No ancient text describes how Egypt’s first pyramid was actually built. Nearly two centuries of research have not settled the question either. In 2024, a team of materials scientists and hydrologists—none of them Egyptologists—published a proposal that a water-powered lift helped raise the stones of the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara. Their findings, based largely on satellite data and existing survey reports, sparked immediate debate among archaeologists.
The Step Pyramid was built for Pharaoh Djoser, the first king of Egypt’s Third Dynasty, around 2670 to 2650 BCE. Before his reign, Egyptian rulers were buried in flat-roofed rectangular tombs called mastabas, built from mudbrick. Djoser’s chief official, Imhotep, is credited with expanding a stone mastaba upward into a six-tiered pyramid rising roughly 60 to 62 meters. It became the first monumental stone building in Egypt and possibly on earth. Imhotep is widely regarded as the first named architect in recorded history, and later generations of Egyptians honored him as a god associated with wisdom and medicine.
Construction of the Step Pyramid unfolded in stages rather than as a single unified plan. Imhotep began with a modest stone mastaba around 6 meters tall and expanded the design multiple times, eventually stacking six distinct shrinking layers. The completed structure measured roughly 109 by 125 meters at its base and was originally faced in polished white limestone. Its design directly influenced every major pyramid that followed, including the far larger pyramids at Giza built roughly a century later.
Despite its historical importance, one basic question has never been definitively settled: exactly how workers raised the pyramid’s stone blocks into place. That question is where the 2024 paper enters.
In August 2024, a paper appeared in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, authored by Xavier Landro and colleagues at Paleotechnic, a privately funded research organization in Paris dedicated to studying ancient technologies. Landro’s academic background is in materials science and plasma physics, not archaeology. The wider team included hydrologists, an engineer, and specialists from French research institutions, with an added affiliation connected to the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The study proposed that a hydraulic lift system powered by water may have assisted in raising the pyramid’s stones. This challenged the long-standing assumption that ancient Egyptians relied primarily on ramps, sledges, and human effort. The team built its case using satellite radar imagery, historical archaeological survey reports, and local topography around Saqqara, rather than new physical excavation. The paper’s abstract framed the work as revisiting accepted Old Kingdom construction methods using a holistic, multidisciplinary approach.
Central to the theory is a structure called the Gisr el-Mudir, a massive rectangular stone enclosure west of the Step Pyramid. First described by explorers in the 1700s, its original purpose has never been fully explained. Some archaeologists had proposed it was an early funerary enclosure; others considered its purpose unresolved. Landro’s team argued it functioned as a check dam, designed to capture rainwater and trap sediment during periods of heavy desert rainfall. According to their model, water captured behind the dam flowed toward a shallow depression the team identified as a possible seasonal lake, then into a separate feature called the dry moat, a large rock-cut trench partially surrounding the pyramid complex.
Inside the southern section of the dry moat, the team identified a series of connected stepped compartments they interpreted as a water treatment system, complete with settling basins and a purification stage. They argued this sequence matched the technical requirements of a genuine water treatment system, meaning ancient engineers had built a water management network specifically engineered to serve the pyramid.
The proposal’s most dramatic element was a water-powered elevator built into the pyramid’s internal structure. The team pointed to two vertical shafts already known to archaeologists, including a north shaft inside the pyramid. According to the model, water from the treatment system would enter these shafts. At the base of the north shaft, a granite-lined chamber contained stone plugs; once removed, water could rush into the space below. A large wooden float rested above the flooded chamber, attached by ropes running up the shaft over pulleys and down to a lift platform carrying stones. As water filled the chamber, the rising float would push the platform upward. Draining the water would lower the platform, ready for another load.
The proposed system would have needed to run repeatedly for years to deliver enough stone to complete the pyramid. If accurate, it would represent sophisticated hydraulic engineering for a civilization building its first pyramid, predating other recognized examples of water-powered lifting technology by over a thousand years.
Context matters here. Ancient Egyptians were genuinely sophisticated water engineers by Djoser’s era. A carved ceremonial mace head belonging to the Scorpion King, dated to roughly 3100 BCE, depicts the king cutting a ditch as part of an organized irrigation grid. By the Old Kingdom, administrators had developed basin irrigation, using earthen banks and controlled sluices to capture the Nile’s annual flood. Later administrative records confirm that pyramid projects and water supply planning were linked concepts within Egyptian administration. However, demonstrating mastery of basin irrigation does not automatically confirm the far more specific claim that Egyptian engineers built a pressurized counterbalanced elevator capable of lifting multi-hundred-kilogram stone blocks 60 meters into the air.
