Three thousand years of building in stone for eternity: pyramids set out by the seked, axial temples of pylons, courts and columned halls, walls that batter and cornices that curve, and columns shaped like the plants of the Nile.
Egyptian architecture begins in mud brick and reed, and never forgets it. The earliest royal tombs were mastabas, flat-topped benches of brick over deep shafts; their battered walls, panelled façades and the bound reeds of early shrines became the permanent vocabulary of stone. Around 2650 BC Imhotep, minister to King Djoser, built at Saqqara the first great monument in cut stone: a tomb that grew from a mastaba into six stacked stages, surrounded by a precinct of stone copies of timber-and-reed buildings, complete with fluted engaged columns.
Within a century the step pyramid had been filled out into the true pyramid. The pyramids of Sneferu at Meidum and Dahshur (including the Bent Pyramid, whose slope changes partway up) and then the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza (c. 2560 BC) show a rapid mastery of surveying and organisation. The slope of each was specified by its seked, the run in palms for a cubit of rise, which the Rhind Papyrus teaches; Khufu’s is 5½ palms. Its base is level to within a couple of centimetres over 230 m and oriented almost exactly to the cardinal points.
In the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC) the focus moved to the temples of the gods, above all at Thebes: Karnak and Luxor on the east bank, the mortuary temples on the west. The canonical temple is a sequence along an axis: an avenue of sphinxes, a pair of obelisks, the pylon gateway of two battered towers, an open court, a hypostyle hall, and a series of ever smaller, darker rooms rising to the sanctuary of the god’s image. Its columns represent papyrus, lotus and palm; its ceiling was painted as the sky; its floor was the primeval earth. The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, with 134 columns and a clerestory over its central aisle, is one of the largest columned halls ever built.
Construction was massive and conservative. Walls were of two faces of dressed stone with rubble between, laid without mortar in the finest work; roofs were stone slabs on stone architraves, which kept spans short and columns stout and close. Proportions were controlled by grids and by the royal cubit of seven palms. The forms (batter, torus roll, cavetto cornice, winged sun-disc) changed remarkably little from the Old Kingdom to the Ptolemaic temples of Edfu and Dendera, built by Greek kings in the pharaonic style.
Egypt’s influence runs through the whole history of architecture: the fluted columns of Beni Hasan anticipate the Doric; Vitruvius describes an “Egyptian hall” lit like a basilica; Rome carried off obelisks; and the Egyptian revival of the nineteenth century, prompted by Napoleon’s expedition, brought pylons and cavetto cornices to cemeteries, prisons, bridges and, later, to Art Deco cinemas.