Egyptologists are still seeking the tomb of the first known universal genius. Pharaoh Zoser’s grand vizier, Imhotep, was not only an architect, engineer, and inventor of the pyramid but administrator, sage, and healer of the sick. Posterity has made him a god. Although the trail has been warm, a definite trace of the sanctuary is still to be discovered.
To the atheists, one god is one too many. The Egyptians liked the plural concept of deities, quantum gods, bunches of them, but with only one being worshipped at a time, though all were eternal.One god was simply not enough and not well equipped to deal with the tasks at hand. The chasm between joy and sorrow, ecstasy and calamity required additional support. There are many mysteries about Imhotep; he may have been the first Egyptian god to make room for levity and condone the ability to smile at one another.
In Egypt’s well-filled pantheon Imhotep is one of the very, very few who can boast of promotion from mortal to immortal being. Egytologists of the nineteenth-century were skeptical about his human origins. At that time the only information available derived from accounts written two and a half millenniums after his presumed lifetime. There was, for example, the terse statement in a chronicle of the Pharaohs by Maneto , an Egyptian priest who lived in the third century B.C. and wrote in Greek. Under the entry for Zoser I, Manetho noted that ”during his reign, lived Imhotep, who, because of his medical skill has the reputation of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, among the Egyptians and who was the inventor of the art of building with hewn stone. He also devoted attention to writing”.
Manetho certainly thought Imhotep was a human, noted particularly as a doctor, architect, and author, but what was his authority for thinking so? In 1926, however, the question was settles for once and for all. The excavations then going on at the Step Pyramid produced numerous fragments of a statue of Zoser. On its base were inscribed the names of Zoser and of ”Imhotep, Chancellor of the King of Lower Egypt, Chief under the King.” No question about it, there had been a man named Imhotep, and like many an Egyptian official, he had dedicated a statue to his Pharaoh.
Putting together whatever facts are now known and fleshing them out with some guesswork has allowed the experts to sketch out Imhotep’s career in a general way. He was born at Memphis, the son of a man named kanofer, who stood high in the Egyptian hierarchy, serving as Chief of Works. As was common in ancient Egypt, the son succeeded his father. In this office, Imhotep’s most important project , naturally, was the construction of a fittingly impressive grave monument for his master.
Following the fashion of the day, he started to build him a mastaba. At some point Imhotep changed his mind, and what resulted was in effect six square mastabas, each smaller than the next, piled one upon the other like a child’s building blocks; the Step Pyramid, first of the pyramid tombs and prototype of the mammoth trio at Giza.
Imhotep’s creative touch can be seen not only in the form of the new monument but in its size and construction as well. Measuring 413 feet by 344 feet at the base and towering upward for 200 feet, the Step Pyramid dwarfed the mastabas surrounding it. And, while cut stone had before been used only for paving floors or lining chamber walls, the rest being of mud brick, Imhotep used it for the entire tomb complex; the pyramid, the courts and chapels, the decorative columns, above all the magnificent wall, more than a mile long, that enclosed the complex.
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