Saqqara is the great burial ground of ancient Memphis, about 30 km south of central Cairo, used for royal and elite burials for roughly three thousand years, from the 1st Dynasty (c. 3000 BCE) into the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It is home to the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the earliest large-scale cut-stone building known, as well as the Pyramid Texts of Unas and the underground Serapeum, where the sacred Apis bulls were buried.
Saqqara matters because it holds so many firsts in one place. The first monumental stone architecture, the first known royal religious texts carved inside a pyramid and some of the finest Old Kingdom relief carving all sit within a few kilometres of each other. It is also one of the most active excavation sites in Egypt, and it is where the debate between mainstream Egyptology and alternative researchers becomes most concrete, because the evidence is physical: stone boxes, tunnels and walls that anyone can walk up to and measure. For a wider map of the civilization behind it, start with [the Ancient Egypt topic hub](/topics/ancient-egypt).
Where is Saqqara and what is it?
Saqqara is a desert plateau on the west bank of the Nile that served as the main necropolis of Memphis, Egypt's capital for much of the Old Kingdom. The city itself lay in the valley below; the dead were carried up to the dry edge of the desert, the side of the setting sun.
In 1979 UNESCO inscribed "Memphis and its Necropolis – the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur" as a World Heritage Site. That listing treats Saqqara as one part of a much longer chain of cemeteries. Giza lies to the north, and Dahshur, where Sneferu built the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid, lies about 10 km to the south. Those Dahshur pyramids belong to the wider Memphite necropolis rather than to Saqqara proper, but visitors often see them on the same day. If Giza is on your list too, the companion piece [The Giza Plateau Explained](/the-giza-plateau-explained-a-visitors-guide-to-the-pyramids-sphinx-and-what-lies-beneath) covers that site in the same format.
What makes Saqqara unusual is its time depth: large 1st Dynasty mastaba tombs line the northern edge of the plateau, Old Kingdom kings and officials built pyramids and decorated tombs across the middle, and burials, animal cults and temple activity continued into the Greco-Roman era.
The Step Pyramid of Djoser: the first great stone monument
The Step Pyramid of Djoser is a six-stepped pyramid built for King Djoser of the 3rd Dynasty, around 2670–2650 BCE, and it is the earliest large-scale cut-stone building known anywhere. It rises about 60–62 m, with a rectangular base of roughly 121 × 109 m.
Before Djoser, royal and elite tombs were mostly flat-topped mudbrick mastabas. Egyptologists read the Step Pyramid as that tradition translated into stone and pushed upward. The monument was not planned as a pyramid from the start; it began as a square mastaba and was enlarged in several stages until it became a stack of six diminishing tiers.
The pyramid is only the centrepiece. It stands inside a walled enclosure of about 15 hectares, surrounded by a niched limestone wall about 10.5 m high that imitates the recessed "palace facade" style of earlier brick architecture. Inside the enclosure are:
- The Heb-Sed court, lined with dummy chapels connected to the royal jubilee festival that ritually renewed the king's power.
- The South Tomb, a second, symbolic burial structure on the southern side of the complex whose exact purpose is still discussed.
- Solid "dummy" buildings, stone facades with no usable interior, apparently meant to serve the king in eternity rather than the living.
Beneath the pyramid lies a system of shafts, corridors and galleries several kilometres long in total. A deep central shaft leads down to a granite burial chamber, and some of the galleries were decorated with blue faience tiles imitating reed matting. Excavators recovered tens of thousands of stone vessels from the underground galleries, many inscribed with the names of kings who reigned before Djoser.
The complex was closed to the public for years during a restoration of about 14 years, and it reopened to visitors in March 2020. Much of what can be seen today, including rebuilt sections of the enclosure wall and colonnade, owes a debt to the French architect Jean-Philippe Lauer, who devoted most of the 20th century to studying and restoring the complex.
Imhotep: the architect behind it
Imhotep is the official credited with designing the Step Pyramid complex, and a statue base of Djoser found at the site carries his name and titles. That makes him one of the very few individual architects from the Old Kingdom whose name survives in connection with a specific monument.