Egyptologists raised serious objections almost immediately. Julia Budka, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, noted that no Egyptologists or archaeologists had been directly involved in the study. She also expressed concern that the authors questioned whether the Step Pyramid actually served as Djoser’s burial site at all, a fact well established within Egyptology. Her assessment was direct: the hypothesis was not scientifically proven.
Camille Krasovich, an Egyptologist at the University of Warsaw, pointed out that the stone blocks used in the Step Pyramid weighed an average of roughly 300 kilograms each, considerably lighter than the blocks used in later pyramids at Giza. In his view, building and maintaining a complex hydraulic lifting device would have required more collective effort than simply moving those stones by hand.
Orin Seagull, an archaeologist at the University of Toronto, focused on the proposed water source. He argued the Gisr el-Mudir and its nearby lake could never have captured or held enough water from Egypt’s occasional desert rainfall to power a sustained lifting system over years. He suggested the enclosure more likely represented an early attempt at building the kind of stone enclosure that would later surround royal burial sites, entirely unconnected to any water-powered construction method.
Two additional technical criticisms emerged. Krasovich noted that no ancient Egyptian text or inscription mentions any lake existing west of the pyramid complex, despite extensive scribal documentation of water projects elsewhere. Roland Enmarch, a researcher who reviewed the study’s engineering claims, expressed doubt that a hydraulic lift built using the methods described could realistically raise heavy stones to the pyramid’s full height. He pointed out that the paper did not demonstrate ancient Egyptians had access to pressurized hydraulics, the principle that would genuinely allow such lifting.
Even researchers who found aspects of the theory intriguing stopped short of endorsing it. Judith Bunbury, a geoarchaeologist who reviewed the study, acknowledged there may plausibly have been enough seasonal water to support some kind of hydraulic system, but she did not confirm the specific elevator mechanism.
Landro and his co-authors did not present their findings as a settled answer. The paper’s title explicitly frames its conclusions as addressing the possible use of hydraulic force. In their concluding remarks, the authors stated their work was intended to open a new line of research rather than declare the mystery solved. Landro has called for further excavation at the Step Pyramid, acknowledging that the north shaft has only been partially excavated so far. Its true full height and internal structure above the currently documented 4 meters remain unknown. A core piece of physical evidence the entire proposed elevator mechanism depends on has not been fully uncovered.
The hydraulic lift hypothesis entered a long, genuinely unresolved scientific conversation. No surviving Old Kingdom text describes how any pyramid’s stones were raised. The most widely taught explanation involves ramps—straight, spiraling, or some combination—paired with wooden sledges, ropes, and organized labor. Researcher Frank Müller-Romer has argued for several ramps arranged along all four sides of a pyramid simultaneously. Other researchers have pointed to ancient quarry inscriptions supporting at least some version of ramp-based construction. These ramp theories face their own challenges; critics note that a ramp large enough to reach the Great Pyramid’s full height would itself have been an enormous construction project, and no definitive traces of such ramps have been located.
What could settle the debate? Landro has pointed to the most obvious next step: a complete excavation of the pyramid’s partially explored north shaft. Fully documenting its true height, internal architecture, and surviving stonework would either support the proposed elevator mechanism or reveal that the shaft cannot accommodate it. Further geological and hydrological surveys at the Gisr el-Mudir and the theorized lake site could help determine whether ancient rainfall patterns could have sustained the system. A physical engineering test, building a small-scale replica of the proposed float and pulley mechanism, could also help settle whether the system is theoretically capable of lifting stone the full height of the pyramid.
None of that research has happened yet, and there is no announced excavation currently designed to test these claims. The hydraulic lift hypothesis remains for now exactly where a genuinely serious but still unresolved scientific proposal is supposed to sit: published in a respected peer-reviewed journal, built on a real analysis of satellite and topographic data, yet still missing the direct physical confirmation that would let the wider archaeological community adopt it or set it aside.
Nothing about this changes everything historians understood about how Egypt’s pyramids were built. It adds one more serious, still unresolved hypothesis to a debate that has already run for more than a century without a single universally accepted answer. It will likely stay that way until someone actually finishes excavating the one shaft the entire theory depends on.
