The Great Pyramids of Giza: What Evidence Tells Us About When, How and by Whom They Were Built

By Essam Ali, Egyptologist · Updated October 2026 · Sources are linked in the text and listed in full at the end.

The Great Pyramids of Giza are the three royal tombs built on the Giza plateau, on the western edge of modern Cairo, for the Fourth Dynasty kings Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure in the 26th century BC. The largest, the Great Pyramid of Khufu, is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing. Together with the Great Sphinx, the queens’ pyramids, the temples and the cemeteries of officials and workers around them, they form part of the UNESCO World Heritage property “Memphis and its Necropolis – the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur”, inscribed in 1979 (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.).

A great deal has been written about these monuments, much of it speculation. This article sticks to what the evidence shows: the measurements, the dating methods, the papyri written by men who moved the stone, the town where the builders lived, and the physics experiments that have looked inside the Great Pyramid without moving a single block. Where specialists still disagree, we say so.

The Great Pyramids of Giza at a Glance

	Pyramid of Khufu (Great Pyramid)	Pyramid of Khafre	Pyramid of Menkaure
King and dynasty	Khufu, 4th Dynasty	Khafre, son of Khufu	Menkaure, son of Khafre
Approximate reign	c. 2589–2566 BC	c. 2558–2532 BC	c. 2532–2503 BC
Original height	146.6 m (280 royal cubits)	143.5 m	65.5 m
Height today	about 138.5 m	about 136.4 m	about 61 m
Base side	about 230.3 m	about 215.3 m	about 102.2 × 104.6 m
Slope	51°50′	53°10′	51°20′
Ancient name	Akhet-Khufu, “Horizon of Khufu”	“Khafre is great”	“Menkaure is divine”

Dimensions after (Lehner, 1997); reign dates follow the conventional chronology in (Shaw, 2000) and carry an uncertainty of several decades. The pyramids look smaller today because almost all of their smooth outer casing of fine white limestone was stripped in the Middle Ages and reused in the buildings of Cairo; Khafre’s pyramid still keeps a cap of casing near its summit.

When Were the Great Pyramids of Giza Built?

Egyptologists date the pyramids in two independent ways, and both point to the 26th century BC.

The first is the historical chronology, built from king lists, the lengths of reigns recorded in ancient documents and inscriptions, and a handful of astronomical observations. On this basis Khufu ruled for about 23 to 27 years, beginning around 2589 BC (Shaw, 2000). The papyri found at Wadi al-Jarf, discussed below, are dated to the 26th and 27th years of his reign and refer to the pyramid by its ancient name, so the project was well advanced by then (Tallet, 2017).

The second is radiocarbon dating. Between 1984 and 1995 a team led by Georges Bonani, with Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner, collected more than 450 organic samples from Old and Middle Kingdom monuments, including charcoal and plant remains trapped in the mortar of the Giza pyramids (Bonani et al., 2001). A later study used 211 radiocarbon measurements on short-lived plant material from securely dated contexts and combined them in a statistical model with historical reign lengths; it placed the beginning of Djoser’s reign, a few generations before Khufu, between 2691 and 2625 BC (Bronk Ramsey et al., 2010). The radiocarbon results broadly confirm the historical dates, and if anything they tend to push the Old Kingdom slightly earlier.

A third, more controversial approach uses the stars. Kate Spence noted that the sides of the Great Pyramid deviate from true north by only about three minutes of arc, and proposed that the builders found north by waiting until two stars circling the celestial pole lined up vertically. Because the pole slowly shifts over centuries, she used the small errors in the alignment of successive pyramids to suggest that Khufu’s pyramid was laid out around 2480 BC, give or take a few years (Spence, 2000). Her method has been widely discussed and challenged, and her date is several decades later than the conventional one, but her measurement of the alignment itself is not in dispute.

How Were the Great Pyramids of Giza Built?

No ancient text describes the building method step by step, but several lines of evidence now fit together well: the quarries, the papyri of the boatmen who carried stone, the reconstruction of the ancient river, and the remains of ramps.

The stone

Most of the Great Pyramid’s estimated 2.3 million blocks are local limestone, cut from quarries on the Giza plateau itself, just south of the pyramids; the quarry pits are still visible near the Sphinx. The fine white limestone used for the outer casing came from Tura, across the river on the east bank of the Nile. The granite of the King’s Chamber, including ceiling beams that weigh several tens of tonnes, was brought more than 800 km downstream from Aswan (Klemm & Klemm, 2010; Lehner & Hawass, 2017).

