Ancient Egypt

Egyptian Pyramids

The Great Pyramid of Khufu: The Last Wonder of the Ancient World

Explore the Great Pyramid of Giza — built for the pharaoh Khufu, the largest pyramid ever constructed, and the only one of the Seven Wonders still standing.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu: The Last Wonder of the Ancient World

The Great Pyramid of Giza, built c. 2589–2566 BCE for the pharaoh Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty and originally 146.6 m (481 ft) tall, is the largest, oldest, and most famous of the pyramids of Giza. It is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing, and for more than 3,800 years it was the tallest building on Earth. For modern visitors, the Great Pyramid is the essential Egyptian monument: the thing that everyone knows, the symbol of the civilization.

The single best treatment in English is Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (1997); for a more cautious, technically detailed view, Miroslav Verner, The Pyramids (2001). For the modern story of who built it, I would also recommend any reader to look at AERA’s Giza and the Pyramids (2017), which is the most up-to-date synthesis of the recent fieldwork.

The Builder: Khufu

Khufu, known to the Greeks as Cheops, was the second king of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt, and the son of Sneferu, the dynasty’s founder. He ruled for about twenty-three years, c. 2589–2566 BCE, at the height of the Old Kingdom’s power. For the broader history, see our guide to the pharaoh Khufu and the Fourth Dynasty.

Almost no contemporary records of Khufu’s reign survive. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing more than 2,000 years later, described him as a harsh ruler who closed the temples and forced the people to labor on his tomb. Most modern scholars consider these stories to be later Greek propaganda. The few contemporary documents that do survive (papyri from the Wadi al-Jarf, published by Pierre Tallet in 2013, and the sealings of the workers’ town at Giza) show a king deeply involved in religion and administration, not a tyrant. For the evidence on who actually built the pyramid, see who actually built the Great Pyramid.

The Numbers

The Great Pyramid is, by almost any measure, the most impressive building in the world.

  • Original height: 146.6 meters (481 feet). After the loss of the outer casing stones, it now stands 138.8 meters (455 feet).
  • Base: 230.3 meters (756 feet) on each side, covering an area of about 5.3 hectares (13 acres).
  • Volume: approximately 2.6 million cubic meters (92 million cubic feet) of stone.
  • Number of blocks: an estimated 2.3 million, each weighing on average 2.5 tons.
  • Total weight: approximately 6 million tons.

The four sides of the pyramid are aligned to the cardinal directions with an error of less than 0.067 degrees, a precision that, even with modern instruments, is difficult to achieve. The sides are nearly identical in length, with a variation of less than 6 centimeters (2.4 inches).

The Design

The Great Pyramid is a true “smooth-sided” pyramid: a square base, four triangular faces meeting at an apex, with an angle of about 51°50’. The shape is called a true pyramid in Egyptian architecture, as distinct from the earlier step pyramids like the Step Pyramid of Djoser. For the evolution of the form, see our guide to the step pyramids.

The basic statistics are impressive enough, but the structural complexity of the Great Pyramid is also remarkable. Inside, the pyramid contains:

  • A descending passage, 105 meters (345 feet) long, leading down from the entrance to a subterranean chamber.
  • An ascending passage, branching off the descending passage and rising at an angle of 26° to a horizontal corridor.
  • A Queen’s Chamber, a small, gabled room in the center of the pyramid, with a pointed roof.
  • A Grand Gallery, 47 meters (155 feet) long and 8.5 meters (28 feet) high, with a corbelled ceiling.
  • A King’s Chamber, containing a red granite sarcophagus, and surrounded by a series of stress-relieving chambers above.
  • An air shaft system, two narrow channels running from the King’s Chamber to the outside of the pyramid. The purpose of these shafts is still debated: some scholars believe they were ventilation shafts, others that they had a religious function (perhaps to allow the king’s soul to fly to the stars).

The precision of the construction is legendary. The joints between casing stones were less than 1 millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The average variation in the length of the sides of the base is about 6 centimeters. The exact alignment of the four sides, the exact angles, the exact height: all were calculated to within tolerances that modern engineers did not begin to understand until the twentieth century.

