It’s also a glimpse, perhaps, of the world’s first starchitect. No one was ever explicitly named as the pyramid’s designer, but the widely-held belief is that it was a man called Imhotep, whose name is found on a statue near the entrance to the pyramid. Imhotep’s abilities appear to have been extraordinary: other records show he was a doctor and high priest, as well as the king’s chief carpenter, head sculptor, and second-in-command. Years after his death, he was given the status of a god.
As Jeffreys says: “Imhotep becomes himself an iconic figure, not only architect – and possibly not one at all in the technical sense – but an early power merchant. How else could the labour for the pyramid be arranged and organised on a national scale?”
The ambition of his creation nods to the growing power and bureaucracy of the world’s first nation-state. To build Zoser’s pyramid, Egypt needed not just workers, but managers and civil servants. In previous generations, historians think the royal family might have dealt with most of the country’s administration. But the expansion of Memphis’s burial grounds forced the creation of “a more structured bureaucracy, opened up, for the first time, to career professionals drawn from a wider section of society and promoted on merit”, writes Toby Wilkinson in The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. “As Egypt embarked on pyramid-building, the pyramids were building Egypt.”
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- Development: "A history of cities in 50 buildings", 01: The Pyramid of Zoser (The Guardian), Monday, March 23, 2015 - 13:16