Moving stone by water: the Diary of Merer

In 2013 a French mission led by Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard excavated papyri at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient harbour on the Red Sea coast. They are the oldest inscribed papyri yet found in Egypt. The best preserved, the logbook of an inspector named Merer, records his crew of about forty men carrying blocks of white limestone by boat from the Tura quarries to Giza during the 27th year of Khufu’s reign. The crew made two or three round trips roughly every ten days, each carrying around thirty blocks of 2 to 3 tonnes, which works out at about 200 blocks a month. The diary names Ankhhaf, Khufu’s half-brother, as the official in charge of a harbour at Giza, and calls the pyramid Akhet-Khufu (Tallet, 2017; Tallet & Lehner, 2021).

A lost branch of the Nile

Merer’s boats could only reach Giza if the river came close to the plateau, and recent environmental research shows that it did. By analysing ancient pollen in sediment cores from the Giza floodplain, Hader Sheisha and colleagues reconstructed about 8,000 years of river levels and identified a now-vanished arm of the Nile, the Khufu branch, which reached a harbour below the pyramids. During the reigns of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure its water stood at around 40 per cent of its maximum level in the Holocene, high enough to float heavy cargo to the foot of the plateau (Sheisha et al., 2022). A separate study using satellite radar, geophysical survey and drill cores traced a 64 km long former branch, which its authors call the Ahramat (“pyramids”) branch, running along the edge of the desert past most of the pyramid fields between Giza and Lisht (Ghoneim et al., 2024).

Lifting the blocks: ramps

Once at Giza, the blocks had to be raised. The most direct evidence for the technique comes from Hatnub, an alabaster quarry in Middle Egypt, where a joint mission of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (IFAO) and the University of Liverpool, led by Yannis Gourdon and Roland Enmarch, found a steep central ramp flanked by two staircases lined with postholes, dated to at least the reign of Khufu by inscriptions bearing his name. Sledges carrying stone appear to have been hauled up slopes of 20 per cent or more, with ropes passed around wooden posts to multiply the pulling force (Jarus, 2018). How ramps were arranged on the pyramid itself (straight, zigzagging up one face, wrapping around the sides, or partly internal) is still debated, and the builders may have combined several methods as the pyramid rose (Lehner & Hawass, 2017).

Precision

The accuracy of the Great Pyramid comes from simple tools used with great care. Its sides were laid out to within a few minutes of arc of true north (Spence, 2000), and its slope follows a “seked” of five and a half palms of horizontal run for each cubit of height, which gives the angle of about 51°50′ (Lehner, 1997). Levelling, sighting along cords and plumb lines, and constant checking at every course were enough to achieve it.

Inside the Great Pyramid

The original entrance is on the north face, about 17 metres above the ground. From it the Descending Passage runs down through the masonry into the bedrock to an unfinished Subterranean Chamber. Partway down, the Ascending Passage branches upwards; at its top a horizontal passage leads south to the so-called Queen’s Chamber, while the Grand Gallery, a corbelled hall about 8.6 metres high and 47 metres long, climbs on to the King’s Chamber, lined entirely with Aswan granite and containing Khufu’s empty granite sarcophagus (Lehner, 1997).

Above the King’s Chamber are five low compartments, usually called relieving chambers, stacked to spread the weight of the masonry above. When four of them were opened by tunnelling in 1837, their walls were found to carry red-painted builders’ marks, including the names of work gangs compounded with the name of Khufu. These marks, painted on blocks that were never meant to be seen again, are among the clearest pieces of evidence for who built the pyramid (Lehner & Hawass, 2017).

Today visitors enter through a tunnel cut by medieval treasure hunters, below the original entrance, which joins the Ascending Passage and leads up through the Grand Gallery to the King’s Chamber. Interior access needs a separate ticket.

New Discoveries: Looking Through the Pyramid With Cosmic Rays

Since 2015 the ScanPyramids project, a collaboration between Cairo University, the HIP Institute in Paris and physicists from Japan and France working under the authority of Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, has used muons to look inside the Great Pyramid. Muons are particles created when cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere; they pass through rock but are partly absorbed by it, so detectors placed inside or around a pyramid record more muons arriving from directions where there is empty space.

In 2017 three teams using three different detector technologies (nuclear emulsion films and scintillator hodoscopes in the Queen’s Chamber, and gas detectors outside the pyramid) independently detected a large void above the Grand Gallery, at least 30 metres long, with a cross-section similar to that of the gallery itself. It was the first major internal structure found in the pyramid since the 19th century (Morishima et al., 2017). Its purpose is unknown, and it may have been part of the construction process rather than a room.

In 2023 the same collaboration published precise measurements of a second, smaller space behind the chevron-shaped gables above the original entrance on the north face: a corridor-like structure about 9 metres long with a cross-section of about 2.0 by 2.0 metres (Procureur et al., 2023). Neither space has been entered, and neither is evidence of a hidden burial; both are most likely architectural features designed to deflect weight or to serve the builders.

Who Built the Pyramids?

