The pyramids of Giza: who built them, how, what was found inside and what people argue about

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The pyramids of Giza were built by Egyptians of the Fourth Dynasty around 2600–2500 BC: the Great Pyramid for the pharaoh Khufu, the second for his son Khafre, the third for his grandson Menkaure. That is not a hypothesis but the result of two centuries of excavation: the workers' town, their tombs, the quarries, the tools, a papyrus logbook kept by a man on the job and gang marks inside the pyramid itself have all been found. Below are the facts in order, and at the end a separate "Versions and theories" section: everything said about the pyramids beyond the science, with who proposed it and what archaeologists reply.

What stands on the plateau

• The Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops to the Greeks). Originally 481 feet (146.6 m) tall, now 454 feet (138.5 m) with the casing and capstone gone. Each side of the base is 756 feet (230.3 m); about 2.3 million blocks averaging 2.5 tons. For nearly four thousand years the tallest structure on Earth, until Lincoln Cathedral in 1311. Article and measurements.
• The Pyramid of Khafre. 448 feet (136.4 m), standing on higher ground and so looking larger than its neighbour. Near the top it keeps a band of the smooth Tura limestone casing that once covered all three.
• The Pyramid of Menkaure. 213 feet (65 m), its lower courses faced with Aswan granite. A basalt sarcophagus was found inside in 1837; the ship carrying it to England sank off the coast of Spain.
• The Great Sphinx. A lion with a human head, 240 feet (73 m) long and 66 feet (20 m) high, carved from a knoll left in the quarry. Most Egyptologists date it to Khafre: it sits beside his causeway and probably wears his face.
• Around them: mortuary temples, causeways down to the valley, three small queens' pyramids beside each large one, fields of mastaba tombs for courtiers, and, to the east and south, the cemeteries of the builders themselves.

Who built them: three lines of evidence

1. The workers' town

Since 1988 Mark Lehner's expedition has been excavating the "Lost City of the Pyramids" south of the Sphinx, the settlement of Heit el-Ghurab: gallery barracks for thousands, bakeries with huge bread moulds, breweries, granaries and the bones of tens of thousands of animals. The crews were fed beef, not scraps: by the expedition's count, about 11 cattle and 37 sheep or goats were slaughtered every day. The Giza complex and Lehner's expedition.

2. The workers' tombs

In 1990 a builders' cemetery was discovered south of the plateau: hundreds of mud-brick tombs with names and titles such as "overseer of the gang" and "inspector of the side of the pyramid". The skeletons show hard labour but also treatment: healed fractures, even amputations after which people lived for years. Slaves were not buried beside the pharaoh and were not treated. Zahi Hawass's excavations.

3. The Diary of Merer

In 2013, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea, a French expedition led by Pierre Tallet found the oldest inscribed papyri in Egypt. They are the logbook of a crew leader named Merer, written in the 27th year of Khufu: his men ferry limestone blocks from the Tura quarries down the Nile to "Akhet-Khufu", the "Horizon of Khufu", the Great Pyramid's own name. A crew of about 40 made two or three trips every ten days, and the stone was received by the official Ankhhaf, the king's half-brother. It is a first-hand report from the job with the client's name on it. The Diary of Merer.

Add the gang marks inside the pyramid: in 1837 Howard Vyse opened the relieving chambers above the King's Chamber and found work notes in red ochre with Khufu's cartouche and gang names such as "Friends of Khufu". Some of the marks run into the joints between blocks, unreachable once the blocks were laid, so they were painted at the quarry, before construction. Vyse and the relieving chambers.

How they were built

• Stone. The bulk is local plateau limestone; the quarry is visible right beside the Sphinx. The white casing came from Tura across the Nile, the granite of the King's Chamber from Aswan, 500 miles (800 km) upriver. Blocks were cut with copper saws and chisels fed with sand and split with wooden wedges.
• Moving. On wooden sledges over wet sand: a painting in the tomb of Djehutihotep shows a man pouring water in front of a sledge carrying a colossus, and experiments in 2014 confirmed that damp sand halves the friction. The tomb of Djehutihotep.
• Lifting. Ramps: straight, spiralling around the body of the pyramid, or a combination. In 2018 a ramp from Khufu's reign was found at the Hatnub quarry, about 20 degrees steep with stairways on both sides and post holes: blocks were hauled up on ropes running around wooden posts, as around pulleys. The Hatnub quarry.
• Precision. The sides face the cardinal points to within about four minutes of arc, and the lengths differ by inches. Star sightings, plumb lines and water-filled trenches for a level give that precision, and the Egyptians had all three.
• Time and people. Khufu reigned about 26 or 27 years. With 20,000 to 25,000 workers, a permanent core of a few thousand and the rest seasonal, laying one block every few minutes of daylight fits inside the reign. That is a calculation, not a guess: it rests on the barracks and bakeries that were dug up.

