the sands. Also, by the three pyramids, at a distance

5:35from them of rather more than a bowshot, the likeness of a most enormous head and neck protrudes from the ground. The people call it Old Father Dread, and assert that its body is buried in the ground. The face is handsomely, indeed admirably portrayed, with a touch of elegance and beauty about the features, as if a smile were playing across them. Above all, al-Baghdadi was impressed by the mastery of

6:05engineering it must have required to build such constructions, and to have them survive for such a stretch of time. The construction of the pyramids was carried out according to a methodology remarkable in respect both to design and to precision of execution. This is what has enabled the pyramids to endure time's passing eras. Or rather, it has meant that time itself has had to endure the era of the

6:39pyramids. Noble intellects gave the pyramids their all. Pure minds exhausted their every effort for their sake. Enlightened souls outpoured their loftiest capabilities on their design, to stand as exemplars that are the pinnacle of the possible. Because of this, they all but speak aloud of their builders, telling us what sort of folk they were, giving voice to their intellects, relating the stories of their lives and times.

7:16When al-Baghdadi visited Giza around the year 1200, the Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world and had been for more than 3,700 years. All that time, it had testified to the greatness of the civilization that had grown up on the banks of the Nile, a civilization that had passed through countless periods of flourishing and decay, and then finally disappeared beneath the sands of the desert.

7:48L-Baghdadi A-Baghdadi

Introduction to the Podcast

7:55My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to The Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I

8:29look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time, who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to tell the story of one of the most iconic cultures ever produced by humankind, the civilizations of Egypt's Nile Valley. I want to show how this series of related societies grew

9:02up in the floodplains of their great river, and built some of the most enduring and recognizable structures in the world. I want to tell the story of how they rose, how they endured, and how they finally faded from history altogether.

The Story of Egypt

9:25The story of Egypt is one of the greatest and longest epics in all of history. Many empires would consider themselves lucky to last through the reigns of 31 kings, but ancient Egypt would see the reign of 31 dynasties of kings, lasting for more than 3,000 years.

9:49In the time since, historians have long struggled with this panoply of rulers and eras, and have tried to wrestle the history of Egypt into neat categories. They typically split its history into three sets of dynasties, commonly known as the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. Between these are a number of intermediate periods, when the central power of its kings failed, and the land divided.

10:21Throughout this history, Egypt's empire would ebb and flow, just like the great river that gave it life. That river was the greatest watercourse of the entire Afro-Eurasian landmass, the river Nile.

10:39The Nile finds its source in Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa. It's a body of water about the size of Georgia, or nearly the size of Ireland. The gigantic Lake Victoria drains into the river known as the White Nile, which is joined by the so-called Blue Nile, further downstream at Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. From there, it flows for a further 2,000 kilometers across the Nubian and Egyptian deserts to Cairo,

11:14where it branches out into a wide delta, and empties into the Mediterranean Sea.

11:23Next to the Amazon River, the Nile is either the longest or second longest river on Earth. It runs for 6,800 kilometers, or around a sixth of the way around the Earth, and its drainage basin covers a tenth of the entire landmass of Africa. Egypt itself has an extremely arid climate, and its inland territories experience virtually no rainfall. If geography had been only a little different,

11:55and late Victoria had not begun to drain westwards, we can only imagine how differently history might have gone. For at least the last 5,000 years, every blade of grass and every tree in the Nile Valley, every animal and every person to ever live, every priest and every king, owes their existence solely to this river.

12:28Human presence in Egypt is among the oldest in the world. After evolving in the region of East Africa, modern humans migrated primarily along this corridor, and from there spread to the rest of the world. The Nile is, in a sense, the highway down which all of humanity has once passed.

12:52As one of our first stops along our great journey, Egypt is home to human remains of astonishing antiquity.

13:01Stone tools worked by archaic humans have been discovered in Nile deposits dating to as early as 600,000 years ago, and modern Homo sapiens followed in the last 100,000 years or so. These migrations likely happened during one of the many African humid periods that have occurred over the last millions of years.

13:28These are times when shifts in the planet's climate caused rains to fall on the Sahara Desert. During these periods, the desert bloomed into a verdant grassland, home to animals and people. When the period ended, the grasses would die, the animals would leave, and the sands would return. It's thought that this cycle has occurred more than 200 times since the desert first formed 8 million years ago.

