Great Structures FIG. 1 Pyramids of Giza: build it up

To scale: sizes and places follow published surveys. Simplified: courses drawn as smooth even layers; all passages drawn in one north-south cut (the real ones run about 7 m east of the centre line); temples, causeways and small pyramids left out; ramp shapes are ideas, not finds.

Height: 146.6 m
Courses: 210
Stone placed: 100.0 %
Blocks: 2.30 M
Mass: 6.00 Mt
Top platform: 0.0 m

Courses210, 146.6 m

The big idea

A pyramid is a mountain of stone that works only in compression: every block is squeezed by the blocks above, and the weight runs straight down into the bedrock. The builders got it right by being exact at the start, with a level base, square corners and sides facing true north, and then keeping every course level and every face at the same slope as it rose.

Memory trick: “Level the base, square the corners, keep the seked.”

A bit of history: The Great Pyramid was built for Khufu, a king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty, and is conventionally dated to about 2560 B.C.; experts' dates for his reign differ by a few decades. Ancient sources say it took about 20 years, and records from his reign fit a building time of over two decades. His son Khafre, and later Menkaure, built the other two great pyramids at Giza. The Greek traveller Herodotus described the pyramids about 2,000 years later, and Flinders Petrie surveyed them with great care in 1880 to 1882.

Builders in every age have had to lay out their measures and stretch the line before a single stone goes up. In Job the Lord asks about the earth itself: Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? (Job 38:5, KJV)