Saqqara’s next chapter: How Egypt is modernizing its oldest necropolis

CAIRO — Around 25 miles south of Cairo — in the shadow of the Pyramid of Djoser, the world’s first monumental stone building — Egypt hopes that better pathways and shade structures can do what millennia of pyramids and inscriptions haven’t quite managed: Turn the Saqqara necropolis into a mainstream stop on the tourism circuit instead of a footnote to Giza.

The Supreme Council of Antiquities, affiliated with the Ministry of Tourism, launched on July 18 a development project to upgrade Saqqara’s internal roads and visitor infrastructure. It is the unglamorous, practical kind of intervention that sites this significant rarely get.

Benches, shaded rest areas, wheelchair-accessible pathways, improved service facilities — none of it sounds like much next to a Fifth Dynasty pyramid, but together the changes address Saqqara’s quietest problem: it's one of the richest archaeological landscapes on Earth, and for decades it has been genuinely hard to visit.

Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sherif Fathy described the project to local media during the launch ceremony as part of a broader strategy to protect the site’s archaeological integrity while modernizing what surrounds it.

Also speaking at the ceremony, SCA Secretary General Hisham El-Leithy said the upgrades will follow international technical and engineering standards for archaeological sites to ensure the works don’t come at the expense of what they’re meant to protect.

Amr Eltebie, director general of the Saqqara Archaeological Area, told Al-Monitor that the first phase of the project, which is expected to last one year, is focused on the basics: benches, shaded areas and upgraded facilities. “The project is starting deliberately during the low-visitation summer months so it doesn’t disrupt tourist activity,” he explained.

A second, more structural phase will come next: a new entrance from Middle Ring Road designed to bypass the deteriorated access roads that have made simply getting to Saqqara part of the problem.

“The initiative has also treated accessibility — namely, the installation of dedicated pathways for wheelchair users — as a genuine commitment rather than something tacked on at the end,” Eltebie added.

What makes Saqqara worth it

Saqqara served as the necropolis of Memphis, Egypt’s first capital, and stayed in continuous use as a burial ground during the First and Second Dynasties, from around 3100 BC to 2890 BC, and through the Coptic period that ended nearly 4,000 years later. Not many places in the world have served the same purpose for such a long and uninterrupted period of time.

Egyptologist Magdy Shaker says at least 28 royal pyramids and pyramid remains can be found in the Saqqara area, including the Step Pyramid of Djoser, which is widely believed to be the oldest large-scale stone structure in the world, dating back to the Third Dynasty in the 27th century BC, and the likely starting point of pyramid-building itself. 

Before the Step Pyramid of Djoser, constructions were primarily made of mudbrick mastabas, Shaker said, adding that Djoser’s monument was a real conceptual leap.

The vast Saqqara archaeological site, which spans about 9 square kilometers, is also home to the pyramid of King Unas of the Fifth Dynasty. The tomb is the first royal burial site inscribed with the Pyramid Texts, a collection of funerary spells meant to guide the king through the afterlife and among the foundational texts of Egyptian religious literature.

“Beyond the royal monuments, Saqqara is dense with the tombs of officials from nearly every era of ancient Egyptian history, many carrying inscriptions and scenes of real quality,” Shaker told Al-Monitor.

The Serapeum, the underground burial complex for the Apis bulls — animals regarded as the living embodiment of Ptah, Memphis’ patron god — also stands out in Saqqara. When a bull died, it was buried in a formal ceremony while priests searched for its successor, a practice that ran from the 18th Dynasty into the Ptolemaic period, well over a thousand years of continuous ritual use.

Saqqara’s timeline doesn't end with the Pharaonic era. The Monastery of Saint Jeremiah, a Coptic Christian site southeast of Djoser’s complex, was active until roughly the 8th century AD.

Saqqara is not merely a testament to Egypt’s monuments or dynasties; it embodies nearly the entire arc of Egyptian civilization within a single archaeological zone, from prehistoric remains to the Coptic period, in a way that no single site at Giza or Luxor can match.

Why the Giza comparison only goes so far

The development project launched at Saqqara could be similar to what has been achieved in the Giza Plateau (about 13 kilometers, or 8 miles, southwest of central Cairo) so far, including regulated visitor routes, designated zones for camel and donkey operators, and organized circulation.

Shaker believes the project in Saqqara is a reasonable starting template but is quick to flag its limits.

“Giza is architecturally and historically narrow: [It's] fundamentally a Fourth Dynasty pyramid field. Saqqara, for its part, hosts pyramids, temples, private tombs, an underground animal necropolis and a monastery, spanning nearly the full length of ancient Egyptian history,” he said.

A single linear visitor route, the kind that works at Giza, is a much harder problem in Saqqara, where the sites are older, more spread out and more varied.

According to Shaker, that difference is also why Saqqara has lagged in visitor infrastructure for so long, even though its importance was never in doubt. It lacked restrooms, a real visitor center, golf carts, cafeterias and, critically, accessible pathways. “Those aren’t minor gaps for a site this large and this walking-intensive. They’re the kind of thing that quietly caps how many people can visit and for how long.”

Perhaps the most striking part of Shaker’s account is not about what has been found at Saqqara but about what hasn’t. He suggests the site has given up only a fraction of what it holds, adding that large areas remain unexcavated. In this vein, the government’s infrastructure overhaul in the area is more than a tourism upgrade; it is groundwork for a site archaeologists expect to keep yielding discoveries for years to come.

For Eltebie, Saqqara’s problem was never about the archaeological sites; it was about accessibility and bad roads that prevent visitors from enjoying everything it holds.

The success of the first phase of the project to position Saqqara as a headline destination on par with Giza will likely depend on what comes after.

“Until Saqqara becomes easy to reach, its historical appeal as a site that offers a fuller, more varied picture of Egyptian civilization than other areas in the country may continue to resonate only with those who were already planning to go,” Eltebie said.