59 Fun Facts About Great Pyramid of Giza

By what Greek name, handed down by Herodotus, is the Great Pyramid's builder Khufu also known?

Cheops is the Greek form of Khufu. Herodotus, writing some 2,000 years after the king's death, cast him as a tyrant who shut Egypt's temples and set his people to hauling stone.

The Great Pyramid was built during which era of ancient Egyptian history?

The Old Kingdom raised it more than 4,400 years ago, so early that Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the pyramid's builders.

Roughly how tall was the Great Pyramid when it was newly built?

About 150 metres: it stood some 147 metres tall when new. The loss of its outer casing and its tip has since lowered it to around 138 metres.

The Great Pyramid was the world's tallest structure for over 3,700 years until it was overtaken by what?

A medieval cathedral finally topped it: Lincoln's central spire, raised in the early 1300s, is often given the credit. A storm later blew that spire down, while the pyramid still stands.

Howard Vyse named chambers he blasted open inside the Great Pyramid in 1837 after Wellington and which admiral?

Horatio Nelson got the third chamber up, above Wellington's. Vyse reached them with gunpowder, and red-painted gang marks the builders had left on the walls named the king the pyramid was raised for.

The Great Pyramid's perimeter divided by its height comes remarkably close to twice which famous number?

The number pi hides in the slope: the builders rose 14 units for every 11 across, which makes the perimeter 44/7 times the height, twice the old approximation 22/7. Whether they intended it is still argued.

Roughly how many large blocks were quarried to build the Great Pyramid?

2.3 million blocks is the standard estimate. Finishing them inside one king's reign meant setting a block in place roughly every two or three minutes of every working day for over twenty years.

The fine limestone for the Great Pyramid's casing was ferried across the Nile from which quarries?

Tura supplied it from the far bank of the Nile. A logbook found in 2013 shows an official named Merer loading his boats there and delivering the stone to the building site in the last years of the king's reign.

Which stone, floated hundreds of kilometres down the Nile, lines and roofs the Great Pyramid's burial chamber?

Granite from Aswan roofs the chamber in beams weighing tens of tonnes. Every one has since cracked across, and a Victorian surveyor judged the ceiling to be held up only by 'sticking and thrusting'.

Which early Greek sage is said to have worked out the height of Egypt's pyramids from the length of their shadows?

Thales of Miletus gets the credit from several ancient writers. In the simplest telling he waited until his own shadow was exactly as long as he was tall, then measured the pyramid's shadow instead of the pyramid.

Hemiunu, credited by many as the Great Pyramid's architect, held which high office under his uncle Khufu?

Royal vizier meant chief minister, in charge of all royal building works. Hemiunu grew up in the trade: his father Nefermaat had held the same post while the previous king raised pyramids of his own.

The three small pyramids standing beside the Great Pyramid are traditionally assigned to whom?

Khufu's queens are the traditional owners. Close by lies the hidden shaft tomb of his mother, Hetepheres, found in 1925 with her furniture and jewellery still in place but her sealed sarcophagus empty.

Khafre built Giza's second pyramid, but which other son of Khufu took the throne before him?

Djedefre reigned first, and instead of building beside his father he began his own pyramid at Abu Rawash, about eight kilometres to the north. Khafre then brought the royal tombs back to Giza.

What are the five low compartments stacked above the Great Pyramid's King's Chamber thought to be for?

Taking weight off its roof is the accepted purpose: the stacked slabs divert the thrust of the masonry overhead. Only the lowest compartment was known before 1837, when explorers blasted their way into the other four.

The Diary of Merer, a logbook from the building of the Great Pyramid, was found in 2013 beside which sea?

The Red Sea harbour of Wadi al-Jarf hid the rolls in a cave once used to store boats. They are the oldest inscribed papyri ever found, and log a crew's daily trips ferrying casing stone to Giza.

The Great Pyramid's ancient Egyptian name, Akhet Khufu, translates as what?

Horizon of Khufu is what its builders called it. A boat crew's logbook from the king's last years, among the oldest papyri known, records load after load of stone delivered to 'Horizon of Khufu'.

Radiocarbon dating of the Great Pyramid's mortar was possible because the builders added what to it?

Ashes from fires got into the mix as the mortar was prepared, leaving carbon that laboratories could date. Samples taken in 1984 and 1995 confirmed what the king lists implied: the pyramid belongs to Khufu's era.

What do experts think explains a cedar fragment from the Great Pyramid carbon-dating 500 years older than the pyramid?

Old or reused timber is the likely reason: wood was scarce in Egypt, so it was treasured and recycled, or the piece came from the heart of a long-lived tree. It had been missing for over 70 years when it surfaced in a cigar box in Aberdeen.

Herodotus claimed how many labourers at a time worked on the Great Pyramid in three-month shifts?

100,000 men at a time, changed every three months, was the figure Herodotus was given some 2,000 years later. Archaeologists who dug the builders' town now put the workforce nearer 20,000 to 30,000.

