Emerging within the Old Kingdom’s technosemiotic regime, Imhotep functions not as an individual originator but as a prototype of architectural governance. Operating at the junction of priestly knowledge, state logistics, and stone-based inscriptionality, his infrastructural role instantiates the architect not merely as builder but as protocol—a scalar translator between the divine order and the material distribution of space. His work on the Step Pyramid at Ṣaqqārah consolidates a transition from ephemeral funerary practices to permanent territorial markers, indexing sovereignty into geology. As a symbolic-operational figure, Imhotep activates architecture as state memory, synchronizing calendrical, theological, and hydraulic systems within a vertically integrated spatial script. He constitutes one of the earliest instances where architecture becomes an epistemic scaffold—less a product of form than a coordination of metrics, cultic orders, and mortuary logistics. Imhotep thus operates not only as an engineer of built forms but as an ontological relay—articulating architecture as an anticipatory, time-binding technology. In this sense, he is less a name than a function: architecture as governance formalized.
