Ancient Egypt

Egyptian Pyramids

How Did Egyptians Move the Massive Stone Blocks for the Pyramids?

Discover the techniques ancient Egyptians used to transport and raise enormous stone blocks — sledges, slipways, water, ramps, and the Nile.

How Did Egyptians Move the Massive Stone Blocks for the Pyramids?

The pyramids of ancient Egypt are, by any standard, astonishing pieces of engineering. The Great Pyramid of Giza contains 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing on average 2.5 tons, and the largest granite blocks in the inner chambers weigh more than 80 tons. Yet these blocks were quarried, transported, and lifted into place by a Bronze Age civilization with only copper tools, wooden sledges, and human muscle power. The techniques that the Egyptians used have been the subject of debate for centuries. Today, a combination of archaeology, experimental archaeology, and ancient inscriptions is giving us a much clearer picture.

The Problem

To build a single major pyramid, the Egyptians had to move an enormous quantity of stone:

  • Local limestone for the core blocks. The core blocks of the Giza pyramids came from the plateau itself, sometimes only a few hundred meters from the pyramid site.
  • Tura limestone for the casing stones, brought across the Nile from Tura, about 12 km south of Giza.
  • Aswan granite for the inner chambers, the sarcophagi, and the lower courses of the Pyramid of Menkaure, brought more than 800 km from Aswan.
  • Gypsum and other stones for the mortuary and valley temples.

The transportation of these stones was the most logistically challenging part of pyramid building. The Egyptians developed a range of techniques to handle the various sizes and distances.

Sledges and Slipways

The most common method of moving stone was on wooden sledges, dragged by teams of workers over prepared slipways. The technique is well-attested in Egyptian art: there is a famous tomb painting of a colossal statue being moved on a sledge from the tomb of the Twelfth Dynasty nomarch Djehutihotep, and the technique appears in inscriptions as well.

A sledge could be dragged by a team of 40 to 60 workers for a 2.5-ton block, and by 100 or more workers for an 80-ton block. The slipway was a level or slightly inclined path, prepared with hard clay and covered with water to reduce friction. In recent years, the Dutch physicist Daniel Bonn and his team at the University of Amsterdam have shown that pouring water on the sand of the slipway reduced friction by as much as 50%. The technique, in other words, was a kind of ancient “sledging on wet sand,” and the Egyptians knew it.

The Wadi al-Jarf Papyri

The single most important piece of evidence for the transportation of stone comes from a set of papyri discovered in 2013 at the Wadi al-Jarf site on the Red Sea coast, published by the French Egyptologist Pierre Tallet, who has been working at Wadi al-Jarf and the Red Sea ports since 2011. These are the log books of an inspector named Merer, who led a team of about 200 men ferrying limestone from a quarry at Tura to the Giza plateau. The papyri, dated to the reign of Khufu, describe Merer’s daily activities in detail: how many trips he made, when the stone arrived, when the workers got sick.

The papyri confirm that the stone was moved on the Nile. Tura is on the east bank of the river, and the Giza plateau is on the west bank; the stones were ferried across the river, then dragged the short distance to the pyramid site.

A small thing I find genuinely moving about the Merer diary is that it records the names of individual crew members, day by day, who went absent, who was sick, who relieved whom. We have, in a sense, the names of Bronze Age boatmen, which is the kind of detail that turns a four-thousand-year-old bureaucratic record into something much more human. The earliest named boat crews in history, as far as I know.

Boats on the Nile

For the long-distance transportation of stone, especially granite from Aswan, the Egyptians used boats. The Nile was the highway of ancient Egypt, and the Egyptians were master boat-builders. The boats used for the stone trade were of a special type: long, flat-bottomed vessels with high ends, designed to carry heavy loads.

The first of the two Khufu ships was discovered in 1954 by the Egyptian archaeologist Kamal el-Mallakh; the second was excavated in 1987 by a team that included the American archaeologist David O’Connor. The boat, which had been dismantled and buried alongside the pyramid, may have been used to ferry Khufu’s mummy to his burial. Both boats have been carefully restored and are now on display at the Giza Solar Boat Museum.