Greek writers imagined slaves, but who does evidence dug up at Giza suggest really built the Great Pyramid?

Farmers and villagers did the work. Giza's pyramid builders were fed from large bakeries, and those who died on the job were buried in tombs beside the pyramids, which Egyptologists read as proof they were not slaves.

Animal bones dug from the pyramid builders' town at Giza show that the workforce regularly ate what?

Prime beef from young cattle turned up in quantity, with sheep and goat besides: enough meat, the excavators reckon, to feed thousands of workers every day. The herds were driven in from farms in the Nile Delta.

Testing how the Great Pyramid's blocks were cut, masons with replica chisels worked nearly six times faster once the limestone was what?

Soaked with water, the limestone softened and the chisels lasted longer. From the trial, the team reckoned about 3,500 quarrymen could have cut the 250 blocks a day that the pyramid needed.

Which archaeologist's painstaking survey of 1880-82 gave the Great Pyramid measurements that scholars still rely on?

Flinders Petrie went to test the mystical theories then in fashion about the pyramid's dimensions, and his tape measure buried most of them. One believer who visited him said he felt 'as if I had been to a funeral'.

How wide, on average, are the joints between the Great Pyramid's casing stones?

0.5 millimetres is the average, and the masons still worked mortar into every joint. A Victorian surveyor rated the accuracy equal to a modern optician's straight-edge.

Egyptian builders fixed the Great Pyramid's slope as a seked: five and a half palms across for every one what upward?

Cubit: the royal cubit was divided into seven palms, so measuring five and a half across for each one up gave every face the same slope, about 52 degrees in modern terms.

The sides of the Great Pyramid are lined up, to within a fraction of a degree, with what?

The four compass points are matched with an average error of under four minutes of arc. It is true north the builders found, not magnetic north, probably by taking sightings on the stars.

Polaris was not the pole star when the Great Pyramid was built; which star then lay closest to the celestial pole?

Thuban, a faint star in Draco, sat close to the pole in the pyramid age, and the builders may have used it to find north. The slow wobble of Earth's axis has since swung the pole round to Polaris.

The Great Pyramid was one of two Wonders of the Ancient World in Egypt; which was the other?

The Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria was finished about 280 BC. In its day the only taller structures on Earth were the pyramids of Giza themselves, and a medieval fort now stands on its ruins.

Casing stones stripped from the Great Pyramid in the Middle Ages were carted off to help build which city?

Cairo took them: a 14th-century sultan is said to have carted the finely cut blocks away for his own building works. What visitors see today is the rough core that lay underneath.

What is a pyramidion?

A pyramid's capstone, the last block set. Later kings had theirs cased in gold, but the oldest ones found, from Khufu's own dynasty, are plain limestone.

Before its casing was stripped away, what did the outside of the Great Pyramid look like?

Smooth and gleaming white: polished limestone covered the stepped core and shone in the sun. The blocks were set rough and then dressed flat in place, working, Herodotus was told, from the top down.

What became of Khufu's mummy, for which the Great Pyramid was built?

It has never been found. Looters probably emptied the tomb in ancient times, carrying off the king's body along with his treasures.

With iron tools still unknown in Egypt, the Great Pyramid's limestone was cut with chisels made of which metal?

Copper, hardened by hammering, was the best the masons had, and its ore was mined in Sinai. Herodotus, writing two thousand years later, wrongly assumed the builders had worked with iron.

How do most visitors get inside the Great Pyramid today?

Through a tunnel cut by robbers, which tradition credits to a ninth-century caliph hunting for treasure. The builders' own doorway sits about ten metres higher up the same face.

What is the only original object still inside the Great Pyramid's King's Chamber?

A lidless stone sarcophagus is all that remains, and its makers' slips still show: one saw cut runs too deep and was started again, and the scar of a drill that wandered is left in one side.

In 1993 a robot called Upuaut 2 climbed a narrow shaft inside the Great Pyramid and found what?

A small stone door, fitted with two metal pins, blocked the shaft some 60 metres up. A hole drilled through it in 2002 showed only a second slab behind, and a later camera found red-painted builders' marks in the gap between the two.

In 2017 the ScanPyramids project found a large hidden void deep inside the Great Pyramid using what technique?

Muon radiography counts cosmic-ray particles that rain down through the stone: more get through wherever there is empty space. Three kinds of detector all saw the same void, at least 30 metres long.

Which unfinished room of the Great Pyramid, forgotten through the Middle Ages, did Giovanni Caviglia reopen in 1817?

The Subterranean Chamber lies deep in the rock under the pyramid, much of it still a mess of half-cut trenches. One theory holds it was the first plan for the burial, dropped when the builders decided to go higher.

What did Egeria and other early Christian pilgrims take the pyramids of Giza to be?

Joseph's granaries: Genesis has Joseph storing seven years of grain in Egypt, and pilgrims took the pyramids for his silos. The idea lasted a thousand years, though one ninth-century visitor pointed out that they were solid.

Which Roman writer sneered that the pyramids of Egypt were idle and frivolous displays of royal wealth?