What is inside

The Great Pyramid has three chambers. The subterranean one is cut into bedrock and unfinished. The "Queen's Chamber" is a name given by the Arabs; it was probably a room for a statue of the king. Above it runs the Grand Gallery, 28 feet (8.6 m) high with corbelled walls, and beyond it the King's Chamber of red granite with an empty sarcophagus wider than the entrance passage: it was set in place before the roof was closed. Above the chamber are five relieving chambers that take the weight. Narrow "air shafts" run from both chambers towards the faces; the shafts of the lower chamber end in stone slabs with copper fittings, reached in 1993 by Rudolf Gantenbrink's robot, and in 2011 a robot camera looked behind the first slab and saw red marks and another block. The interior.

In 1954 a pit by the south face yielded Khufu's dismantled cedar boat, 143 feet (43.6 m) long, 1,224 pieces reassembled; a second boat was lifted in 2011. In 2017 the ScanPyramids project imaged the pyramid with muons, cosmic-ray particles that pass through stone but are lost in voids, and found a cavity at least 100 feet (30 m) long above the Grand Gallery; the result was published in Nature. In 2023 the same method and an endoscope confirmed a 30-foot (9 m) corridor behind the north face. Whether these are structural voids or rooms is still unknown. ScanPyramids.

Versions and theories

The versions below are not supported by science. They are here because they are what most often comes up in search next to the word "pyramids", and for each we name who proposed it and what archaeologists reply. Everything in this section is a version, not a fact.

Joseph's granaries

Version. Medieval Christian travellers took the pyramids for the granaries the biblical Joseph built to store grain; a 13th-century mosaic in St Mark's in Venice shows them that way, and in 2015 the American politician Ben Carson repeated the idea. Reply. There is almost no empty space inside a pyramid: it is solid masonry with three small chambers, nowhere to store grain. Joseph's Granaries.

Atlantis and a "lost civilization"

Version. The pyramids and the Sphinx were supposedly built by a forgotten civilization thousands of years before the Egyptians, from Edgar Cayce, who promised a "hall of records" under the Sphinx, to the books of Graham Hancock. Reply. No layer at Giza holds the tools, bones, rubbish or writing of another culture; everything found is Egyptian, radiocarbon-dated, and matches the reigns of the Fourth Dynasty. Graham Hancock.

Aliens

Version. Erich von Däniken in "Chariots of the Gods?" (1968) suggested that only visitors from space could achieve such precision and mass. Reply. The precision is explained by plumb lines, water and stars; the mass by 20 years of labour by tens of thousands of people whose houses, bread and graves have been excavated. The version does not explain why visitors would leave quarries, an unfinished underground chamber and gang marks. Ancient astronauts.

Orion's Belt

Version. Robert Bauval (1994) noticed that the three pyramids are laid out like the three stars of Orion's Belt and placed the plan in 10,500 BC, when the match would have been closer. Reply. The third pyramid is offset in the wrong direction relative to the stars, and choosing a date to fit a pleasing coincidence is curve-fitting; the Egyptians did link the king with Orion, but that explains the symbolism, not the date of construction. Orion correlation theory.

The Sphinx was eroded by rain

Version. The geologist Robert Schoch (1992) read the walls of the Sphinx enclosure as water erosion and dated it to 7000–5000 BC, when Egypt had rain. Reply. Most geologists and Egyptologists attribute the pattern to the weathering of layered limestone and salt crystallisation, and there is no trace around the Sphinx of any culture that could have carved it thousands of years before Khafre. Sphinx water erosion hypothesis.

The blocks were cast concrete

Version. The chemist Joseph Davidovits proposed that the blocks were not cut but cast in place from a limestone paste, a geopolymer. Reply. The blocks contain fossils in natural layers typical of quarries, and the quarries themselves, with half-cut blocks, stand next to the pyramids. Davidovits.

Vyse forged Khufu's cartouches

Version. Zecharia Sitchin claimed that the inscriptions with Khufu's name in the relieving chambers were painted in 1837 by Howard Vyse himself for the glory. Reply. Some of the signs run into the joints between blocks, unreachable after laying, and the Diary of Merer found in 2013 independently names Khufu as the owner of the project. Sitchin.

The pyramid as a machine

Version. From Christopher Dunn's "Giza Power Plant" to pumps and resonators: the pyramid was supposedly a device, not a tomb. Reply. There are no traces of conductors, water deposits or mechanical wear inside; there are a sarcophagus, a mortuary temple, a causeway and queens' pyramids, the standard kit of a royal tomb repeated at dozens of other pyramids. Pyramidology.

A simple rule for the reader: if a version requires the quarries, the town, the tombs, the papyri and the inscriptions all to be wrong at once, it is a version, not history.

What is in the archive

The Ancient temples of the world collection holds 16 Egyptian monuments: the three pyramids and the Sphinx of Giza, the Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, the first stone pyramid, and the temples of Karnak, Luxor, Abu Simbel, Hatshepsut, Edfu, Dendera and Kom Ombo. Each has a date, a builder and a Wikimedia Commons photo with author and licence. The pyramids are worth seeing next to their contemporaries: Stonehenge and the Maltese temples in the same collection are older still.

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