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How 10,000 Pyramid Workers Got Fed - Webpage

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How 10,000 Pyramid Workers Got Fed - Webpage

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Builders: The Pyramid Workers

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The pyramid of Menkaure, with three queens' pyramids in front. Behind are the pyramids of Khafre and Khufu. The workers' town that archaeologists have been exploring was used to house laborers building Menkaure's pyramid.

Credit: Photo by Ricardo Liberato, CC Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

The builders of the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt feasted on food from a massive catering-type operation, the remains of which scientists have discovered at a workers' town near the pyramids.

The workers' town is located about 1,300 feet (400 meters) south of the Sphinx, and was used to house workers building the pyramid of pharaoh Menkaure, the third and last pyramid on the Giza plateau. The site is also known by its Arabic name, Heit el-Ghurab, and is sometimes called "the Lost City of the Pyramid Builders."

So far, researchers have discovered a nearby cemetery with bodies of pyramid builders; a corral with possible slaughter areas on the southern edge of workers' town; and piles of animal bones.

Based on animal bone findings, nutritional data, and other discoveries at this workers' town site, the archaeologists estimate that more than 4,000 pounds of meat - from cattle, sheep and goats - were slaughtered every day, on average, to feed the pyramid builders. [ See Photos of the Unearthed Giza Pyramid Site]

This meat-rich diet, along with the availability of medical care (the skeletons of some workers show healed bones), would have been an additional lure for ancient Egyptians to work on the pyramids.

"People were taken care of, and they were well fed when they were down there working, so there would have been an attractiveness to that," said Richard Redding, chief research officer at Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), a group that has been excavating and studying the workers' town site for about 25 years.

"They probably got a much better diet than they got in their village," Redding told LiveScience.

Feeding the Giza workforce

At the workers' town, which was likely occupied for 35 years, researchers have discovered a plethora of animal bones. Although the researchers are still unsure of the exact number of bones, Redding estimates he has identified about 25,000 sheep and goats, 8,000 cattle and 1,000 pig bones, he wrote in a paper published in the book "Proceedings of the 10th Meeting of the ICAZ Working Group 'Archaeozoology of southwest Asia and adjacent Areas'" (Peeters Publishing, 2013).

About 10,000 workers helped build the Menkaure pyramid, with a smaller workforce present year-round to cut stones and complete preparation and survey work, the AERA team estimates. This smaller workforce would have ramped up for a few months starting around July of each year. "What they would do is, for about four or five months a year, they would bring in a big workforce to move blocks, and they would do nothing but move blocks," explained Redding, who is also a research scientist at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and a member of the faculty at the University of Michigan. [ In Photos: The Beautiful Pyramids of Sudan]

Needless to say, pyramid building is hard work. The workers would need at least 45 to 50 grams of protein a day, Redding said. Half of this protein would likely come from fish, beans, lentils and other non-meat sources, while the other half would come from sheep, goat and cattle, he estimated. Milk and cheese were probably not consumed due to transportation problems and the cattle's low milk yield during that time, Redding said.

Combining these requirements and other protein sources with the ratio of the bones (and the amount of meat and protein one can get from an animal), Redding determined about 11 cattle and 37 sheep or goats were consumed each day.

This would be in addition to supplying workers with grain, beer and other products.

Vast herds ... and herders

In order to maintain this level of slaughter, the ancient Egyptians would have needed a herd of 21,900 cattle and 54,750 sheep and goats just to keep up regular delivery to the Giza workers, Redding estimates.

The animals alone would need about 155 square miles (401 square kilometers) of territory to graze. Add in fallow land, waste land, settlements and agricultural land for the herders, and this number triples to about 465 square miles (1,205 square km) of land - an area about the size of modern-day Los Angeles. Even so, this area would take up just about 5 percent of the present-day Nile Delta.

These animals also needed herders - likely one herder for every six cattle and one herder for every 50 sheep or goats, based on ethnographic observations. This brings the total number of herders to 3,650 overall and, once their families are included, 18,980, just under 2 percent of Egypt's estimated population at the time.

These herds would have been spread out in villages across the Nile Delta, then brought to the workers' town at Giza to be slaughtered and cooked. At the end of their lives, the animals were likely kept in the southern part of the town, in a recently unearthed structure that researchers have dubbed the "OK corral." ("OK" stands for "Old Kingdom," the time period in which the Giza pyramids were built.) The structure, which includes two small enclosures where animals may have been slaughtered and a rounded pen, is partly hidden under a modern-day soccer field. [ Image Gallery: Amazing Egyptian Discoveries]

An image of the OK (Old Kingdom) Corral with the Giza pyramids in the distance. Researchers note that it was large enough to hold 55 cattle with feeding pens. There may also have been areas for slaughter.