Not slaves. The old idea of slave armies comes partly from later traditions and partly from Herodotus, who visited Egypt about two thousand years after the pyramids were built and was told that 100,000 men laboured in three-month shifts for twenty years (Herodotus, Histories 2.124). The archaeology tells a different story.

In 1990 the Giza inspectorate under Zahi Hawass began excavating a cemetery of the pyramid builders on the slope south of the plateau. Its modest tombs of mud brick and stone held workmen and their overseers, buried with beer jars and other offerings in the shadow of the king’s pyramid. One of the largest belonged to Idu, the overseer of a work gang. Burial so close to the royal tomb was an honour that would not have been given to slaves (Hawass, 2010).

Below the cemetery, Mark Lehner’s Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) has excavated Heit el-Ghurab, the town where the builders lived and worked: long gallery buildings, houses for officials, storerooms and dozens of bakeries (Lehner, 2010). Animal bones from the site show that the workforce was well fed. Richard Redding estimated that about 11 cattle and 37 sheep or goats were eaten there each day, for a workforce that the AERA team puts at around 10,000 people during the building of Menkaure’s pyramid (Jarus, 2013). The picture that emerges is of a permanent core of skilled builders, supported by rotating crews of conscripted labourers from across Egypt, organised into named gangs and fed by the state (Lehner & Hawass, 2017).

Khafre, Menkaure and the Great Sphinx

The Pyramid of Khafre

Khafre’s pyramid stands on higher bedrock than his father’s, which is why it often looks taller in photographs although it was always slightly smaller. It is the best place to see what all three pyramids once looked like, because a cap of the original casing survives near its summit. Its complex, with a mortuary temple, a causeway and a valley temple built of enormous granite-faced limestone blocks, is the most complete of the three (Lehner & Hawass, 2017).

The Pyramid of Menkaure

The third pyramid is much smaller but was the most lavishly finished: its lowest courses were cased in red Aswan granite, some of which is still in place. Three small queens’ pyramids stand to its south, and further queens’ pyramids line the east side of Khufu’s pyramid.

The Great Sphinx

The Sphinx, about 73 metres long and 20 metres high, was carved from a ridge of bedrock left standing in a quarry beside Khafre’s causeway. Its relationship to that causeway and to the temple built directly in front of it is the main reason most Egyptologists attribute it to Khafre’s reign (Lehner & Hawass, 2017). Read more in our article on the secrets of the Sphinx.

Khufu’s boat

In 1954 archaeologists found a dismantled cedar boat in a sealed pit beside the south side of the Great Pyramid. Reassembled, it is about 42 metres long and some 4,600 years old, one of the oldest intact large vessels in the world. In August 2021 it was moved in a single 48-hour operation to the Grand Egyptian Museum, where it is now displayed (Egyptian Streets, 2021). See our guide to Grand Egyptian Museum tickets and prices if you plan to see it.

What the Evidence Rules Out

• “Slaves built the pyramids.” The builders’ cemetery and town show paid and fed workers, organised in gangs that proudly wrote their names inside the pyramid (Hawass, 2010; Lehner, 2010).
• “Nobody knows who built them or when.” Builders’ marks naming Khufu, the Diary of Merer from his 27th year, and radiocarbon dates from the mortar all point to the Fourth Dynasty (Bonani et al., 2001) (Tallet, 2017).
• “The stone couldn’t have been moved with ancient technology.” Merer’s logbook records the transport of hundreds of blocks a month by boat, the Khufu branch brought the river to the plateau, and the Hatnub ramp shows how blocks were hauled uphill (Sheisha et al., 2022; Jarus, 2018).
• “The muon scans found a hidden treasure chamber.” They found empty spaces of unknown function, most likely part of the structure; nothing indicates a burial (Morishima et al., 2017; Procureur et al., 2023).

Visiting the Great Pyramids of Giza Today

The plateau opens early in the morning, and the first hours of the day are the coolest and quietest, especially between May and September. Allow at least three hours for the three pyramids, the panoramic viewpoint, the Sphinx and Khafre’s Valley Temple. Entering the Great Pyramid needs a separate ticket, and the climb up the Grand Gallery is steep and humid, so it is not recommended for anyone with heart problems or claustrophobia.

The Grand Egyptian Museum, a short drive away, now holds Khufu’s boat and the complete burial treasure of Tutankhamun, so the pyramids and the museum make a natural full day. For the earlier history of pyramid building, visit the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, and for the river that made it all possible, read our article on the River Nile. Our Giza Pyramids, Sphinx and Saqqara tour is led by licensed Egyptologist guides, and you can find the wider story in our overview of the history of Egypt.

How to Cite This Article

Ali, E. (2026). The Great Pyramids of Giza: What the evidence tells us about when, how and by whom they were built. Egypt Best Vacations. https://egyptbestvacations.com/great-pyramids-of-giza/

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