Pliny the Elder said so in his Natural History. He had heard that the kings built them either to stop their treasure passing to rivals and heirs or simply to keep the common people from sitting idle.

What did the Greek geographer Strabo, visiting around 25 BC, say covered the entrance to the Great Pyramid?

A movable stone, he wrote, could be raised to reveal a sloping passage leading down to the vault. His account suggests that visitors could still get inside the pyramid in Roman times.

Most modern theories favour ramps, but how did Herodotus say the Great Pyramid's blocks were raised?

With machines of short timbers, he was told, each stone was lifted one step at a time, from tier to tier. He could not say whether there was a machine on every step or one that was carried up with the work.

Which scientist used John Greaves's 1630s survey of the Great Pyramid to work out an ancient Egyptian unit of length?

Isaac Newton took Greaves's figures for the pyramid's chambers and passages and hunted for a unit that divided them evenly. His essay on it was printed only after his death, in an edition of Greaves's own works.

The 43-metre cedar boat found buried beside the Great Pyramid in 1954 is often described as what?

World's oldest intact ship is the usual billing, since nearly all of its timbers are original. The planks are lashed together with grass rope, so tightly that the hull stayed watertight without caulking.

The Khufu ship was moved in August 2021 to which new home?

Grand Egyptian Museum: the ship made the short trip across Giza on a remote-controlled vehicle brought in from Belgium, leaving the small museum that had been built over the very pit where it was found.

Who was Khufu's father and predecessor?

Sneferu out-built his famous son in one respect: he is credited with three large pyramids, among them the Bent Pyramid, whose slope changes partway up.

The only largely intact statue of Khufu, builder of Egypt's biggest pyramid, is a tiny figurine made of what?

Ivory, and just 7.5 centimetres tall. The head broke off during the 1903 dig at Abydos and was lost in the earth, and it took three weeks of sifting to recover it.

Manetho's king list, the source of Egypt's numbered dynasties, put the Great Pyramid's builder in which one?

The Fourth Dynasty, where Manetho listed the king as Souphis. He was an Egyptian priest writing in Greek around 300 BC, and his division of the country's rulers into thirty dynasties is still the framework historians use.

How was the Great Sphinx, which crouches below the pyramids at Giza, made?

Carved from the living bedrock: masons cut away the rock around a limestone outcrop to free its body, and the blocks they took out went into the temples built in front of it.

Besides being the only survivor, what else sets the Great Pyramid apart among the Seven Wonders?

By far the oldest: it had already stood for well over a thousand years before any of the other six was begun, and was an antique to the Greek travellers who drew up the list.

The Giza pyramids belong to a UNESCO World Heritage Site named for which ancient capital, whose cemetery they were?

Memphis was Egypt's capital when the pyramids were built, and Giza served as its royal burial ground. The listing, made in 1979, strings together its pyramid fields along the desert edge from Giza south to Dahshur.

In what state was Khufu's boat when it was found sealed in a pit at Giza in 1954?

Dismantled and neatly stacked, its 1,224 pieces lay in the pit in careful layers, like a kit. The restorer Ahmed Youssef Moustafa toured Nile boatyards to learn how such hulls went together, and the rebuilding took years.

Where do the Great Pyramid and nearly all of Egypt's other pyramids stand?

West of the Nile, on the side of the setting sun, which Egyptians treated as the domain of the dead. The Great Pyramid sits on a rocky plateau at the desert's edge, just above the old flood plain.

Why do the Great Pyramid's chambers carry no inscriptions or decoration?

The custom began centuries later: the first texts carved inside a pyramid belong to kings who ruled long after Khufu. His chambers are bare except for the red-painted marks his work gangs left out of sight.

Each face of the Great Pyramid is very slightly what, giving rise to the claim that it really has eight sides?

Hollowed down the middle: a surveyor in 1880 found each face 'very distinctly hollowed'. Laser scans now put it down to damage done when the casing was torn off, not to a secret eight-sided design.

What went on for centuries after Khufu's death in the temples built beside the Great Pyramid?

Offerings to the dead king were kept up by generations of priests, dozens of whom are known by name. That long-lived cult is one reason Egyptologists believe Khufu really was laid to rest inside.

What kind of fossils can be seen in the limestone blocks of the Great Pyramid?

Discs of prehistoric shell creatures, flat and round like small coins, stud many of the blocks. The ancient geographer Strabo was told they were the builders' leftover lentils, turned to stone.

On the leading theory, what was the boat buried beside the Great Pyramid meant to do?

Carry the king across the sky with the sun god, which is why such vessels are called solar boats. Some scholars think it first served a more practical turn, as the barge that bore his body to the tomb.

A hieroglyphic inscription carved above the Great Pyramid's entrance in 1842 by Karl Richard Lepsius's expedition honours the king of which country?

Prussia: Lepsius's team kept Frederick William IV's birthday with a party at the pyramid, then composed a tablet in hieroglyphs hailing him, Egyptian-style, as 'the Sun and Rock of Prussia'.