Credit: AERA Inc.

The boss eats the beef

The research revealed interesting details about life in the workers' town. For instance, the overseers - who lived in a structure the archaeologists call the "north street gatehouse" - got to eat the most cattle, and those living in an area called the "galleries," where the everyday workers lived, ate mainly sheep and goats.

Redding said it wasn't surprising that the overseers preferred to dine on beef, considering it was the most valued meat in ancient Egypt. "Cattle is, of course, the highest-status meat," he said, noting that it appears far more frequently then sheep or goat in tomb scenes, and that pigs never appear in tomb scenes.

The settlement located adjacent to the workers' town, dubbed "eastern town," wasn't as rigidly planned as workers' town, and its residents were eating a considerable number of pigs, the researchers found. Evidence also suggested the people in eastern town were trading with people in workers' town for hippo-tusk fragments.

These finds suggest that the residents of the eastern town were not as directly involved in pyramid building and had a special relationship with the pyramid workers.

"They were not provisioned; they were not given their meat and food every day," like those in the workers' town were, Redding said. "It's more of a typical urban farming settlement, and there was a symbiotic relationship between the two -probably," he said.

Future discoveries at Giza

Research at workers' town suggests that not all the workers lived there and some may have actually camped out near the Giza pyramids.

"What we think now is - and this is something we're going to be coming out with in the next little while - is that, more likely, it was a large portion of the workforce, the more skilled laborers [living at workers' town], and that there were temporary camps up by the pyramids where the temporary workers who came in would be housed," he said.

"They probably (didn't) need much in the way of housing; they would need more shade than anything else. They wouldn't need any kind of warmth because it wouldn't be winter."

Future studies will look for the remains of the workers' towns of Khufu and Khafre, the two other pharaohs who built pyramids at Giza. A dump area, investigated in the 1950s, may hold them; seal impressions found at the dump have the rulers' names on them.

"What we think was going on was that Menkaure came along, he establishes his reign, he leveled that whole area and he took all the levelling debris, took it to the top of the hill and threw it over the back in a big dump," Redding said.

"That dump on the back side of the ridge may represent a remnant of Khufu and Khafre's construction's town," Redding said, adding that he hopes new excavations will begin on the dump in the next year or two.

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Giza Secret Revealed: How 10,000 Pyramid Builders Got Fed

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The builders of the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt feasted on food from a massive catering-type operation, the remains of which scientists have discovered at a workers' town near the pyramids. The workers' town is located about 1,300 feet (400 meters) south of the Sphinx, and was used to house workers building the pyramid of pharaoh Menkaure, the third and last pyramid on the Giza plateau.

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Building the Great Pyramids - Video Notes

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Building the Great Pyramids - Video Notes

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Building the Great Pyramid

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No cameras were around thousands of years ago when the ancient Egyptians built the three pyramids of Giza, for each of three pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure.

And so scientists have had to piece together clues as to how these towering monuments were constructed. Over the past two decades, a series of new discoveries and studies allowed researchers to paint a clearer picture of those feats. [ In Photos: Inside Egypt's Great Pyramids]

The first, and largest, pyramid at Giza was built by the pharaoh Khufu (reign started around 2551 B.C.). His pyramid, which today stands 455 feet (138 meters) tall, is known as the "Great Pyramid" and was considered to be a wonder of the world by ancient writers.

The pyramid of Khafre (reign started around 2520 B.C.) was only slightly smaller than Khufu's but stood on higher ground. Many scholars believe that the Sphinx monument, which lies near Khafre's pyramid, was built by Khafre, and that the face of the Sphinx was modeled after him. The third pharaoh to build a pyramid at Giza was Menkaure (reign started around 2490 B.C.), who opted for a smaller pyramid that stood 215 feet (65 m) high.

Over the past two decades, researchers have made a number of discoveries related to the pyramids, including a town built near the pyramid of Menkaure, a study showing how water can make blocks easier to move and a papyrus found by the Red Sea. These have allowed researchers to gain a better understanding of how the Giza pyramids were built. The new finds add to older knowledge gained over the last two centuries.

The techniques used to build the Giza pyramids were developed over a period of centuries, with all of the problems and setbacks that any modern-day scientist or engineer would face.

