Imhotep served as chancellor and chief architect to the Egyptian pharaoh Djoser during the Third Dynasty and is the earliest engineer and architect known to history by name, credited with designing the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first monumental structure built entirely of dressed stone. Where earlier tombs were low, flat mastabas of mudbrick, Imhotep design stacked six mastaba-like tiers of diminishing size into a single stepped pyramid roughly sixty meters tall, a leap in scale and material that later Egyptian pyramid builders directly extended. Centuries after his death he was venerated in Egyptian religion as a god of medicine, wisdom and healing, absorbed into the cult of the god Ptah at Memphis, a deification so complete that a mortal architect became one of the very few named individuals worshipped as a full deity in the ancient world; this atlas holds him as the engineer his own inscriptions record him to have been, and proposes a same-as facet link to DivinityAtlas, which already holds Imhotep as a deity entity, on the Ibn Sina precedent for a genuinely dual-facet figure.
Facts
Disputed
Birth YearNo birth record survives. The year is a scholarly estimate backed into from his known service under Pharaoh Djoser, whose Third Dynasty reign is placed around the twenty-seventh century BCE, and from the working life a chief architect of the Step Pyramid would need to have had by that point. Death YearNo death record survives. The year is a scholarly estimate consistent with the end of Djoser reign and the span of Imhotep known career. Connections
Associated With
Traditionally credited as the architect and engineer of the Step Pyramid of Djoser.
In Field
Source Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopaedia Britannica editors
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Divinity Atlas: Imhotep, the same subject.
Sources
1. A History of Technology
Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors, Oxford University Press, 1954View the Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.In Field: Civil EngineeringView the Source Frequently Asked Questions
What made the Step Pyramid at Saqqara a leap in engineering?
It was the first monumental structure of dressed stone, about sixty meters tall, replacing low mudbrick mastabas.
Imhotep, chancellor and chief architect to the pharaoh Djoser, designed the Step Pyramid as the first monumental structure built entirely of dressed stone. Where earlier tombs were low, flat mastabas of mudbrick, he stacked six mastaba-like tiers of diminishing size into a single stepped pyramid roughly sixty meters tall, a leap in scale and material that later Egyptian pyramid builders directly extended.
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