Saqqara and the Serapeum

Auguste Mariette found the Serapeum by reading a book. Strabo, writing in the first century BC, had described a temple of Serapis at Memphis approached by an avenue of sphinxes that the desert sand was forever burying. In 1850 Mariette, sent to Egypt to buy Coptic manuscripts, a task he abandoned, saw a sphinx head standing above the dunes, recognised the description, and dug along the line it implied. He uncovered sphinx after sphinx, followed them, and by November 1851 he was inside the catacombs where the Apis bulls were buried.

Each Apis was a living bull identified by particular markings and understood as the presence of Ptah on earth. It was kept, honoured, and at death embalmed and entombed. The Greater Vaults, begun under Psamtik I, hold enormous sarcophagi of granite and basalt cut and polished to a tolerance that has impressed every engineer who has looked at them; two dozen remain in the galleries, the heaviest around sixty tonnes.

The discovery made Mariette's career and founded the Egyptian antiquities service he went on to run. It also cost the site a great deal. The clearance was fast and thinly documented by any standard, including some that existed at the time. Much of what he removed went to the Louvre, including the Seated Scribe and the group of statues of Greek poets and philosophers from the avenue's exedra, and sphinxes from the approach ended up in Vienna. Only two Apis burials were found undisturbed; the rest had been robbed in antiquity, which limits how much the disturbance cost, but the stratigraphy and the context went with the speed.

What remained of his own record then disappeared twice over. A Nile flood at the Boulaq museum in 1878 destroyed unpublished notes, and his excavation diary was later borrowed by a successor and never returned. The result is that the largest single discovery of its century is documented worse than digs a fraction of its size.

Saqqara has meanwhile become the most productive excavation in Egypt. Since 2018 it has produced sealed coffins by the hundred, the intact tomb of the priest Wahtye, a mummy covered in gold leaf, and in April 2025 the tomb of a son of Userkaf fronted by a pink granite false door four and a half metres high.

The Step Pyramid at Saqqara is the moment a burial mound became a building. Before it, royal tombs were rectangular mud brick structures with flat tops. Djoser's complex takes that form, stacks six of them, and executes the whole thing in cut limestone, inside an enclosure wall more than a kilometre long containing courts, shrines and dummy buildings that were never meant to be entered. Several of the shrines are solid: they have carved doorways that do not open and columns that carry nothing, because their purpose was to provide the king with a permanent stone version of the temporary festival architecture he would need in the afterlife.

The complex is the earliest large scale monumental stone building known anywhere, and the ancient Egyptians themselves remembered who designed it. Imhotep, Djoser's official, was still being named more than two thousand years later, by then venerated as a god of healing and wisdom and identified by the Greeks with Asklepios. That is a rare thing in Egyptian record keeping, where architects are usually anonymous. What Saqqara shows, laid out across a single site, is the invention of a religious form rather than its mature use: the step pyramid was tried once at this scale, refined, and then abandoned for the true pyramid within two generations.

Saqqara holds both the oldest large stone building in the world and an underground gallery built for the burials of bulls treated as living gods.

Older than the pyramids at Giza

The Step Pyramid of Djoser, designed for the Third Dynasty pharaoh by his official Imhotep, is generally regarded as the oldest colossal stone building in the world, predating the Giza pyramids by several generations and marking the transition from earlier mudbrick royal tombs to monumental stone construction, a shift credited largely to Imhotep's own innovation.

Burying a bull as a god

The Serapeum, a network of underground galleries at Saqqara, held the mummified remains of the Apis bulls, animals worshipped in life as living manifestations of the god Ptah and, after death, associated with Osiris, each interred in an enormous polished granite sarcophagus weighing many tonnes, a scale of animal burial without a close parallel elsewhere in the ancient world.

Found fast, at a cost

As this entry's companion article notes, the Serapeum's rediscovery by Auguste Mariette in the 1850s, guided partly by the ancient geographer Strabo's description, was carried out with a speed that came at the cost of careful documentation, and some archaeological context was lost or damaged in the rush to excavate before French sponsors' patience, and funding, ran out.