14:03The earliest peoples in this region lived by hunting and fishing, and left behind stone tools and a multitude of rock paintings. From about the year 13,000 BC, in one of the Sahara's driest periods in history, the Sabillian culture began gathering wild wheat and barley, and from there developed their own domesticated strains. From 9,000 BC, people began to weave thread from wool,

14:33and another humid period began.

14:37One enigmatic stone circle at the desert site of Nabta Playa dates to around 7,500 BC, when the Sahara was a range of rolling grasslands once more. This stone monument may have been used to mark the movements of stars at different times of the year, so that people could keep track of cycles like the harvest and the migration of animals for hunting. Nabta Playa has been called Egypt's Stonehenge,

15:09but this doesn't quite do it justice, since it was built at least 5,000 years before the first stones of Stonehenge were ever laid. When the last ice age ended and the Sahara once more dried up, any peoples who had been living and herding in its grasslands would have been driven out of their ancestral home. They would have wandered across the newly formed desert until they reached the only stretch of green in the midst of all that sand.

15:41That was the banks of the Nile, and here they would make their home. These peoples would build a collection of scattered settlements reaching up and down the river. But slowly, as more and more people were driven to the riverbank to survive, these began to coalesce into larger towns, cities, and finally, kingdoms. The ancient Egyptians referred to the whole region

16:21by the name The Two Lands, referring to the Long Nile Valley in the south and the delta that spread out in the north, close to the sea. These were the two lands that today we call Upper and Lower Egypt.

16:40Surprisingly for a modern person who orients their maps facing north, the Egyptians thought of their world in the opposite direction. As a consequence, their word for east was the same as their word for left, and west the same as right. In the Egyptian mind, they were always facing upstream, waiting for the annual floods to arrive. If you find this confusing as we continue, just remember that southern Upper Egypt is the region upstream,

17:13and northern Lower Egypt is downstream. For many people at this time, the lands along the riverbank would have constituted their entire world. The Egyptians referred to the river's floodplain as Kemet, or the Black Land, due to the rich dark soil left behind by its life-giving floods. This land was the realm of the noble god Horus, who had the head of a falcon,

17:43the god of life, protection, and healing. If you walked just an hour in either direction, you would soon reach what they called Deshret, or the Red Land. This was the inhospitable desert stretching out on all sides, roasting hot, largely devoid of water and shade, and inhospitable to most life. These deserts were presided over by the god Set, the god of chaos and violence.

18:14The Nile itself, they knew simply by the name Iteru, or the river, since in their world, there was no other.

18:33The Egyptian world began in Upper Egypt, far up the reaches of the Nile, at a place now known as Aswan. Here, a belt of hard granite crosses the landscape and forces the river waters into shallow whitewater rapids, running over boulders and through rocky channels called cataracts. This word comes from the Greek word cataractes, or rushing down.

19:03Today, the waters of these cataracts have been tamed by the construction of the Aswan Dam, but in ancient times, they could be a rushing torrent. Each year, when the floodwaters passed through this rocky stretch of the river, they made such a thundering sound that the earth itself could shake, and this led the ancient Egyptians to believe that the waters were coming up from beneath the earth, bursting out of vast subterranean seas.

19:34At Aswan, they built a temple on an island in the middle of those rushing waters, and here worshipped that primeval force. The fast-flowing waters at Aswan made it a natural barrier to ships, and prevented any further exploration upriver. For this reason, for much of its early history, this was where ancient Egyptian influence ended, the final extent of their power and border of their empire.

Ancient Egyptian Geography

20:07Beyond Aswan was the southern lands of Nubia, and for this reason, Egyptians would also refer to it as the narrow gateway to the south. The temple island in the Aswan cataracts was known to the Egyptians as Abu, the Egyptian word for elephant, since it was a hub for the ivory trade with these southern lands. The Greeks would follow this example, and named the place Elephantine.

20:38From here, trade caravans would pass overland south to the Darfur region of Sudan, bringing gold, ivory, and other goods. But north of Aswan, everything was considered to be Egypt, as Herodotus records. All the land watered by the Nile in its course was Egypt, and all who lived lower down than the city Elephantine and drank the river's water were Egyptians.

21:08Such was the oracle given to them.

21:12Luckily for the Egyptians, the Nile flows from the south to the north, while the prevailing winds blow in the other direction, meaning that you could use the winds to sail against the current as far as Aswan without too much effort. But the return journey would be even easier, allowing the river waters to simply carry you along. A ship heading downstream to the north from Aswan would see for some time only rocky desert, and the river bordered by cliffs of hard Nubian sandstone.

