Читать книгу Art History For Dummies - Jesse Bryant Wilder - Страница 108

Erecting the first all-stone structure took an innovative brain, someone with the vision to think outside the mud-brick mastaba. Imhotep, whose name appears at the base of a tomb statue of Djoser in the Step Pyramid, was that kind of guy. He is the first known artist and architect in history and was referred to as the “Chancellor of the King of Lower Egypt, the first after the King of Upper Egypt, Administrator of the Great Palace, Hereditary Lord, the High Priest of Heliopolis, Imhotep, the builder, the sculptor, woodcarver” (try fitting that on a nametag).

Imhotep’s Step Pyramid is similar to a Mesopotamian ziggurat (see Chapter 5). It seems to be a spiritual launchpad, designed to give the pharaoh’s soul a boost into heaven, one step at a time. In the fourth dynasty, the Step Pyramid evolved into the familiar four-sided pyramid like the Great Pyramids at Giza.

Imhotep was also a famous physician and magician. (Medicine and magic were brother and sister in those days.) In late Egypt, Imhotep was revered as the god of medicine and healing and had shrines in parts of Egypt and Nubia. (Boris Karloff plays Imhotep in the 1932 film The Mummy. Arnold Vosloo stars as him in the 1999 film The Mummy and the 2001 film The Mummy Returns.)