Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid was raised at Giza for Khufu, known to the Greeks as Cheops, a pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom. His father was Snefru and his mother Hetepheres I, whose funerary cache was found in the cemetery beside the pyramid. Most recent chronological estimates date Khufu and his pyramid between 2700 and 2500 BCE, and its construction is dated c. 2600 BCE. Radiocarbon dating of ash mixed into its mortar, sampled in 1984 and 1995, gave a calibrated range of 2871–2604 BCE; a reanalysis based on the younger samples gave a completion date between 2620 and 2484 BCE.

In the Old Kingdom only kings and queens could have a pyramid tomb. High social status was valued in ancient Egypt, and the sizes of tombs were regulated officially, their allowed dimensions written down in royal decrees; layout, funeral equipment and access to materials and workers lay at the king’s discretion. Like other tombs of the Egyptian elite, the pyramid had four main purposes: to house the body of the dead and keep it safe, to show the status of the dead and his family, to keep his place in society, and to be a place where offerings could be brought to him. Khufu’s relatives and high officials were buried around it, in the custom that Hassan, who excavated at Giza, called “quite in accordance with the Egyptian idea of the Hereafter”.

The pyramid’s internal structure consists of three main chambers, the King’s, Queen’s and Subterranean Chambers, with the Grand Gallery and various corridors and shafts. From the original entrance on the north side a passage descends through the masonry into the bedrock to the Subterranean Chamber, about 27 m below the base and left unfinished; another ascends to the Grand Gallery, 8.6 m high and 46.68 m long, whose polished limestone walls step inward in seven courses. From the foot of the gallery a horizontal corridor leads to the Queen’s Chamber, exactly halfway between the north and south faces, while the gallery itself rises to the King’s Chamber. Faced entirely with granite, that chamber holds the only surviving object inside, a sarcophagus cut from a single hollowed-out granite block, and above its flat ceiling lie five relieving chambers. As was the norm for tombs of the 4th dynasty, no interior wall was decorated or inscribed.

Around the pyramid stood a funerary complex: two temples joined by a causeway, one close to the pyramid and one near the Nile, tombs for Khufu’s family and court, three smaller pyramids for his wives, a still smaller satellite pyramid, and five buried solar barques. The pyramid temple, dedicated to the Sed festival of Khufu’s 30th jubilee, was lavishly decorated with scenes of the king, officials and priests performing rituals, and a mortuary cult of Khufu was kept up in these temples for hundreds of years.

The pyramid consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks: approximately 5.5 million tonnes of limestone, 8,000 tonnes of granite and 500,000 tonnes of mortar. Most blocks were quarried just south of the pyramid, from a nummulitic limestone formed of the fossils of shell creatures. White limestone for the casing came by boat across the Nile from the Tura quarries, and granite blocks weighing 25 to 80 tonnes, for the ceilings of the King’s Chamber and the relieving chambers, came from Aswan, more than 900 km to the south. Stone was split by hammering grooves, inserting wooden wedges and soaking them until they expanded. Hemiunu, Khufu’s vizier, is believed by some to have been the architect; there is no definite consensus on the exact construction techniques.

Discoveries at the nearby workers’ camps suggest that the pyramid was built by thousands of conscript labourers. Worker graffiti suggest that haulers were divided into groups of 40 men, each made of four sub-units with an “Overseer of Ten”. A construction management study of 1999, made with Mark Lehner and other Egyptologists, estimated an average workforce of about 13,200 people and a peak of roughly 40,000. The work was precise: the four sides of the base have an average error of only 58 millimetres in length, and they are aligned to the four cardinal directions, deviating on average by about a tenth of a degree.

The pyramid was described by Greek and Roman writers long after it was built. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE more than 2000 years after its construction, attributed it to Cheops, whom he wrongly placed after the Ramesside period and portrayed as a tyrant; he wrote that gangs of 100,000 labourers worked in three-month shifts for 20 years. Diodorus Siculus, who visited Egypt between 60 and 56 BCE, put the workforce at 360,000 and strengthened the link between pyramid building and slavery, while Pliny the Elder saw the pyramids as “stupendous memorials of their vanity”. Their mixture of description and legend lies behind many later errors about the monument.

In late antiquity the pyramids came to be taken for the granaries of Joseph from the Book of Genesis; the pilgrim Egeria recorded the idea on her visit between 381 and 384. In the Islamic period the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun is said to have tunnelled into the structure, a Coptic legend credited it to the antediluvian king Surid, and writers such as al-Masudi told fantastical tales of its chambers. The polymath Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1163–1231) measured it and praised it as a work of engineering genius, and Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) noted that it was a grave. By the Late Middle Ages the Great Pyramid had a reputation as a haunted structure.

The pyramid was likely looted as early as the First Intermediate Period, and Joyce Tyldesley notes evidence that it had been opened and emptied by the Middle Kingdom. Visitors now enter it through the Robbers’ Tunnel, traditionally said to have been cut around 820 by the workmen of al-Ma’mun, though many scholars argue that an older robbers’ tunnel existed and that the caliph cleared and enlarged it. Most of the smooth casing was removed over time, lowering the pyramid from 146.6 m to 138.5 m; amid earthquakes in northern Egypt, workers stripped away many casing stones, said to have been carted away in 1356 for use in Cairo. The capstone, or pyramidion, was already lost in classical antiquity.

In 1435 Cyriacus of Ancona reached Giza and, comparing what he saw with Herodotus, refuted its identification with Joseph’s granaries. Later explorers opened the interior: Nathaniel Davison is credited with finding the lowest relieving chamber in 1763, Giovanni Caviglia cleared the way to the Subterranean Chamber in 1817, and in 1837 Howard Vyse used gunpowder to reach the four chambers above it. Flinders Petrie made the first precise measurements in 1880–1882. Since 2016 the ScanPyramids team has used muography to find a corridor behind the north entrance and, in 2017, a large cavity above the Grand Gallery, the “Big Void”, whose purpose is unknown.

The Great Pyramid is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one that has remained largely intact; Cyriacus of Ancona could already testify in the 15th century that the pyramids of Giza alone among the wonders had survived. Initially standing at 146.6 m, it was the world’s tallest human-made structure for more than 3,700 years. It belongs to the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Memphis and its Necropolis”, and the cedar-wood Khufu ship, found in a sealed pit at its foot in 1954 and fitted together over fourteen years by the boat builder Haj Ahmed Yusuf, is now in the Grand Egyptian Museum.

The pyramid has also long drawn speculation. Because the ratio of its perimeter to its height approximates 2π, some Egyptologists suggest that its slope was chosen for that reason, and Petrie thought such relations so systematic that they belonged to the builder’s design; others argue that the ancient Egyptians had no concept of pi and that the slope follows from the chosen seked alone. Many scientific and alternative hypotheses attempt to explain how it was built, and study of it continues: a 3D survey in 2024 revealed graffiti in Nelson’s Chamber giving a date in “the year of the 6th census” of Khufu’s reign.