The Casing Stones

The original appearance of the Great Pyramid was very different from its appearance today. The structure was cased in fine white Tura limestone, polished to a brilliant shine. The casing stones were fitted with extraordinary precision, and the pyramid must have been a smooth, gleaming white triangle, visible, in the morning sun, for miles.

The casing was stripped during the medieval period to build the city of Cairo. The most severe stripping took place in the fourteenth century, after a major earthquake in 1303 CE. What we see today is the rough, weathered core of the pyramid; the casing was a separate, finer, and far more beautiful layer.

The Interior

The interior of the Great Pyramid has been entered and studied for centuries. The standard modern entrance is the Robbers’ Tunnel, cut into the pyramid in the ninth century CE by the caliph al-Ma’mun, who was looking for treasure. He never found it; the king’s mummy had been removed from the sarcophagus long before, but the tunnel he cut became the permanent entrance.

The most striking room is the King’s Chamber, at the end of the Grand Gallery. It is built of enormous blocks of red Aswan granite, each weighing more than 70 tons, brought 800 km from the south. The empty granite sarcophagus, set into the floor, is too large to fit through the entrance; it must have been placed in the chamber before the roof was built. Above the King’s Chamber are five smaller “stress-relieving chambers,” whose purpose is exactly what the name suggests: to relieve the enormous weight of the masonry above and prevent the King’s Chamber from collapsing.

The Mystery of the Air Shafts

The two air shafts that run from the King’s Chamber to the outside of the pyramid have been the subject of intense debate, and I want to take a position on this. The older “ventilation” theory, popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, never made much physical sense; the shafts are far too small to move meaningful volumes of air, and the pyramid was a sealed monument, not a building that needed to breathe. The newer alternative, advanced most prominently by the 2017 ScanPyramids discovery of a large void above the Grand Gallery, is that the shafts were (a) symbolic passages for the king’s soul, in the standard Old Kingdom framework, and (b) structural elements of a larger internal construction, possibly the internal spiral ramp hypothesized by the architect Jean-Pierre Houdin. My own view is that the religious-symbolic explanation is well-grounded and the structural-explanation is interesting but unverified. Until somebody excavates the void ScanPyramids found, we will not know which, and probably the most honest position is that the shafts are doing more than one thing and we do not yet know what all of those things are.

In 1993, the German robotics engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink sent a small robot up the shafts. At the end of the southern shaft, the robot found a small door with copper fittings. The door has not been opened, although it was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary in 2002 that sent another robot to peer through a small hole and found another door behind. The purpose of these small doors is unknown.

The Pyramids in History

The Great Pyramid has been a source of wonder for at least 4,500 years. The Greeks, the Romans, the medieval Arabs, the early modern travelers: all have left descriptions of it, and all have struggled to explain how it was built.

The Greeks, including Herodotus and Strabo, described the pyramid in detail, although their accounts are colored by the impossibility of imagining the labor and skill involved. The medieval Arab writers, including Al-Masudi and Al-Idrisi, recorded the legends about the construction, including stories that the stones had been moved by magic, by alien visitors, or by a cement that has since been lost. Napoleon Bonaparte, who spent a night in the King’s Chamber in 1798, is said to have remarked, “Soldiers, from the tops of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you.” (The line is more often quoted than it should be; the earliest source is a contemporary memoir by an aide-de-camp, not Napoleon himself.)

The Modern Excavations

Modern archaeological work on the Great Pyramid has been relatively limited, in part because the structure is so well preserved and in part because the Egyptian authorities have been cautious about access. The most important recent work has been the project to record the air shafts with small robots, and the work of the Ancient Egypt Research Associates on the surrounding plateau, including the Workers’ Village and the Workers’ Cemetery.

The Giza plateau is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, shared between the governorate of Giza and the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. The Great Pyramid is open to visitors, and the interior can be entered by guided tour.