KING DJOSER
He was the son of King Khasekhemwy and Queen Nimaethap, but it is still unclear whether he was the direct heir to the throne. The Ramesede king list gives the name of a king Nebka before him,
but there are still problems in connecting this name with the contemporary horus names.
The painted limestone statue of Djoser from the so-called serdab,
now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, is the oldest known life-size Egyptian statue.
Today at the site in Sakkara where it was found, there is a plaster copy of the statue in place of the original.
The statue was found 1924-1925. In the inscriptions, he is called Netjerikhet, meaning “divine of the body.
Egyptologists now believe that Djoser was the first king of this dynasty,
by pointing out that the order in which some of Cheops’ predecessors were mentioned in the Papyrus Westcar,
which suggests that Nebka should be placed between Djoser and Huni, not before Djoser.
Queen Nimaethap, wife of Khasekhemwy, the last king of the Second Dynasty of Egypt, is mentioned on a pot lid from Khasekhemwy with the title “Mother of the King’s Children”,
some writers claim she was Djoser’s mother and Khasekhemwy was his father.
This is also suggested by another pot lid, dating from Djoser’s reign,
and there calls her “Mother of the King of the Two Lands”. Her cult seems to have still been active in Snefru’s later reign.
The relationship between Djoser and his successor, Sekhemkhet, is unknown; and the date of his death is uncertain.
Manetho says that Djoser ruled Egypt for twenty-nine years, while the Turin King List says it was only nineteen years. Due to its many important construction projects,
especially in Sakkara, Djoser must have had a reign of almost 30 years.
Djoser sent several military expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula, during which the local inhabitants were subjugated. He also sent expeditions for valuable minerals such as turquoise and copper.
The Sinai was also strategically important as a buffer between the Nile Valley and Asia.
His most famous monument is his Step Pyramid, this shape would eventually lead to the standard pyramid tomb in the later Old Kingdom.
He may also have established the southern border of his kingdom in the First Cataract. An inscription known as the Famine Stele which records the date of Djoser’s reign,
but probably made during the Ptolemaic dynasty, tells how Djoser rebuilt the temple of Khnum on the island of Elephantine in the First Cataract, after ending a seven-year famine in Egypt.
Although it appears that he started an unfinished tomb in Abydos Upper Egypt, Djoser was eventually buried in his famous pyramid at Saqqara in Lower Egypt.
Djoser and Imhotep the famous architect of King Djoser was his vizier, “the head of the royal shipyard” and “overseer of all stone works”, Imhotep oversaw stone building projects such as the tombs of King Djoser and King Sekhemkhet.
It is possible that Imhotep was mentioned in the equally famous Papyrus Westcar, in a story called “Cheops and the Magicians”. But because the papyrus is badly damaged at the beginning, Imhotep’s name has been lost.
A papyrus from the Temple of Tebtunis, dating from the 2nd century AD, preserves a long story in the demotic script about Djoser and Imhotep. To Djoser, Imhotep was so important that he was honored by being mentioned on statues of King Djoser in his necropolis at Sakkara.
Djoser was buried in his famous Step Pyramid in Sakkara. This pyramid was originally built as an almost quadratic mastaba, but then five further mastabas were literally piled on top of the first, each new mastaba smaller until the monument became the first step pyramid. Supervisor of the building constructions was the high lector priest Imhotep.
The step pyramid is made of limestone. It is enormous and contains only a tight corridor leading to the narrow center of the monument, ending in a crude chamber where the entrance to the tomb was hidden in a shaft.
This shaft was later filled with rubble. The pyramid was once 62 meters high and had a base of approximately 125 x 109 meters. It was tightly covered with finely cut, white limestone. Under the Staircase Pyramid, a large maze of corridors and rooms.
The burial chamber is located in the middle of the underground complex, a 28 meter deep shaft leads directly from the surface to the burial chamber.
The ash entrance was closed by a stone plug weighing 3.5 tons.
The underground burial maze contains four galleries.
The eastern gallery contained three limestone reliefs depicting King Djoser during the celebration of the Hebsed festival. The walls around and between these reliefs were decorated with bluish Fayence tiles.
They were believed to imitate reed mats, as a reference to the mythological underworld waters. The other galleries experience unfinished.
On the eastern side of the pyramid, very close to the blue chambers,
eleven grave axes lead straight down from 30-32 meters deep,
these were used for the funerals of royal family members,
and part were used as symbolic graves of the grave goods of the royal ancestors of the 1st & 2nd Dynasties.
More than 40,000 vessels, bowls and vases made from all kinds of semi-precious stones were found in these galleries. Royal names such as the kings Den, Semerkhet, Nynetjer and Sekhemib were mentioned on the pots.
It is now thought that Djoser had restored and then sealed the original tombs of the ancestors
with the grave goods in the galleries in an attempt to save them.
King Djoser’s necropolis was surrounded by a 10.5 meter high wall with niches in it,
building a courtyard of 15 hectares. This courtyard contains several cultic buildings,
such as the Southern Tomb, the Southern Courtyard, the Southern and Northern Pavillon,
the entrance Colonnade and the Serdab with the famous statue of Djoser.
