Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egyptian Civilization

How Were the Pyramids of the Old Kingdom Actually Built?

A detailed look at the methods, workers, and logistics behind Old Kingdom pyramid construction — from quarrying to final placement, based on archaeology at Giza.

How Were the Pyramids of the Old Kingdom Actually Built?

For more than four thousand years, people have wondered how the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom built the great pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, built around 2560 BCE, is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing. It rises 481 feet, contains more than two million blocks of stone averaging 2.5 tons each, and is aligned to the cardinal directions with remarkable accuracy. For broader context, see our guide to the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Egyptian pyramids.

The archaeological work of the last forty years, most notably by the Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) under Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, and by Pierre Tallet, who published the Wadi al-Jarf papyri in 2013, has filled in nearly every gap in the story.

Planning a Pyramid

Building a pyramid was a multi-decade project that began years before the first stone was quarried. Most Old Kingdom pyramids were built on the west bank of the Nile, on the edge of the desert, close enough to the river to receive stone, food, and workers by boat, but high above the flood plain. The Giza plateau, chosen by Khufu, was a flat shelf of limestone bedrock with the Nile visible in the distance.

The architects designed the pyramid in advance. The Great Pyramid has sides that differ in length by less than 0.1 percent, a discrepancy of less than a hand’s breadth over a base of 756 feet. The Egyptians used a system of measurement based on the royal cubit (about 20.6 inches) and a method of laying out right angles with knotted ropes. The foundation of the Great Pyramid was cut down to bedrock on the high side and built up with stone on the low side, and modern surveyors have estimated that the base is level to within about 2.1 centimeters.

Quarrying the Stone

Most stone came from the local bedrock. The core blocks of the Great Pyramid are made of nummulitic limestone from the Giza plateau itself. Quarrymen cut channels into the rock with copper tools, drove wooden wedges into the channels, and soaked the wedges with water so they would swell and split the stone.

The hard stone (granite, basalt, and diorite) came from much farther away. The granite of the Great Pyramid’s internal chambers was quarried at Aswan, more than 500 miles upriver. The famous Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan shows the same technique on a colossal scale. For more on stone transport, see our guide to moving the stone blocks.

Transporting the Stone

The Egyptians had two main methods: by boat on the Nile, and by sledge on land. Boats were far easier. The Egyptians were master boat builders, and they used the annual Nile flood to their advantage; the floodwaters reached the base of the Giza plateau, so the blocks of Aswan granite could be brought downriver on specially constructed barges and floated directly to the construction site.

Once on land, the blocks were moved on wooden sledges. The Egyptians poured water in front of the sledge runners to wet the sand, dramatically reducing friction, an experiment confirmed in 2014 by the University of Amsterdam, which found it reduced the required pulling force by about half. Wall paintings from the tomb of Djehutihotep at el-Hawawish show a colossal statue being moved this way.

The Workers: Not Slaves

One of the most persistent myths is that the pyramids were built by slaves. Slaves (usually prisoners of war) were a small part of the labor force, and they were typically employed in domestic service, agriculture, or mining rather than in pyramid construction.

The pyramid builders were state-organized teams of Egyptian workers. Archaeological work at Giza has uncovered the remains of a workers’ town called Heit el-Ghurab, with workshops, bakeries, fish-processing facilities, and residential areas for the laborers. It appears to have housed a permanent workforce of several thousand, plus seasonal labor gangs that swelled the population during the flood season.

The workers were organized into teams with names like “Friends of Khufu” and “Drunkards of Menkaure,” and these names were discovered in 2017 carved into the stones of the Great Pyramid itself by Pierre Tallet. The workers were well-fed; excavations have uncovered thousands of bones of cattle, sheep, goats, and fish, suggesting a diet of more than 4,000 calories per day per worker. To learn more, see our guide to who actually built the Great Pyramid and workers vs. slaves.

Skilled craftsmen (stonemasons, copper workers, sculptors, and scribes) lived in nearby pyramid towns and were permanent employees of the state. The Wadi al-Jarf papyri, discovered in 2013, are the journal of an inspector named Merer, who led a team of workers transporting limestone along the Nile to the Great Pyramid: the oldest large-scale administrative diary from pharaonic Egypt. One of the small things I find striking in Merer’s log book is that he names his crew: the imy-a per-weret medjay and the imy-a sekh-ka and so on. We have the names of individual Bronze Age boatmen. That is unusual.

Raising the Stones: The Ramp Problem

The most debated question is how the Egyptians raised the stones. The Great Pyramid weighs about six million tons, and even an average block of 2.5 tons had to be lifted tens of meters off the ground. The Egyptians had no cranes, no pulleys, and no beasts of burden larger than donkeys.

Several methods have been proposed:

  • Straight ramps built up against the side of the pyramid. Simple, but for the Great Pyramid the ramp would have been as massive as the pyramid itself.
  • Zigzag ramps that wind back and forth up the side, reducing the slope at the cost of working space.
  • Spiral ramps wrapping around the outside. The architect Jean-Pierre Houdin has proposed, on the basis of microgravimetry and thermal imaging, that the Great Pyramid may contain a now-vanished internal spiral ramp.
  • Internal ramps built inside the body of the pyramid itself, possibly using the relieving chambers above the King’s Chamber as part of the structure. The ScanPyramids project has confirmed a large void inside the Great Pyramid that could be part of such a system.
  • Lever and counterweight systems, used in the New Kingdom for some obelisks.
  • Cast-stone theories, in which the limestone blocks were cast in place from a kind of concrete. This is not supported by petrographic analysis of the pyramid stones, which are clearly quarried.

The most likely answer is that the Egyptians used a combination of methods, adapted to each pyramid. For the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, built around 2670 BCE, a straight ramp of mudbrick was almost certainly used, and the remains of such a ramp have been found. The details of how the Great Pyramid was finished are still debated.

Finishing the Pyramid

The pyramids were originally sheathed in fine white limestone casing stones, polished to a gleaming surface. The casing stones were cut on the inside to fit precisely against the core blocks, and on the outside to a smooth plane, laid from the top down. The casing stones of the Great Pyramid were largely removed in the medieval period, when the limestone was burned for lime to plaster the buildings of Cairo. Only the casing at the very top of Khafre’s pyramid survives intact, giving a glimpse of what the pyramids looked like in the Old Kingdom. For more, see our guides to the Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Pyramid of Khafre and the Sphinx.

The Internal Structure

The interior of the Great Pyramid contains three main chambers: the Subterranean Chamber, cut into the bedrock; the Queen’s Chamber, halfway up; and the King’s Chamber, high in the body of the pyramid. The King’s Chamber is built of massive granite blocks, each weighing about 25 tons, and the roof is constructed of nine enormous granite beams, each weighing more than 70 tons. Above the King’s Chamber are five smaller relieving chambers, also built of granite.

What Came After

The pyramid-building tradition continued into the Middle Kingdom, with the smaller and less stable pyramids of Amenemhat I and his successors. The pyramid age itself ended with the collapse of the Old Kingdom around 2181 BCE, a collapse that the climate record suggests was triggered in significant part by the 4.2 kiloyear aridification event, even if the political fragility of the late Old Kingdom made the disaster worse than it had to be. The great monuments of the Old Kingdom (Khufu’s Great Pyramid, Khafre’s pyramid and the Sphinx, Menkaure’s pyramid) still stand at Giza, more than 4,500 years after they were built. The two surveys every reader should at least know about are Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (1997) and Miroslav Verner, The Pyramids (2001); they do not agree about everything, but between them they cover the field.