21:45This is not a land well suited to agriculture, but in ancient times, these valleys were sources of natural resources, like gemstones, copper, and gold. Further north, the red cliffs fall away, and the floodplain around the river gets wider. Here, the landscape would have blushed green, and a larger population could be supported. It was in this region that the desert city of Thebes would grow up, which the Egyptians called Waset.

22:18This would one day become the most powerful city in Upper Egypt, the capital of the desert regions.

22:27The living part of an Egyptian city, its houses and markets and workshops, tended to be built on the eastern bank of the river, where the sun rises, while the western bank, where the sun set, was used only for burials and tombs. Sailing further north, you would reach the area we call Middle Egypt, and the floodplain gets wider still. This region would have been full of wildlife and vegetation.

22:58Some way to the west of the river, the waters divert and fill a large oasis known as Fayum, which sprouts like a broad leaf from the stem of the Nile. In ancient times, this lake was home to large populations of Nile crocodile, so that the settlement on the shore would be known by the Greeks as Crocodilopolis, or Crocodile City.

23:25Here, Egyptians apparently even tamed crocodiles in their temples, as Herodotus recounts. Now for some of the Egyptians, the crocodiles are sacred animals. Those who dwelt about Thebes, and about the lake of Moiris, hold them to be most sacred. And each of these two peoples keep one crocodile selected, which has been trained to tameness. And they put hanging ornaments of stone and of gold into the ears of these,

23:57and anklets round the front feet. And they give them food appointed and victims of sacrifices, and treat them as well as possible.

24:08In other places, crocodiles were hunted for food, using ingenious but risky methods. A man puts the back of a pig upon a hook as bait, and lets it go into the middle of the river, while he himself upon the bank of the river has a young live pig, which he beats. And the crocodile hearing its cries makes for the direction of the sound. And when he is drawn out to land,

24:40first of all, the hunter plasters up his eyes with mud, and having done so, he very easily gets the mastery of him. But if he does not do so, he has much trouble.

25:00Also living in the river were the animals that the Greeks would call river horses, or hippopotamus, our hippopotamus. The river horse is sacred in districts of Papremis, but for the other Egyptians it is not sacred, and this is the appearance which he presents. He is four-footed, cloven hoofed like an ox, flat-nosed, with a mane like a horse, and showing teeth like tusks,

25:31with a tail and voice like a horse, and in size as large as the largest ox. And his hide is so exceedingly thick that when it has been dried, shafts of javelins are made of it. The most strategically important location was what the Egyptians called the balance of the two lands. This was the place where the river split into its delta. As the crossroads between upper and lower Egypt,

26:03this was always the natural place for the capital when the empire was united. This location would give rise to the city of Memphis, and in turn to modern Cairo. And it is here that the Egyptians would build their most famous and lasting monuments.

26:22Each year, the monsoon rains falling in the highlands of Ethiopia and Central Africa would swell the river, and the annual flood would arrive. This happened with such regularity around the middle of August that the Egyptians timed it using the rising of the star Sirius.

26:44In the 5th century BC, Herodotus wrote the following description of these floods. When the Nile is in flood, it overflows in places as far as two days' journey from either bank. The Nile comes with a rising flood for a hundred days from the summer solstice. And when this tale of days is complete, it sinks again with a diminishing stream, so that the river is low for the whole winter,

27:16till the summer solstice again. The Egyptian year was divided into three seasons, the flood season of Achet, the growing season of Peret, and the harvest season of Shemu. Once the floodwaters receded in early autumn, the land was refreshed and fertilized with rich Nile mud, and new crops could be grown. In this black mud, farmers grew emmer wheat, barley, beans, and lentils,

27:47throughout the cooler winter season. And when summer came again, the grain was ready to be harvested.

27:55Egyptian life was held in this delicate balance.

28:00Each year, if the river flooded too little or too much, the results could be devastating. As one ancient Egyptian hymn to the Nile makes clear, If he is greedy, the whole land suffers. Great and small fall moaning. People are changed at his coming.

28:31When he rises, then the land is in joy. Then every belly is glad. Every jaw has held laughter. Since their lives depended so greatly on these floods, the Egyptians developed ingenious systems for measuring them. At the cataracts of Aswan,

29:03they built a series of devices known as Nile-ometers. These often take the form of towers with deep wells inside that allow the river to flow in, with measurements inscribed on their walls in Egyptian cubits. Each year, ancient people would anxiously check these Nile-ometers to see how high the water was rising that year and whether it would be a time of famine, a time of plenty, or a time when they would need to hastily build some flood defences.

