Imhotep’s great creation, the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, sparked a frenzy of construction in Egypt, and a nation of farmers became a nation of builders. It is even possible that Imhotep went on to design a second step pyramid for Zoser’s successor, King Sekhem- Khet, whose pyramid was discovered in the 1950s (see Appendix II). After building several step pyramids, Egypt would go on to erect even greater monuments—and one of the strangest of these is the Medium Pyramid.
The pyramid at Medium sits isolated in the desert about fifty miles south of Saqqara. Rarely visited by tourists, it is a crucial step in Egypt’s march toward the Great Pyramid. As soon as you see the Medium Pyramid you know something went wrong. Looking more like a medieval fortress than a pyramid, it seems almost sinister. In the 1960s, Kurt Mendelssohn, an Oxford University physicist, theorized that the walls
of the pyramid collapsed during construction because the angle of the pyramid was too steep.13 He believed the mound of sand at its base hid the top of the pyramid that came crashing down. However, recent
excavations of the mound show that the collapse theory is wrong; the mound consists primarily of windblown sand.
Egyptologists now agree that the reason for the pyramid’s ruinous state was that local villagers used it as a quarry for stone, stripping it of its fine white limestone casing. But there’s still a mystery. The pyramid was never used for the pharaoh’s burial, and no one knows why. There is a temple next to the pyramid where priests would have made offerings for the dead king. On top of the temple are two stelae— round-topped stones that served as ancient Egypt’s bulletin boards. If you wanted something known, you carved it on a stela and put it where everyone could see it. The two stelae at the Medium Pyramid should have the king’s name and titles, but they are totally blank; they were never inscribed—a dead giveaway that the king never used the pyramid. The unfinished burial chamber inside the pyramid offers another clue that the pyramid was never used, but within it rests a milestone in the history of pyramid building.
The burial chamber inside the Medium Pyramid is the first above ground burial in Egypt, a radical break from the underground burial chamber concept of the Step Pyramid. The owner of the Medium Pyramid
was going to be buried in the pyramid, not under it. To be buried inside a pyramid, a major engineering problem had to be solved. If the burial chamber is inside the pyramid, then the ceiling of the chamber must support the hundreds of thousands of tons above it. Constructing a room inside a pyramid had never been tried before and the architect of the Medium Pyramid came up with an ingenious solution—a cor belled
ceiling. With a cor belled ceiling, the walls narrow as they get higher. As you build the wall out of stone blocks, each level is placed about six inches in from the one beneath it, so it overlaps and looks like an upside-down staircase. Thus, when you get to the top, the block spanning the walls and forming the ceiling is only a few inches wide. A block only a few inches wide is not going to crack under the weight above it, thus the problem of how to build an internal room is solved.