Pyramids originated from simple rectangular "mastaba" tombs that were being constructed in Egypt over 5,000 years ago, according to finds made by archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie. A major advance occurred during the reign of the pharaoh Djoser (reign started around 2630 B.C). His mastaba tomb at Saqqara started off as a simple rectangular tomb before being developed into a six-layered step pyramid with underground tunnels and chambers.

Another leap in pyramid-building techniques came during the reign of the pharaoh Snefru (reign started around 2575 B.C.) who built at least three pyramids. Rather than constructing step pyramids, Snefru's architects developed methods to design smooth-faced, true pyramids.

It appears that Snefru's architects ran into trouble. One of the pyramids he constructed at the site of Dahshur is known today as the "bent pyramid" because the angle of the pyramid changes partway up, giving the structure a bent appearance. Scholars generally regard the bent angle as being the result of a design flaw.

Snefru's architects would correct the flaw; a second pyramid at Dahshur, known today as the "red pyramid" - so named after the color of its stones - has a constant angle, making it a true pyramid.

Snefru's son, Khufu, would use the lessons from his father and earlier predecessors to construct the "Great Pyramid," the largest pyramid in the world.

The pyramids of Giza were built using techniques that took centuries to develop.

Credit: WitR/Shutterstock

The pharaohs appointed a high-ranking official to oversee pyramid construction. In 2010, a team of archaeologists discovered papyri dating to the reign of Khufu at the site of Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea. Text on the papyri stated that in the 27th year of Khufu's reign, the pharaoh's half-brother, Ankhaf, was the vizier (highest official to serve the king in ancient Egypt) and "chief for all the works of the king," archaeologists Pierre Tallet and Gregory Marouard wrote in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology.

While the papyri said that Ankhaf was in charge during the pharaoh's 27th year, many scholars believe it's possible that another person, possibly the vizier Hemiunu, was in charge of pyramid building during the earlier part of Khufu's reign.

Researchers are working to understand the sophisticated planning that would have been involved in pyramid building, which required constructing not just the pyramids, but also the temples, boat pits and cemeteries located near the enormous structures.

Researchers have noted that the Egyptians had the ability to align structures to true north very precisely, something that may have helped in planning the pyramids. Glen Dash, an engineer who studies the pyramids at Giza as part of Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), noted that Khufu's pyramid is aligned to true north within one-tenth of a degree. How the ancient Egyptians did this is not fully clear. In a report published recently in an AERA newsletter, Dash wrote that a circumpolar star like Polaris and lines of rope were likely used as part of the method.

Over the past few years archaeologists with AERA have been excavating and studying a port at Giza that would have been used to bring in supplies, food and people. The papyri found at Wadi al-Jarf allude to the importance of Giza's ports, saying that limestone blocks, used in the outer casing of the pyramid, were shipped from quarries to the pyramid sites within a few days using boat transport.

The port that AERA archaeologists found is located by a town built near Menkaure's pyramid. This town had sizable homes for high officials, a barracks complex that likely held troops and buildings where large numbers of clay seals (used in record keeping) were found. The ordinary workers likely slept in simple dwellings near the pyramid site.

Estimates given by various archaeologists for the size of the workforce at Giza tend to hover around 10,000 people for all three pyramids. These people were well-fed; in a study published in 2013, Richard Redding, the chief research officer at AERA, and colleagues found that enough cattle, sheep and goats were slaughtered every day to produce 4,000 pounds of meat, on average, to feed the pyramid builders. The finding was detailed in the book "Proceedings of the 10th Meeting of the ICAZ Working Group 'Archaeozoology of Southwest Asia and Adjacent Areas'" (Peeters Publishing, 2013). Redding used the animal bone remains found at Giza, and the nutritional requirements for a person doing hard labor, to make the discovery.

Redding also found that animals were brought in from sites on the Nile Delta and kept in a corral until they were slaughtered and fed to the workers.

The workers' meat-rich diet may have been an inducement for people to work on the pyramids, Redding said. "They probably got a much better diet than they got in their village," Redding told Live Science in 2013.

Many of the stones used in Khufu's pyramid are from a horseshoe-shaped quarry located just south of the pyramid, said Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist who leads AERA, and engineer David Goodman. They published their finds back in 1985 in the journal Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts.

Construction workers would have used blocks from a quarry located south-southeast of Menkaure's pyramid to build that pyramid, the researchers said. However, it is unclear which quarry was used for Khafre's pyramid.

When nearly complete, each of the Giza pyramids was furnished with a smooth outer casing made of limestone. Little of this outer casing remains today, having been reused for other building projects in Egypt over the millennia.