29:40During the period known as the pre-dynastic era, the two halves of Egypt were divided, and this division was cultural as well as political. The desert people of southern Upper Egypt worshipped their own god, Nehbet, who was commonly depicted as a griffon vulture, a powerful and majestic bird. These people were likely darker-skinned and had more of a cultural and linguistic connection with the southern lands of Nubia and Sub-Saharan Africa,

30:12their rulers sometimes even intermarrying with the royalty of southern kingdoms. Meanwhile, the people of northern Lower Egypt paid deference to the god Wajet, usually shown as an Egyptian cobra. They had more genetic influence from North Africa and the Mediterranean and may have been somewhat lighter-skinned. The kings of southern Upper Egypt ruled while wearing a white bulbous crown, while the kings of the north wore a red crown,

30:45with a spiraling representation of a cobra emanating from it. The kingdoms that ruled over these regions were always fluid, but the geographical distinction between Upper and Lower Egypt always held sway. But around the year 3000 BC, or more than 5000 years ago, all that began to change. That was because of a king of a kingdom called Thinis. His name was Namer. The figure of Namer is wreathed in mystery,

31:29and what little we know about him has been pieced together from fragments of inscriptions and a few significant artefacts. Namer was born under the personal name Menes, but chose Namer as his Horus name or king name when he came to the throne of Thinis. And this name perhaps gives us some sense of his personality. That's because Namer means something like fighting catfish. The Nile catfish that the king clearly admired

32:02is a remarkable species. It's a predatory fish, a nocturnal hunter that can grow up to 1.2 meters long or about the size of a dolphin and uses a form of naturally generated electricity as a weapon. Using a unique organ in its body, it can generate an electric shock of up to 350 volts that stuns its prey. In the largest catfish, this shock can be enough to stun an adult human,

32:33and the Egyptians were fascinated by this unique property. They depicted these shock and awe predators on painted wall murals and even experimented with using the weak electric charges of young specimens as a treatment for arthritis. We might imagine that this king, Namer, wanted to emulate some of the characteristics of these surprise hunters. But whether it was their patience lying in wait for their enemies, the tenacity of their surprise attacks,

33:03or the shock and awe with which they stunned their prey, we may never know. Virtually the only source we have for this period is a carving known as the Namer palette, which contains only a handful of cryptic clues. One side of this carved artifact shows King Namer standing over a defeated enemy, gripping him by the hair in one hand and raising a mace in the other. It's a clear sign of domination.

33:35Here, Namer is shown wearing the white, bulbous crown of his native Upper Egypt, suggesting that he bludgeoned his rivals there into submission. On the other side, the carving shows the king leading an army, while ranks of his defeated enemies lie before him. Below this, an image of a bull is shown tearing down the walls of a fortress with its horns. On this side of the carving, Namer is wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt.

34:06From this, we might assume that he set out on a campaign of conquest and successfully brought the two lands of Egypt together. Two mythical animals carved on one side of the Namer palette stand with their long necks intertwined, perhaps representing the coming together of the two sides of Egypt, their lives and their fates now inextricably bound. This was a union that would see the newly united Egypt grow

34:47to become one of the most influential societies in early human history. At first, Egyptian culture was heavily influenced by the slightly older civilizations of Mesopotamia, like the Sumerians. Egyptian palaces were often built to a Sumerian design, and they used Sumerian motifs in their art too. But by at least the year 3000 BC, Egypt had matured its own indigenous artistic culture

35:17and its own system of writing. The Greeks would later refer to these by a word which means sacred carving or hieroglyph.

35:33The Egyptian hieroglyphs are a mixed writing system that uses a variety of phonetic symbols, as well as a collection of symbols that represent whole words. For example, an image of a man holding up his hand to his mouth could be used to represent the common word eat, but other symbols that represented groups of consonants could be used to spell out other less common words, names, or places.

