The Great Pyramid of Giza

The story

A sum that makes your head spin

Let us do some calculations. The Great Pyramid of Giza is made, according to estimates, of about two million three hundred thousand blocks of stone. If the builders put it up in about twenty years, a block had to be laid every few minutes, day after day, summer and winter. Each block weighs on average more than two tonnes: like a small car. Some, in the King's Chamber, weigh tens of tonnes. Yet the pyramid, built around 2560 BC for the pharaoh Khufu (Cheops in Greek), still has an almost perfectly square base, with sides about 230 metres long and lined up, with a tiny error, with the four points of the compass.

Today it is about 139 metres tall, because it has lost its top and its outer casing. At first it measured about 146 metres, like a forty-storey building. For almost four thousand years it was the tallest structure in the world; it was overtaken only in 1311, when the spire of Lincoln Cathedral in England was finished, about 160 metres high.

How it was built

The main stones are local limestone, cut in quarries a few steps from the building site. For the outer casing, of smooth white stone, a finer limestone was used, brought from Tura, on the opposite bank of the Nile. For the inner chambers, enormous blocks of pink granite came from the south, from Aswan, more than 800 kilometres away. All this travelled on boats, with the Nile flood bringing the river closer to the site.

We do not know for certain how the blocks were raised. Scholars suggest ramps of brick and rubble, straight, spiral or partly inside the pyramid itself, and the use of wooden sledges, levers and ropes. A scene painted in a tomb shows a man pouring water in front of a loaded sledge: wet sand makes it slide better. Anyone who proposes a single solution perhaps forgets that the method may have changed as the pyramid rose.

Who built it

The Greek historian Herodotus, two thousand years later, told that a hundred thousand men worked for twenty years (an exaggerated figure), and many thought they were slaves. But the excavations of the last thirty years, led by Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, have shown something else. South of the pyramid there was a real town of workers, with bakeries, breweries, storehouses and dormitories. Animal bones tell us that they ate bread, beer and a lot of beef. Their tombs, near the pyramid, were built with care, and some skeletons show signs of treated injuries, such as broken bones that were set again. These are traces of workers who were looked after and respected.

The work gangs had names written in red paint in the hidden chambers above the King's Chamber: “Friends of Khufu” and, in another pyramid, “Drunkards of Menkaure”. Probably the groups competed to see who worked best. Scholars estimate that in all 10,000 to 40,000 people worked on the site, depending on the estimate, permanent and seasonal. Many farmers came in the months of the flood, when the fields were under water and there was nothing else to do.

A recent discovery has added an extraordinary detail. In 2013 the French archaeologist Pierre Tallet found at Wadi al-Jarf, on the Red Sea, the oldest inscribed papyri: the diary of an official named Merer, who for a few months led a team of about forty men. Merer noted down the boat journeys to carry limestone blocks from Tura to Giza, in the last years of Khufu's reign. It is like a building-site logbook from 4,500 years ago.

What is inside

The entrance, on the north side, leads to a rising corridor. You reach the Grand Gallery, about eight and a half metres high, with a corbelled ceiling, and then the King's Chamber, of granite, with a large empty sarcophagus. There are two other chambers, the so-called Queen's Chamber and one cut into the rock beneath the pyramid. In 2017 scholars using modern instruments, such as cosmic-ray (muon) detection, discovered an empty space at least thirty metres long above the Grand Gallery. What it is for, nobody yet knows.

Near the pyramid, in 1954, in a pit sealed with blocks, a cedar boat about 43 metres long was found, taken apart into more than twelve hundred pieces: Khufu's “solar boat”, perhaps used for his funeral or meant for the journey into the afterlife.

A doubt about the king

We know little about Khufu. His only known statue is a small ivory figure just over seven centimetres tall. He was the most famous of the pyramid-building pharaohs, but all that has come down to us of him is his pyramid. Even the dates of his reign vary according to scholars: it is usually said to be 2589 to 2566 BC, which is why dates for the building, like the 2560 BC we use here, are always approximate.