The papyri found at Wadi al-Jarf said that the limestone used in the casing is from a quarry located at Turah, near modern-day Cairo, and was shipped to Giza by boat along the Nile River and a series of canals. One boat trip took four days, the papyri said.

To move the stones overland, the Egyptians would have used large sledges that could be pushed or pulled by gangs of workers. The sand in front of the sledge was likely dampened with water, something that reduced friction, making it easier to move the sledge, a team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam found in a study published in 2014 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"It turns out that wetting Egyptian desert sand can reduce the friction by quite a bit, which implies you need only half of the people to pull a sledge on wet sand, compared to dry sand," Daniel Bonn, a physics professor at the University of Amsterdam and lead author of that study, told Live Science in 2014. The scientists said scenes in ancient Egyptian artwork show water being poured in front of sledges.

Most Egyptologists agree that when the stones arrived at the pyramids, a system of ramps was used to haul the stones up. However, Egyptologists are uncertain how these ramps were designed. Little evidence of the ramps survives, but several hypothetical designs have been proposed over the last few decades.

New data may come from the Scan Pyramids Mission, an initiative being undertaken by researchers at three different universities, the Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute and the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. This project's scientists are in the process of scanning and reconstructing the Giza pyramids using a variety of technologies. In addition to finding out more about the construction of the pyramids, the project may also reveal if there are any undiscovered chambers within the structures.

Original article on Live Science.

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No cameras were around thousands of years ago when the ancient Egyptians built the three pyramids of Giza, for each of three pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. And so scientists have had to piece together clues as to how these towering monuments were constructed.

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How to cut stones, specially what tools to use for hard granite stones

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Details about how to cut stones, specially what tools to use for hard granite stones. Franz Löhner thinks, that only forged iron chisels can cut through the hard granite. Franz Löhner doesn't allege, that the ancient Egyptians already knew the difficult and elaborate procedure of making wrought iron - but, that they acquired the valuable iron by trading.

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Introduction

How big of a hole do you have to dig to quarry enough rock to build a mountain? Pretty big when the mountain is the Great Pyramid, as Mark Lehner and David Goodman discovered when they surveyed the Great Pyramid quarry on the Giza Plateau.

They were impressed by the fearlessness the ancient builders exhibited in taking on such a colossal project. Surveying the yawning depression, they often imagined the clink-clink of the copper chisels and the thump of rock hammers of two thousand workmen toiling under the Giza sun. They could almost hear the rhythmic chanting of workers hauling the stones away on sledges.

A horseshoe-shaped quarry lies just south of Khufu's Great Pyramid and the Khafre pyramid causeway. The sides of the quarry align with the sides of the Khufu Pyramid.

Lehner suspected that this great pit furnished most of the local stone for the core of the Great Pyramid. He calculated the missing volume of stone and compared the sum to the volume of the Great Pyramid (see MDAIK 41, 1985).

The ancient quarrymen began removing stone by cutting channels the size of hotel corridors to isolate big blocks of bedrock. They subdivided these blocks with smaller channels, just wide enough for a single quarryman to drive the channel forward.

When they isolated the desired-size block, they would insert levers as big as railroad ties into sockets along the underside and then pry the stone free from the bedrock. Once the stone was free they would drag it away. You can still see some of their channels and lever sockets.

Working this way, the pyramid builders cut the huge quarry to a maximum depth of 30 meters (98.4 feet) below the plateau surface.

The bottom of the quarry slopes slightly upwards to the north toward what would later become the Khafre causeway. Massive amounts of limestone, sand, tafla (desert clay), and gypsum debris now fill the center of the quarry. Lehner speculates this material might be remnants of the pyramid construction ramps, which the workers removed and dumped back into the quarry to fill it at the end of the project.

The largest blocks of bedrock, isolated by channels, still exist between the main quarry and the Sphinx to the east. Here you can see, roughed out of the bedrock but still attached, a 50-100 ton block like those the builders used in the Khafre and Menkaure temples.

In the quarry basin, which the builders exploited deeper into the bedrock, you can see channels and a stepped face that indicate where the ancient workmen cut the smaller pyramid-sized blocks in a one to two-ton range.

The calculation

To calculate the missing volume of stone in the quarry, we used a map from the Egyptian Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction (1977). This map has spot heights (measured elevations in meters above sea level) and contours at one-meter intervals.

Our calculation is an approximation because of the quarry's irregular shape and the fact that centuries of blowing sand have refilled the southern extension of the quarry. A rough comparison with the Great Pyramid reveals a good match.