36:03Hieroglyphs emerged a little after the invention of cuneiform in Mesopotamia, and it's possible they were inspired by this older writing system. In Mesopotamia, we can see the gradual evolution of the cuneiform writing system from its earliest symbolic roots. But in Egypt, the earliest discovered example of hieroglyphs show the symbols springing into existence already fully formed in a complex system. This suggests that they may have been developed

36:33all at once as a conscious effort and were perhaps even devised by a single person. The Egyptian hieroglyph for ruler was the shepherd's crook since the king was considered to be a kind of shepherd for his people. Egyptian kings would even symbolize their royalty by holding a gilded, curved crook modeled after those used by shepherds. These kings have come to be known as pharaohs. The word pharaoh derives from the Egyptian word

37:09per-a-a, meaning great house, and it has stuck in the popular imagination as the name used for any Egyptian ruler, partly due to its use in the Bible. But there is actually no evidence that it was used to refer to Egypt's rulers until nearly 2,000 years after Namer's lifetime. Up until that time, throughout the first 18 dynasties of Egypt's history, its rulers were simply referred to as kings or Neswet,

37:40and by epithets such as His Majesty. Still, the term pharaoh has gained such currency in popular usage that it's still used to refer to all the rulers of Egypt across the ages. The pharaoh in ancient Egypt was considered the living embodiment of the falcon god Horus and the son of the sun god Ra. One later hymn praises the figure of the king. Pharaoh is the lord of wisdom

38:11whose mother knows not his name. Pharaoh's glory is in the sky. His might is in the horizon. Pharaoh is the bull of the sky who shatters all at will, who lives on the being of every god.

38:27Perhaps most famously of all, the Egyptians were compelled by their religious beliefs to embalm the bodies of the dead, ritually cleansing them in preparation for the afterlife. The Greek Herodotus, who travelled widely in Egypt, wrote about the specialist embalmers who would prepare bodies in this way in exchange for a fee.

38:52They, whenever a corpse is conveyed to them, show to those who brought it wooden models of corpses made like reality by painting and demonstrate on these the best of the ways of embalming. The second, which they show, is less good and also less expensive, and the third is the least expensive of all. Having told them about this, they inquire in which way they desire the corpse of their friend to be prepared.

39:23With the price negotiated, the embalmer could begin their work, the grisly process of which Herodotus also describes. First, with the crooked iron tool, they draw out the brain through the nostrils, extracting it partly thus and partly by pouring in drugs. And after this, with the sharp stone of Ethiopia, they make a cut along the side and take out the whole contents of the belly.

39:54And when they have cleared out the cavity and cleansed it with palm wine, they cleanse it again with spices pounded up. Then they fill the belly with pure myrrh and with cassia and other spices and sew it together again. Having done so, they keep covered up in natron for seventy days. And then they wash the corpse and roll its whole body up in fine linen cut into bands,

40:25smearing those beneath with gum, which the Egyptians use generally, instead of glue.

40:33Mummification was expensive, and only those with wealth could afford it. Rich merchants, royal officials, and of course, the pharaoh himself.

40:47One inscription on the walls of a tomb for the pharaoh Unas gives a sense of the kinds of prayers and blessings that might have been spoken while these rituals took place. This one to the sun god Amun-Ra and the moon god Thoth. Son and Thoth, take Unas with you,

41:18that he may eat of what you eat of, that he may drink of what you drink of, that he may sit where you sit, that he may sail in what you sail in. The booth of Unas is plaited of reeds. The flood of Unas is in the marsh of offerings. His feast is among you gods. The water of Unas is wine like the sun. Unas will circumnavigate the sky

41:49like the sun. Unas shall course the sky.

42:06Upon coming to the throne of the newly united Egypt, King Narmair built a new capital, perfectly placed at the balance of the two lands, where the river met the delta. This city would become known as Inebu Hedge, or the City of White Walls, but today we know it as Memphis.

42:30The kings who followed Narmair would rule from this new capital, but they spent much of their time traveling between palaces, and when they died, their bodies were still taken back to Narmair's home region of Thinnis in Upper Egypt to be mummified and buried in the city's ancestral burial ground at Abydos. That was until the reign of a king named Hotep Sakemwi. He ruled from about 2,900 BC

43:00and started what has been called the Second Dynasty of Egypt, and he took the decision to start a new burial ground near Memphis so that Egypt's pharaohs could be buried close to their new capital. For the site of this new burial ground, he chose a place on the western bank of the river, the side where the sun sets, at a vast open place called Saqqara.

43:34Saqqara is situated on a raised plateau that the floodwaters of the Nile do not reach. Visually, it would have been striking to ancient people as the place where the green river lands end and the dead sand of the desert abruptly begins. For this reason, it may have been considered a crossing place between death and life, the perfect place for a necropolis or a city of the dead. For kings who wanted their tombs to be remembered,

44:06it also had the benefit of being highly visible from the new capital of Memphis.

