Construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza
The Great Pyramid was built for Khufu at Giza around 2560 BC, and was the tallest structure in the world for about 3,800 years. It stands 146.6 metres originally and about 138 now, from some 2.3 million blocks averaging two and a half tonnes, on a base 230 metres square that is level to within about two centimetres and square to within a few centimetres. It is aligned to true north to within about a twentieth of a degree, achieved with no compass and no instrument that survives — most probably by observing the circumpolar stars. The workforce was not enslaved. Excavation of the workers' town south of the plateau since the 1990s has found bakeries, breweries, dormitories, medical care for broken bones, and cemeteries where the men were buried with grave goods within sight of the pyramid, which nobody arranged for slaves. They were organised in gangs with names like the Friends of Khufu, and worked in rotation. The Diary of Merer, papyri found at Wadi al-Jarf in 2013, is the oldest inscribed papyrus known and records a boat captain hauling limestone from Tura across the river over several months in Khufu's twenty-seventh year — the only first-hand account of the construction that exists. The casing stones were stripped for Cairo after an earthquake in 1303. Herodotus was told it took 100,000 men twenty years, which is roughly four times the modern estimate and was told to him two thousand years after the fact. Muon tomography found a void some thirty metres long above the Grand Gallery in 2017, and nobody knows what it is for.
- Year: 2580 BCE
- Category: Cultural
