“The ancient architects may have raised the stones from the pyramid centre in a volcano fashion using the sediment-free water from the Dry Moat’s south section.”
For so many years, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara has offered a familiar question with an unfamiliar answer: how did the ancient civilization manage to stack so much stone so accurately, so early? Ramps, levers, rollers, and collective labor have long been at the forefront of most solutions. However, a recent study with an engineering perspective has challenged the monument to be more than mere masonry.
At the heart of the proposal is the notion of a hydraulic “elevator” in plain sight: the shafts, conduits, and stone features long documented by archaeologists but never before integrated into a single machine-like story. In a 2024 PLOS ONE study, the team claims that the Step Pyramid’s architecture corresponds to a hydraulic elevation system “never reported before” from this period. According to their theory, stone could be delivered to a central axis and lifted upwards by water pressure through a series of fill and drain cycles, enabling the growth of the structure from which the “volcano” analogy derives.
The case opens outside the walls of the pyramid, where two massive structures have new functions. One is the “Dry Moat” surrounding the Djoser complex. The southern part of the moat contains a rock-cut structure known as the “Deep Trench,” which has a series of compartments that suggest a process of settling and retention, as if for a purpose other than ritual or quarrying. The compartments correspond to the slowing and clarifying of sediment-laden water.
In the vicinity, the much-contested Gisr el-Mudir enclosure, which had been variously interpreted as anything from a fortress to a cattle pen, has been newly interpreted as a dam-like feature designed to trap sediment. It is described as a feature some 2 kilometers long with the characteristics of a check dam, placed to intercept drainage and provide temporary storage upstream. Further downstream, the terrain is consistent with the notion of ponding an intermittent lake that could have supported the moat system.
Within the monument, focus turns to the vertical shafts and tunnels beneath the pyramid. The substructure of the Step Pyramid consists of a series of galleries and two main shafts, one of which is beneath the pyramid itself. The theory suggests that the water from the southern trench was carried through the tunnels possibly via conduits up to 7 kilometers long to the central shaft. Here, a float platform would be able to raise several stones at a time, using the stored water to lift the stones vertically rather than using only the external ramps.
One of the details that the researchers point out is the “plug” system at the bottom of the key shafts. Instead of viewing the granite box relief carvings as strictly funerary, the research indicates that they served as an opening and closing system for a control mechanism for the water flow into and out of the lifting chamber.
Even with this water-powered system in place, the old methods are not abandoned. The Step Pyramid still involved quarrying, transporting, positioning, aligning, and finishing, and the water would not have been available on demand throughout the year. The meaning of the editorial lies in the fact that the structure begins to take on the appearance of a well-organized civil engineering system. If that system was in place, the Step Pyramid becomes not only one of the first pyramids, but one of the first machine pyramids that used water as both a need and a motive force.