44:13Over the coming centuries, this site would become full of tombs of kings and queens and countless royal attendants and nobles who followed them into the afterlife. At first, these tombs were built in a form known as a mastaba, large rectangular constructions built of mud brick and promising their inhabitants a rebirth into the next life. These could be very large, but they were still relatively unassuming.

44:44But soon, Egyptian pharaohs would get even more ambitious with their burial arrangements. This ambition truly began with the rule of a pharaoh named Netjeriket Djoser. The reign of Djoser begins the period known as the Old Kingdom, which would last for the next 500 years. Djoser was the son of a king named Khah-Sakemwi,

45:15who had reunited Egypt after a period of turmoil, during which the northern delta rose in rebellion. With order now restored, Djoser clearly wanted to keep it that way. Rather than continuing to travel around the country as pharaohs before him had done, he moved to a permanent capital at Memphis, where he could keep a better eye on the restive northern riverlands. Over his nearly three decades of rule,

45:46he set about an ambitious program of construction, rebuilding temples and throwing up fortresses all along the river. But it was in the manner of his burial that he would truly leave his mark. When Djoser began the construction of his final resting place, it looked a lot like the mastaba tombs of the kings that had come before. But his royal architect soon began dreaming of a more ambitious structure. He was a visionary chancellor and engineer who held numerous official titles

46:18in the kingdom, including head of the royal shipyard, royal seal-bearer, and overseer of all stone works. His name was Imhotep.

46:36Imhotep's name means the one who comes in peace, and he was born in the 27th century BC. But beyond that, much of what we know about him has been distorted by myth and legend. He was something of a polymath, a priest, a statesman, a scribe, physician, and architect, and even gained fame as a magician. He also has the distinction of being perhaps the first non-royal person to be recorded in any detail

47:07by history. As the king's most trusted architect, Imhotep was put in charge of the construction of Josa's tomb. But it would not be a regular mud-brick mastaba like his predecessors. In fact, Imhotep was determined to build this tomb out of stone. This stone would need to be quarried from the bedrock nearby, roughly cut into blocks. But as this stone mastaba rose out of the desert,

47:39Imhotep seems to have had an idea. With this stronger building material, the structure could support more weight, and so there was no real reason to stop building. Once the first mastaba was built, he experimented with placing another smaller one on top of it, and then another on top of that, creating a stepped design like a wedding cake. Originally, Imhotep planned to build this construction

48:09four tiers high, but soon he became even more daring. By the time it was finished, Joso's tomb stood six layers high. It was perhaps the world's first large-scale construction made from cut stone, and rising to a height of 62 meters, it was likely also the tallest building on earth.

48:34Finally, the stepped pyramid of Josa was complete, and when the king died, he was laid to rest in a granite chamber beneath the great edifice, surrounded by a maze of tunnels.

48:49Josa's pyramid was a revolutionary step in Egyptian architecture, and it would stand as a challenge to all the kings who would follow him, a challenge that they would find irresistible.

49:09The difficulties that engineers like Imhotep faced in building these pyramids were enormous, but their achievement becomes even more impressive when you consider that these monuments also had to be built fast. Today, Egypt is littered with the remains of half-built pyramids. These were abandoned halfway through their construction, usually because the pharaoh who commissioned them had died early. Once a pharaoh was dead,

49:40it seemed no one saw any point in continuing to build his tomb. After all, there was a new pharaoh now, and construction on his pyramid would have to begin right away. For this reason, pyramids usually had to be completed at the very least within 30 years. Only the kings with the longest and most stable reigns would ever live to see the final capstone placed.

50:09The next pharaoh after Djoser was a man named Sekemket, who may have been Djoser's brother, and he would join the ranks of the unfinished. As soon as he came to the throne, he began the construction of another stepped pyramid of immense ambition, sure to dwarf his brother's achievement. But only the first layer of the pyramid was built when Sekemket died, just six or seven years into his reign, and the pyramid was abandoned.

50:41Another king, Kabar, also died after six years, before his stepped pyramid could be completed. To build each pyramid, the Egyptians would require enormous amounts of laborers, as many as 100,000 per pyramid, with about 10,000 laboring at any one time. There's a widespread misconception that these monuments were built by armies of slaves, but most historians now believe this