Over the following centuries Imhotep came to be venerated as a sage and healer, and eventually as a god in his own right. The Greeks identified him with Asclepius, their god of medicine. Today the on-site Imhotep Museum, opened in 2006 near the entrance to the Step Pyramid complex, is the best place to start a visit, with finds from Saqqara displayed in context.
The Pyramid of Unas and the Pyramid Texts
The Pyramid of Unas, built for the last king of the 5th Dynasty around 2350 BCE, contains the oldest known Pyramid Texts: spells and recitations carved in columns of hieroglyphs on the walls of the burial chamber and antechamber.
The Pyramid Texts are the earliest substantial body of religious writing known from Egypt, and among the oldest anywhere. They describe the dead king's journey, his protection from dangers and his ascent to join the gods and the circumpolar stars. Later kings and queens of the 6th Dynasty, including Teti, whose pyramid also stands at Saqqara, continued the practice.
These texts did not stay royal. Over time, versions of the spells were adapted onto the coffins of officials in the Middle Kingdom (the Coffin Texts), and later onto papyrus scrolls in the New Kingdom, the collection known today as the Book of the Dead. For how that later tradition works, see [The Egyptian Book of the Dead Explained](/the-egyptian-book-of-the-dead-explained-spells-judgment-and-the-afterlife). For the worldview behind all three bodies of text, including the principle of Maat and the Neteru, read [Kemetic spirituality explained](/kemetic-spirituality-explained-neteru-maat-and-the-ancient-egyptian-worldview).
The mastabas: daily life carved in stone
The private tombs of Saqqara are the site's second great treasure. Officials of the Old Kingdom built mastabas near their kings, and their chapels are covered in painted reliefs showing farming, fishing, boat-building, butchery, crafts, music and household life.
Three are especially well known:
- The mastaba of Ti, a 5th Dynasty official, famous for the quality and detail of its reliefs, including hippopotamus hunting in the marshes.
- The mastaba of Mereruka, vizier under Teti in the 6th Dynasty, one of the largest private tombs of the Old Kingdom, with dozens of rooms.
- The mastaba of Kagemni, another vizier of the same era, known for its lively scenes of animals and daily work.
These scenes are one of the main sources for how ordinary Egyptians worked and lived more than four thousand years ago.
The Serapeum: tunnels of the Apis bulls
The Serapeum of Saqqara is a network of underground galleries cut into the bedrock for the burial of the Apis bulls, sacred animals associated with Ptah, the god of Memphis. When an Apis bull died it was mummified and buried with royal-level ceremony, and a successor bull was sought out.
The site was rediscovered by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette in 1851. He was guided by the Greek geographer Strabo, who described a temple of Serapis near Memphis approached by an avenue of sphinxes half-buried in sand. Mariette found sphinxes of that avenue and followed them to the galleries.
The Serapeum was in use from the reign of Amenhotep III in the 18th Dynasty through to the Ptolemaic period. Its most famous section, the Greater Vaults, belongs to the later phase and contains 24 monolithic stone sarcophagi of granite and similar hard stone, each set in its own side chamber. With their lids, these boxes weigh roughly 60 to 80 tonnes each. Most were found empty and had been looted in antiquity, but Mariette also found an undisturbed burial from the era of Khaemwaset, the son of Ramesses II who served as high priest of Ptah at Memphis.
Why the Serapeum boxes are debated
The Serapeum is a flashpoint because of the precision of those boxes: flat interior surfaces, sharp inner corners and close-fitting lids, cut from very hard stone and manoeuvred into narrow underground chambers. Researchers in the alternative-history community argue that this level of finish points to tools or methods more advanced than the ones Egyptologists describe.
The mainstream position is that the boxes were produced with known hard-stone techniques: roughing out with dolerite pounders, cutting with copper tools fed with sand as an abrasive, and very long periods of grinding and polishing. Egyptologists point to the inscriptions and dated contexts in the galleries as evidence for when the boxes were installed. Both sides agree on one thing: exactly how the work was organised and finished is still an open question, and it is discussed on both sides of the debate. The same argument runs through the Giza monuments, covered in [how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built](/how-was-the-great-pyramid-of-giza-built-evidence-theories-and-open-questions).
