Djoser was born into the transition between the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom, around 2670 BCE. His Horus name was Netjerikhet, meaning "Divine of Body," and though the name Djoser - the Blessed One - was given to him by New Kingdom visitors more than a thousand years later, it is the name that has endured. He was the first or second king of the Third Dynasty, a period when Egypt was already a unified kingdom but had not yet achieved the bureaucratic and artistic sophistication that would define the pyramid age. His predecessors had been buried at Abydos in the south, in mud-brick enclosures and subterranean tombs, but Djoser chose a different path. He chose Saqqara, the desert plateau west of Memphis, and he chose stone.

The defining act of his reign was the construction of his mortuary complex, designed by his vizier Imhotep, a man who served as chancellor, high priest, royal architect, and physician, and who may be the first authentic genius in recorded history. Imhotep began with a traditional mastaba, the flat rectangular tomb that had been used for pharaohs and nobles since the First Dynasty, but he built it of limestone rather than mud brick. Then he enlarged it. Then he stacked another mastaba on top, and another, each one smaller than the one below, until the structure rose in six terraces to a height of nearly sixty metres. The result was the Step Pyramid, the first pyramid ever built and the earliest colossal stone structure in the world. The entire complex covered fifteen hectares and was enclosed by a wall of limestone more than ten metres high and one and a half kilometres long, decorated with the recessed panel pattern that mimicked the facades of earlier royal palaces. Inside the wall stood dummy buildings - solid stone structures with false doors and no interiors - that replicated the shrines of Upper and Lower Egypt, the chapels of the Heb-Sed festival, and the pavilions where the king's ka, the life force that distinguished the living from the dead, would dwell for eternity.

The Heb-Sed court was the most innovative feature of the complex. The Sed festival was a ritual of rejuvenation that every pharaoh was supposed to celebrate after thirty years on the throne, a ceremony in which the king ran a symbolic course to prove he was still fit to rule. Djoser had not reigned thirty years, but Imhotep built the court anyway, carving in stone the ephemeral reed shrines that had once been erected for the festival and arranging them in two rows, one for the shrines of Upper Egypt crowned with the lotus, and one for the shrines of Lower Egypt crowned with the papyrus. At the south end stood a double throne kiosk where the king, as ruler of the Two Lands, would receive homage. The message was clear: the king did not need to wait for the Sed festival. His complex would perform the rite for him forever.

Beneath the pyramid lay a labyrinth of underground passages, galleries, and chambers on a scale previously unknown. Eleven shafts plunged more than thirty metres into the bedrock, connecting to corridors that stretched for hundreds of metres and contained some four hundred rooms. A central burial chamber, lined with granite and sealed with a three-and-a-half-ton plug, held Djoser's sarcophagus, though when archaeologists opened it in the twentieth century they found only fragments of a mummy and a left foot, the rest destroyed by ancient tomb robbers and the passage of time. A separate structure, the South Tomb, was built at the southern end of the complex as a symbolic second burial place, perhaps reflecting Djoser's role as the dual king of Upper and Lower Egypt, or perhaps serving as a cenotaph for his ka.

The most vivid legend attached to Djoser's name comes not from his lifetime but from the Famine Stela, a granite inscription carved on Sehel Island near Aswan during the Ptolemaic Period, more than two thousand years after his death, though the story it tells is set in Djoser's eighteenth regnal year. According to the stela, Egypt had suffered seven years of drought and famine. The Nile had failed to flood, the crops had withered, and the people were desperate, breaking the laws of the land in their hunger. Djoser, grieving on his throne, summoned his chief lector priest Imhotep and commanded him to find the source of the Nile and the god who controlled it. Imhotep searched the archives of the temple of Thoth at Hermopolis, the city of the ibis-headed god of wisdom, and discovered that the flood was controlled by Khnum, the ram-headed potter god who dwelt at Elephantine, the island at the First Cataract where the Nile churned through granite rapids. Imhotep travelled to Elephantine, entered the temple of Khnum called "Joy of Life," purified himself, and prayed. That night Khnum appeared to him in a dream, introducing himself as the creator of mankind who fashioned them on his potter's wheel, and promising to make the Nile flow again. Imhotep woke and wrote down the dream, then returned to Djoser with the good news. The king was overjoyed. He issued a decree restoring Khnum's temple and granting the god's priests the revenues of the entire region from Aswan to Tachompso, a Nubian district far to the south, with a share of all imports from the south. The famine ended, and the story was carved in stone for eternity.

Whether the Famine Stela records a genuine memory of a drought in Djoser's reign or is a Ptolemaic invention designed to bolster the claims of Khnum's priests at Elephantine, the story testifies to the enduring reputation of Djoser as a king who cared for his people and a pharaoh whose name could still command authority two millennia after his death. The stela is also one of only three inscriptions that connect the cartouche name Djoser with the serekh name Netjerikhet, confirming that the two names refer to the same man.

Djoser died after a reign of nineteen or thirty-eight years, depending on whether the records refer to biennial taxation cycles or actual calendar years, and was buried in his pyramid at Saqqara. His complex was already ancient when the New Kingdom pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty visited it and left graffiti on its walls praising the king and his architect. One scribe wrote that Imhotep was "the greatest of the lector priests," and another praised Djoser himself as a model of kingship. The Greeks, when they came to Egypt, identified Imhotep with Asclepius, their god of medicine, and built temples to him at Memphis and on the island of Philae. Djoser's name faded by comparison, but his pyramid endured, and every pyramid that rose on the Giza plateau or in the sands of Dahshur and Abusir was a descendant of the six-stepped mountain that Imhotep had built for him at Saqqara.