Complex funerary of Sekhemkhet

The funerary complex of Sekhemkhet is a whole of monuments dating from ancient Egypt. It is located at the south-west of those of Ounas and Djéser. Unfinished, one can nevertheless recognize a large rectangular enclosure which was initially to be envisaged following the example that of Djéser but which was unfinished, as well as the vestiges of a pyramid of which architecture is characteristic of the Egyptian pyramids to degrees. It was identified in 1951 and little by little put at the day by Zakaria Goneim. After the premature disappearance of the Egyptologist, the excavations will be continued and supplemented by work of Jean-Philippe Lauer in 1963.

The funerary complex

The enclosure directed North-South form large a five hundred and fifty meters length rectangle towards almost two hundreds of width. Tiny room to the state of ruins the complex seems to be altered in the course of construction without it being very clear to include/understand in which order the various modifications are. Indeed, the excavations revealed two enclosing walls, a first framing of close the pyramid and a second oblong, similar to the enclosing wall of Djéser. This fact announces a change in the plan even complex. It gives to the plan an aspect in conformity with the model, the excentric pyramid being found compared to the center of the crowned surface, just like Imhotep conceived that of its sovereign more in north. The northern part of the first enclosure is preserved on its first sat and reproduced in a way similar of the shows of doors to two locked casements indicating that the true one and single access to the complex was to be elsewhere. Installed in regular fine limestone bases and comprising steps and projections, this wall is in any point similar to the enclosure of Djéser except on its plan and its proportions. Equipment is larger here with the use of fifty centimetres height blocks whereas the blocks of the enclosure of Djéser have twenty-five centimetres of them.

Inscriptions in hiéroglyphes cursive with red ink were raised on blocks of the northern enclosure bordering the pyramid. These inscriptions revealed the name of famous the Imhotep. Although it is there the only mention of the architect, it is not impossible that the latter is the originator of this funerary complex. The pyramid of Sekhemkhet is one of rare to have preserved the vestiges of a slope of construction. This slope made up of broken stones is mingled with argillaceous ground. Its height exceeds of two meters the current vestiges of the pyramid, which implies that the burial was to be higher when the building site stopped. The access to the principal gallery which is inserted in the rock plate finds at the bottom of an excavation dug with a few meters of the northern wall. It put in communication with the funerary apartments of Sekhemkhet by a descending shaft being inserted on eighty meters length and uneven of thirty meters.

In the south and always understood in this same enclosure a second underground device was arranged that one describes as “Southern Tomb” by analogy with the complex of Djéser which has one of them also. Accessible by the west a short gallery crossing a first room carried out straight to an unfinished part dug under the rock plate. This one contained a coffin of wood in which the body of one dead child at the two years rested age. Vases hones some as well as jewels, all dating from the IIIe Egyptian dynasty were discovered at its sides. It cannot however be a question of the skin of the sovereign since he reigned six years. These secondary “tombs” variously remain interpreted, but their role closely seems related to that of the pyramid. At Sekhemkhet the proximity of the two elements and its provision seems to precede the small satellite pyramids of the pyramidal complex traditional which will be built thereafter.

The state of incompletion of the complex in addition to plunderings and ravages of time last makes difficult any recognition of other elements of the complex and any interpretation of the final project. Indeed, the allowed interpretation classically of an extension of the enclosure framing a still dubious pyramidal project and of modest proportion can just as easily be the opposite assumption of a reduction of the preliminary draft copied on that of Djéser in a new project whose center would be well the pyramid become the main object of the funerary complex. The completion of the interior enclosure indeed seems to militate in this favor because in the case of an enlarging of the project, losing its utility the first wall would not have been continued and thus cut in frontage of palate. The external enclosure on the other hand is hardly founded on all its layout and seems to be forgotten and given up with sands of Saqqarah. The surface which it locks up is vast and was not the subject yet of new excavation campaigns allowing to supplement the first initiated excavations, there is more than one half century.

The pyramid

The pyramid is designed on a square level of one hundred twenty side meters what would have carried its height to nearly seventy, once completed. It would then have included/understood seven degrees is one moreover than that of Djéser. There remain about it today only the first sitted ones of large blocks squared in a local limestone. Laid out in poured beds, they formed sections which followed one another, architecture already employed for the first pyramid of Saqqarah. At the time of the excavations in the middle of the 20th century, the archeologists thus released the first degree which since is again hidden under sands. This discovery confirms that the pyramid had indeed been started without making it possible to affirm nevertheless until which stage. The stone which constituted the pyramid represented a material of choice for all the times and this since the Antiquité.

The funerary vault of Sekhemkhet was to about thirty meters plumb and under the center with the pyramid. One reached it by a right gallery being inserted under the rock since the excavation practiced the north of the pyramid not far from the wall steps of the enclosure of the complex. With semi course, an additional gallery opened towards the west and forming an elbow which set out again towards north access to two large galleries laid out in “U gave” and distributing a hundred and thirty-two stores dug on both sides these long corridors obscure and laid out so that none is placed face to face. This impressive gallery of more than three hundred and twenty meters length had been dug with more than ten meters of depth. A puit had been spared to surface with its beginning so probably evacuating more easily spoil during its installation, at the same time facilitating the evacuation of other cuts coming from the principal gallery of access to the vault placed forty meters further even more deeply. This puit was moreover to allow an effective ventilation in the underground working. It is by precisely clearing it that the diggers found the remainders of a funerary furniture going back to. Alabaster and diorite vases, a series of gold bracelets as well as an admirable gold container worked in the bivalvular shape of shell with removable lid showed that a burial had taken place in this pyramid well. On the other hand, the simultaneous discovery with the same place of several papyri into demotic announced that the burial had been disturbed at the time late.

The funerary room was in the center of a device of corridors and appendices, the whole on a outline drawing of three-pronged fork pointed towards the South. It remained unfinished, but still contained at the time of its discovery the sarcophagus of intact Sekhemkhet, seal. Carved in a beautiful block of alabaster, the monolithic tank included/understood a new system of closing made up of a vertical slide on one on its small sides. On the top of this strange sarcophagus, which is besides the only royal sarcophagus of found in its place, one could still see some offerings of flowers deposited millenia ago.

This discovery added to that of the series of gold bracelets found little before in the puit, created sensation at the time. Moreover any royal sarcophagus of the Ancient Empire had not been inviolate overdraft hitherto. The date chosen for its grand opening, all the antique necropolis seemed to live again, the one day time. A feverish activity had developed around the pyramid of Sekhemkhet, clearing ultimate rubble in order to allow the new Master of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser and with her close relations of coming to testify the first of incredible discovered.

One drew up a tent in the desert in order to receive all this noble assembly there as well as the journalists come from any share to attend the spectacle of the resurrection of an obscure sovereign of which everyone was unaware of the existence before even this day. It was about the first fall royal discovered sealed and whose sarcophagus seemed intact since famous discovered tomb of Toutânkhamon in 1922. But when the Egyptologist proceeded to the opening of the slide, the sarcophagus was empty… The mystery of the tomb of Sekhemkhet turned over to Egyptology. Disappointment was sensitive in the assistance but the discovery of Goneim restored thus with sovereign whose existence was mentioned only by inscriptions discovered in the the Sinai at the beginning of the 20th century.

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