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Group: Roman Empire: Theodosian dynasty (Constantinople)
Location: Antioch > Antakya Hatay Turkey

Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first …

Years: 2637BCE - 2494BCE

Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first of the Third Dynasty-pyramidal structures, is constructed over faience tile-lined underground burial chambers for the king and his family.

The other nine, lacking any official inscriptions, offering rooms, and other funerary features common to earlier and later tombs, are clearly not tombs, made the more clear by the fact that no human remains seem ever to have been interred in these structures.

The rooms of the various pyramids, devoid of furnishings, ornament, or fragments of such, contain only lidded chests made of stone.

Filling the rooms underneath the Step Pyramid are about forty thousand stone jars and vessels of every shape and size, manufactured of slate, metamorphic schist, basalt and diorite, an extremely hard granitic rock.

Numerous smooth and glossy vessels made of hard stone feature long narrow necks and wide, rounded bellies and display no trace of tool marks.

Some theorists propose that these, along with some or all the blocks of limestone, were actually manufactured items, cast, in the manner of cementitious limestone concrete, in specialized molds.

The Egyptian builders may have mixed their superior silico-aluminate cement mortar with fossil-shell limestone rubble to produce high quality limestone concrete.

Step pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, Egypt (Photo taken November 3, 2010, by Berthold Werner)

Step pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, Egypt (Photo taken November 3, 2010, by Berthold Werner)

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The Near and Middle East (-2637 - -2494)
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Near East (-2637 - -2494)

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