Giza Pyramids

Three pyramids on a limestone plateau at the edge of the city, built for three kings across roughly eighty years in the 26th and 25th centuries BCE. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the largest, originally about 146 metres tall and made of some 2.3 million blocks; Khafre's looks taller only because it stands on higher ground, and still wears a cap of the polished casing that once covered all three; Menkaure's is markedly smaller, with a granite lower course left unfinished.

Going inside

Entry into a pyramid is a separate ticket and a genuinely tight, steep, airless climb up a low ramped passage. There is nothing decorative to see at the top — the burial chambers are bare granite. Go for the experience of the space, not for the art, and skip it if you dislike confined places.

The pyramids were built in a single, extraordinary burst. Egypt went from Djoser's stepped pyramid at Saqqara to Khufu's smooth-sided Great Pyramid in under a century — a leap in engineering, logistics and state organisation with no real parallel in the ancient world.

Who built them

Not slaves. Excavations from the 1990s onward uncovered the builders' settlement south-east of the plateau: bakeries turning out bread at scale, breweries, a fish-processing area, dormitories, and cattle bone in quantities that mean the workforce was eating well. Their cemetery lies alongside, and the men buried in it were given proper tombs in the shadow of the king's — unthinkable for slaves.

Skeletons show healed fractures and treated injuries, meaning workers received medical care. The picture that has emerged is of a rotating national labour force, fed, housed, paid in rations and organised into named gangs — some of whose graffiti survives inside the pyramid, cheerful crew names daubed on blocks nobody was ever meant to see.

The stripped casing

All three were once sheathed in polished white Tura limestone, so smooth that Arab writers described them as gleaming. Most of that casing was quarried away after a 14th-century earthquake loosened it, and reused to build medieval Cairo — so a good deal of the Great Pyramid's surface is now standing in the mosques and walls of the old city.

Still yielding

In 2017 the ScanPyramids project used muon tomography — cosmic-ray imaging — to detect a large void above the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid, at least thirty metres long. What it was for is still unresolved. Four and a half thousand years on, the building has not finished being surveyed.