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ImhotepThe Builder of The Step-Pyramid of Sakkara
The first real person in known history is not a conqueror or a king but an artist and a scientist — Imhotep, physician, architect, Pyramid Builder and chief adviser of King Zoser (ca. 3150 B.C.). He did so much for Egyptian medicine that later generations worshiped him as a god of knowledge, author of their sciences and their arts; and at the same time he appears to have founded the school of architecture which provided the next dynasty with the first great Pyramid builders in history. It was under Imhotep administration, according to Egyptian tradition, that the first stone house was built. It was he who planned the oldest Egyptian structure extant the Step-Pyramid of Sakkara, a terraced structure of stone which for centuries set the style in tombs; Apparently it was Imhotep who designed the funerary temple of Zoser, with its lovely lotus columns and its limestone paneled walls. In these old remains at Sakkarah, at what is almost the beginning of historic Egyptian art, we find fluted shafts as fair as any that Greece would build, reliefs full of realism and vitality, green faience richly colored glazed earthenware rivaling the products of medieval Italy, and a powerful stone figure of King Zoser himself, obscured in its details by the blows of time, but still revealing an astonishingly subtle and sophisticated face.
We do not know what concourse of circumstance made the Fourth Dynasty the most important in Egyptian history before the Eighteenth.
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