The next stage of the Great Pyramid Field is at Saqqara, where the chief feature is the most ancient, and save for the monsters of Gizeh, the most famous of all the pyramids, the Stepped-Pyramid of King Zeser of the IIIrd Dynasty, the earliest great stone structure in the world. This remarkable building was probably the work of Zeser’s famous counsellor and architect Imhotep, the typical wise man of early Egypt, whose counsel was “as though one inquired at the oracle of God,” and who was subsequently deified and became the patron-deity of the scribes. The tomb which he reared for his master (who had also another great tomb at Bet-Khallaf) was built in six stages, stands about 197 feet in height, and has the peculiarity that its base is not a square but a rectangle, measuring 394 by 351 feet. But though the interest attaching to man’s first great piece of stonework must always be great, the actually living interest at Saqqara attaches not so much to Zeser’s hoary and imposing tomb, as to the comparatively insignificant and decayed pyramids of the Vth and VIth Dynasty kings, Unas, Teti, Pepy I, Merenra, and Pepy II. Mere heaps of rubble and sand as they seem, with none of the splendour of construction or greatness of scale of the Gizeh group, these monuments of the time when the royal power of the Old Kingdom was beginning to decline are yet of supreme value; for they are the first pyramids in which inscriptions have been found, and the long religious texts discovered in them, and now known as the Pyramid Texts, are unique and of infinite importance. Up to the end of his career, Mariette believed that the pyramids were dumb, as the Gizeh group had proved to be, and therefore looked upon the attempt to open any of the Saqqara group as mere waste labour. Maspero, however, believed otherwise, and the opening of the pyramid of Pepy I in 1880 proved that he was right. The other pyramids named proved also to be inscribed, and altogether the five pyramids give us a series of religious texts covering a period of about one hundred and fifty years, or perhaps one hundred and eighty, from 2825 to 2644 B.C., or, on Petrie’s dating, from 4275 to 4090 B.C. Even taking the later dates, these Pyramid Texts form by far the earliest large body of religious writings which have come down from any part of the ancient East, and their importance as sources of knowledge as to the beliefs of the earliest Dynastic period can scarcely be overrated.