THE OLD KINGDOM IN EGYPT AND THE BEGINNING OF THE FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD

Abstract

THE THIRD DYNASTY Early in the Third Dynasty, King Djoser employed the genius of his architect Imhotep to erect the first great building of stone, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. The name Djoser, written in a cartouche, has not been found in an inscription of the Old Kingdom. On his own monuments the king writes his Horus-name, Netjerykhet. There is no doubt that these two names refer to the same man. The wall scribblings of the Eighteenth Dynasty visitors to the Step Pyramid refer to the temple of Djoser and both names occur, together with the name of Imhotep, in the Ptolemaic inscription, on the Island of Siheil near the First Cataract. The legendary character of Imhotep, who was revered centuries after his death as a demi-god, the builder of the temple of Edfu, the wise chancellor, architect and physician of Djoser, has now acquired reality through the discovery of his name on a statue-base of Netjerykhet in the excavations of the Step Pyramid. It is curious that modern research should, within a short space of time, have established the identity of both the wise men of whom centuries later the harper of King Inyotef sings: ‘I have heard the sayings of Imhotep and Hordedef with whose words men speak so often. What are their habitations now? Their walls are destroyed, their habitations are no more, as if they had never been.’ The tomb of Hordedef, with the inscriptions in its chapel maliciously erased but still partly readable was found at Giza, east of the pyramid of his father Cheops, at a time when the excavation of the elaborate series of structures erected at Saqqara by Imhotep was still in progress.