Recent discoveries at Saqqara
Saqqara remains one of the most productive excavation sites in Egypt, and major announcements continue. A few recent highlights:
- 2018: the tomb of Wahtye, a 5th Dynasty priest, was revealed with its brightly painted reliefs still intact.
- 2019–2020: in the area known as the Bubasteion, archaeologists recovered a cache of more than 100 sealed wooden coffins from the 26th Dynasty and Ptolemaic period, announced by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in November 2020.
- 2023: embalming workshops used for preparing human and animal mummies were published, adding detail to how the necropolis actually operated as a working industry.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson treats Saqqara as one of the strongest places in Egypt to examine the idea of an older, more advanced layer of civilization. Saqqara is part of the route on the 4BIDDEN Tour of Egypt, and in his presentations the Serapeum and the underground system beneath the Step Pyramid carry most of the weight.
In Carson's view, the Serapeum boxes, with their scale, hardness and finish, are evidence of a lost technology rather than the product of copper tools and sand. He approaches the shaft and tunnel network beneath Djoser's pyramid the same way, as a sign that the site may hold an older layer than the 3rd Dynasty dating allows. That is his interpretation, and it should be read alongside the mainstream chronology: Egyptologists date the Step Pyramid complex to c. 2670–2650 BCE and the Serapeum's use to between Amenhotep III and the Ptolemaic period, based on inscriptions, associated finds and the architectural sequence at the site. Carson discusses what lies beneath Egyptian sites in What Egypt Is Hiding Underground on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast, and details of the trip itself are on the [4biddenknowledge Tour of Egypt](/4biddenknowledge-tour-of-egypt) page.
Watch, read and go deeper
To see Billy Carson's approach to Egyptian sacred sites and teachings, watch [Egyptian Mystery School](/watch/egyptian-mystery-school) on 4BK TV. For more on the underground side of the story, listen to the podcast episode The Secrets Beneath Egypt. Readers who want to plan a visit can find the current itinerary on the [4biddenknowledge Tour of Egypt](/4biddenknowledge-tour-of-egypt) page. For every article on pyramids, temples, texts and gods in one place, browse [the Ancient Egypt topic hub](/topics/ancient-egypt).
Frequently asked questions
How old is Saqqara?
Saqqara was used as a burial ground from the 1st Dynasty, around 3000 BCE, into the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Its best-known monument, the Step Pyramid of Djoser, dates to around 2670–2650 BCE in the 3rd Dynasty. That makes the site's history of use roughly three thousand years long.
Is the Step Pyramid older than the Great Pyramid of Giza?
Yes. The Step Pyramid of Djoser was built in the 3rd Dynasty, roughly a century before the Great Pyramid of Khufu in the 4th Dynasty. Egyptologists see it as the first step in a sequence that led through Sneferu's pyramids at Dahshur to the smooth-sided pyramids at Giza.
What was buried in the Serapeum?
The Serapeum held the burials of the Apis bulls, sacred animals of the god Ptah at Memphis. The bulls were mummified and placed in underground chambers, and in the later Greater Vaults they were given massive stone sarcophagi. Most of those were found empty and looted, although Mariette recorded one undisturbed burial from the time of Khaemwaset.
Who built the Step Pyramid?
The Step Pyramid was built for King Djoser of the 3rd Dynasty, and its design is credited to his official Imhotep, whose name and titles appear on a statue base found at the complex. Imhotep was later revered as a sage and healer, and the Greeks identified him with Asclepius.
Can you visit Saqqara today?
Yes. Saqqara is open to visitors, and the Step Pyramid complex reopened in March 2020 after a restoration of about 14 years. The Imhotep Museum near the entrance, the Pyramid of Unas, the Serapeum and several decorated mastabas are among the main stops, and many visitors combine it with Dahshur and Giza.
Sources and further reading
- James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005)
- R. O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford, 1969)
- Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (Thames & Hudson, 1997)
- Jean-Philippe Lauer, Saqqara: The Royal Cemetery of Memphis (Thames & Hudson, 1976)
- Auguste Mariette, Le Sérapéum de Memphis
- Strabo, Geography, Book 17
- Dieter Arnold, Building in Egypt: Pharaonic Stone Masonry (Oxford University Press, 1991)
- UNESCO World Heritage List, "Memphis and its Necropolis – the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur"
