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.