Canals and Harbors

Both Giza and Saqqara had artificial harbors, connected to the Nile by a system of canals. Recent work by the Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) has revealed the layout of the Giza harbor system in some detail, including a series of basins and slipways that allowed the boats to dock directly beside the pyramid site.

The canals served two functions: they allowed the boats to land close to the construction site, and they allowed the stone to be offloaded from the boats onto the sledges. The system was carefully planned, and the volume of water needed for the canals was carefully calculated.

Ramps: The Great Debate

Once at the site, the stones had to be raised to their final position. The Egyptians used ramps, of which there are several known types:

  • Straight ramps running up one face of the pyramid. These are easy to build, but the longer the pyramid got, the longer the ramp had to be. For the Great Pyramid, a single straight ramp would have to be at least 800 meters long to reach the top.
  • Zigzag ramps running up one or more faces in a series of switchbacks. The Egyptians may have used these at Giza, but the evidence is limited.
  • Internal ramps, a hypothesis popularized by the French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin in 2007. The idea is that the ramp was inside the pyramid itself, spiraling up the inside as the pyramid was built. The hypothesis is supported by some features of the Great Pyramid, including a spiral anomaly in the stone, and has been supported by some modern archaeologists.
  • Comb ramps running up one face, with a steep section at the top for the final, most difficult blocks. This is one of the most commonly proposed solutions for the upper courses of the Great Pyramid.

The most recent archaeological work and the most detailed experimental reconstructions suggest that a combination of straight ramps and external ramps at different stages was used, depending on the height of the pyramid.

I want to flag where I think the field stands on the Houdin internal-ramp theory, because it is the most-discussed recent proposal and it is worth saying plainly: the hypothesis is intriguing, the microgravimetry and thermal imaging evidence is suggestive, but the theory has not been verified by excavation. The 2017 ScanPyramids discovery of a large void above the Grand Gallery was widely reported in the press as “confirmation” of Houdin’s internal ramp, but the ScanPyramids team has been careful to say that the void is real and consistent with Houdin’s model, not that the model is proved. The honest position, in my view, is that an internal ramp is one reasonable hypothesis among several, and that until somebody actually excavates the void (which the Egyptian authorities are not currently permitting), we will not know.

The Upper Courses

The most difficult part of the construction was the upper courses, near the top of the pyramid. By the time the pyramid was two-thirds complete, the ramp would have been impractically long. The Egyptians probably switched to a different technique, such as a small, steep ramp, or a series of levers and jacks.

The casing stones, the smooth, fine white limestone that covered the outside of the pyramid, were fitted from the top down. The casing was applied after the core was complete, and the ramps would have been dismantled as the casing was put in place. The precision of the casing stones is legendary: the joints between casing stones on the Great Pyramid are less than 1 millimeter wide.

The Workers Who Moved the Stone

The workers who moved the stone were skilled Egyptian laborers, organized in teams and supplied with food and water. The teams were led by foremen, and the foremen were supervised by inspectors, like the inspector Merer whose papyri were found at Wadi al-Jarf. The workers received rations of bread, beer, and other staples, and they were honored after death. For the broader context, see workers or slaves.

The “Wet Sand” Experiment

The most important modern experiment in the movement of pyramid stone was the 2014 study by Daniel Bonn and his team at the University of Amsterdam. Using a small-scale model of an Egyptian sledge, they found that pouring water on the sand of the slipway reduced friction by 50%, allowing a small team to drag a heavy load.

The team also examined a wall painting from the tomb of Djehutihotep, a noble of the Twelfth Dynasty, which shows a colossal statue being dragged on a sledge. At the front of the sledge, a worker is shown pouring water on the sand. The image, which had been dismissed as artistic detail, was in fact a description of an actual technique.

The Modern Excavations

The archaeological work of the last few decades has transformed our understanding of how the pyramids were built. The discoveries at Wadi al-Jarf, the work of the AERA team at Giza, the study of the air shafts with small robots, the excavation of the workers’ village and workers’ cemetery: all have given us a much clearer picture of the techniques used.

The picture is of a civilization with sophisticated techniques, well-organized workers, and a state capable of planning and executing very large projects. The Egyptians were not miracle workers, but they were very good engineers.