Great Pyramid of Giza Trivia
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59 free Great Pyramid of Giza trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Great Pyramid of Giza trivia quiz covers the oldest and only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World from the reign of Khufu around 2600 BC to the muon scans of the 21st century. It takes in the numbers (2.3 million blocks, 146.6 metres, 280 royal cubits, a seked of five and a half palms), the materials from Tura and Aswan, the workforce and the Diary of Merer, and the astonishing precision of the base and its alignment to the cardinal directions. Inside, it explores the Descending Passage, the Subterranean Chamber, the Queen's and King's Chambers, the Grand Gallery, the relieving chambers where Khufu's name was found in 1837, Gantenbrink's robot and the ScanPyramids Big Void. Outside, it covers the lost casing and pyramidion, the queens' pyramids and the Khufu ship, the Sphinx next door, and the long parade of visitors and diggers: Herodotus and his onion inscription, Pliny, Caliph al-Ma'mun's tunnel, Vyse's gunpowder, Petrie's survey and David Gill's mast. Some questions any tourist will know; others are for real pyramidologists. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on the pyramid, Khufu, the Giza complex and the Seven Wonders, and each explanation adds one further detail. For the wider civilization, try our Ancient Egypt quiz.
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Q 01By what Greek name, handed down by Herodotus, is the Great Pyramid's builder Khufu also known?
Cheops
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.
Q 02The Great Pyramid was built during which era of ancient Egyptian history?
The Old Kingdom
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.
Q 03Roughly how tall was the Great Pyramid when it was newly built?
About 150 metres
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.
Q 04The Great Pyramid was the world's tallest structure for over 3,700 years until it was overtaken by what?
A medieval cathedral
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.
Q 05Howard Vyse named chambers he blasted open inside the Great Pyramid in 1837 after Wellington and which admiral?
Horatio Nelson
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.
Q 06The Great Pyramid's perimeter divided by its height comes remarkably close to twice which famous number?
The number pi
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.
Q 07Roughly how many large blocks were quarried to build the Great Pyramid?
2.3 million
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.
Q 08The fine limestone for the Great Pyramid's casing was ferried across the Nile from which quarries?
Tura
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.
Q 09Which stone, floated hundreds of kilometres down the Nile, lines and roofs the Great Pyramid's burial chamber?
Granite
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'.
Q 10Which early Greek sage is said to have worked out the height of Egypt's pyramids from the length of their shadows?
Thales
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.
Q 11Hemiunu, credited by many as the Great Pyramid's architect, held which high office under his uncle Khufu?
Royal vizier
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.
Q 12The three small pyramids standing beside the Great Pyramid are traditionally assigned to whom?
Khufu's queens
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.
Q 13Khafre built Giza's second pyramid, but which other son of Khufu took the throne before him?
Q 21Animal bones dug from the pyramid builders' town at Giza show that the workforce regularly ate what?
Prime beef
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.
Q 22Testing 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
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.
Q 23Which archaeologist's painstaking survey of 1880-82 gave the Great Pyramid measurements that scholars still rely on?
Djedefre
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.
Q 14What are the five low compartments stacked above the Great Pyramid's King's Chamber thought to be for?
Taking weight off its roof
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.
Q 15The Diary of Merer, a logbook from the building of the Great Pyramid, was found in 2013 beside which sea?
The Red 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.
Q 16The Great Pyramid's ancient Egyptian name, Akhet Khufu, translates as what?
Horizon of Khufu
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'.
Q 17Radiocarbon dating of the Great Pyramid's mortar was possible because the builders added what to it?
Ashes from fires
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.
Q 18What do experts think explains a cedar fragment from the Great Pyramid carbon-dating 500 years older than the pyramid?
Old or reused timber
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.
Q 19Herodotus claimed how many labourers at a time worked on the Great Pyramid in three-month shifts?
100,000
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.
Q 20Greek writers imagined slaves, but who does evidence dug up at Giza suggest really built the Great Pyramid?
Farmers and villagers
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.
Flinders Petrie
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'.
Q 24How wide, on average, are the joints between the Great Pyramid's casing stones?
0.5 millimetres
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.
Q 25Egyptian builders fixed the Great Pyramid's slope as a seked: five and a half palms across for every one what upward?
Cubit
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.
Q 26The sides of the Great Pyramid are lined up, to within a fraction of a degree, with what?
The four compass points
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.
Q 27Polaris was not the pole star when the Great Pyramid was built; which star then lay closest to the celestial pole?
Thuban
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.
Q 28The Great Pyramid was one of two Wonders of the Ancient World in Egypt; which was the other?
The Pharos lighthouse
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.
Q 29Casing stones stripped from the Great Pyramid in the Middle Ages were carted off to help build which city?
Cairo
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.
Q 30What is a pyramidion?
A pyramid's capstone
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.