SAQQARA

Saqarra is considered to be the first stone-built building constructed anywhere on earth. Apart from arches and ceremonial entrances, buildings prior to 3000BC were built from mud bricks . . . which is why they have largely disappeared from history.

We visited Saqqara a few years ago, took our daughter then aged ten, with us. We were on an organised tour [with Bales] and stayed in pretty decent hotels, mainly in Cairo. I was the one who dragged us all off in the desert heat to Saqqara. I knew that it was commonly regarded as the first stone building and that Imhotep had built it. We had limited time as you so often do on a group tour but as we were leaving we picked up some small stones that were lying about which looked as though they had come from the stepped pyramid itself, at one time. You aren’t supposed to that, even tiny stones lying on the desert floor but we did and took them back to the hotel room put them in a plastic bag and stored them in our luggage to take home.

That night we each of us had terrible nightmares. My daughter was extremely distressed, couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to try in case the terrifying dreams returned but really we were all in a state. Maybe it was something we ate, or drank.

Maybe it was the presence in the room of the pebbles from Saqqara.

At half-three in the morning, I got out of bed found the stones, went down to the hotel lobby out the front door and tossed the stones out into the gutter across the street. Went back upstairs and we all went to sleep more or less immediately. No more bad dreams.

That is a one-hundred percent true story.

Saqqara is generally accepted to have been constructed c. 2620BC so not the least significant thing about it is that it has survived for so long. Imhotep is said to have built it for King [not Pharaoh in those days] Zoser. Imhotep is one of the most significant people who has ever lived. High Priest of the Kingdom, he knew everything, controlled everything. Erik Von Daniken thinks he was probably an alien visitor and that he kick-started what we might call Civilisation. He taught levitation; they simply didn’t have the technology to move the massive stones but more than that they didn’t have the population, or the means to feed them or even the timescale to construct such a building: it should have taken 80-years minimum. They did it in twenty-five, start to finish. In his fabulous book, A guide to Sacred Places of Ancient Egypt J A West states:

Architecturally and artistically, the Saqqara complex is a prodigious achievement . . . as elegant and clean in line as anything the Greeks would do two thousand years later, and displaying a perfection of craft that seems inconceivable without centuries of practice. Yet architecturally there do not appear to have been any precedents. As an analogy, we might say that starting off with Saqqara is like starting motor car production off with the Porsche 911.

There is nothing remotely like it in Egypt or anywhere else.

Imhotep’s own tomb has never been found; Von Daniken suggests he went home to the stars. For sure, the chambers and shafts are constructed to align with Sirius, Orion and a number of other planetary systems. That has never been challenged but Von Daniken argues that it was sited at the centre of the earth’s land-mass [see image]. If you search the internet, there are something of the order of ten million references to Saqqara; I haven’t enough life left to research this but Imhotep is or was, I haven’t read the recent literature, also thought to be Lucifer. In her amazing book, The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing makes a convincing case for her theory that he was some kind of anti-Christ, spreading evil everywhere which is still the prevalent and dominant means by which humanity conducts itself, even today.