The estimated volumes for Khufu's pyramid and the missing stone in his quarry are:

The quarry is not precisely rectangular and the floor of the quarry is uneven, appearing to slope up to the north. The quarry's southern outlet disappears beneath the sand-filled wadi situated between the Mokkatam and Maadi geological formations. Therefore, we do not know the entire length of the quarry in that direction.

The ancient quarrymen also wasted a certain amount of rock when channeling to extract the stone blocks. Master Carver Nick Fairplay estimated that this waste could have been 30%, perhaps more.

The quarry was mostly exploited before the second pyramid (Khafre, 2520-2494 BC) was built at Giza because Khafre's children built tombs in the west walls of the quarry.

The size, location, and dating makes a good argument for identifying this big hole in the Mokkatam Formation as the Khufu quarry.

Other pyramid quarries at Giza

Menkaure (2490-2472 BC) built the third, or smallest, of the three principle Giza pyramids. American archaeologist, George Reisner, correctly identified a depression south-southeast of Menkaure's pyramid as the quarry for that pyramid. It runs roughly southeast to northwest. Though we have not made a calculation of the volume, its size and location make it a likely candidate to be Menkaure's pyramid quarry.

The Khafre quarry is less certain. Khafre (2520-2494 BC) may have quarried in several places at Giza. Part of his quarry may lie under the deep sand in the wadi south of the pyramids. Khafre may have also quarried tremendous amounts of stone in the area of his Sphinx (see see Khafre's Sphinx) and from north of his pyramid causeway.

Seldom in the ancient world did humans so alter a landscape, what Kemp and O'Connor called (in reference to Birket Hapu, Amenhotep III's manmade lake) "human disturbance on a geological scale." It is little wonder that the world stands in awe of the accomplishments of the Giza pyramid builders.

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Great Pyramid Quarry | Building a Mountain | Mark Lehner | Ancient Egypt Research Associates

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How big of a hole do you have to dig to quarry enough rock to build a mountain? Pretty big when the mountain is the Great Pyramid, as Mark Lehner and David Goodman discovered when they surveyed the Great Pyramid quarry on the Giza Plateau.

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Stone Mason's & Builders

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Stone quarries in ancient Egypt. Details about the Giza quarries, the granite quarries in Assuan and the Tura limestone quarries

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Stone quarries in ancient Egypt. Details about the stones used for the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giseh. The Giza quarries, the granite quarries in Assuan and the Tura limestone quarries. Maps and illustrations. How were the stones bevelled and the precise angle achieved?

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Egyptian Pyramids

The pyramids that we see in Egypt today continue to be 'Wonders of the World'. They were built thousands of years ago and yet still stand.

The ancient Egyptians created the pyramids as burial tombs to honor their pharaohs and since they believe them to be both man and god, they made the pyramids in a grand style.

The Evolution of Burial Tombs in Ancient Egypt

It's believed that the original burial tombs for pharaohs and high-ranking officials were flat monuments called 'mastabas'. Over the years, each new burial tomb would have another smaller layer added to the top until they began to look like steps.

The building of pyramids reached its height in the Old Kingdom time, between the Fourth and Sixth Dynasties; 2575 BC to 2150 BC. There are over 70 pyramids near the Nile River.

It is thought that the first smooth-sided pyramid was built between the years of 2680 to 2560 BC for the pharaoh King Snefru.

Who Built the Pyramids?

Archeological excavations have found that unlike what most people might think, the pyramids were not built by slaves, but were Egyptians that lived in the area.

They have found living areas that appear to be for the laborers and their families in an almost community style.

The villages seem to be set up with shops, houses, butcher shops, and even bakeries for the thousands of loaves of bread that were needed to feed the workers.

Building the Pyramids: Planning, Precision, and Logistics

There was a lot of planning that went into building a pyramid. Because of the weight, the location had to be on a firm rock because building on sand would cause it to collapse.

Specific measurements had to be made on the base size width and length. This was one of the most important decisions because if they were off, the pyramid would fall.

Rock was cut out from quarries that were often quite a distance and carried on boats on the River Nile to the pyramid location.

There were millions of pieces of rock that had to be just the right size to fit in place.

Building the Pyramids: An Ancient Engineering Enigma

Egyptologists are not really sure how the ancient Egyptians managed to get the heavy rock, often weighing many tons to build the pyramids.

Some think that they used ramps, while others think that they may have used sand to release and balance.

There are many people throughout the world today that have tried to build smaller pyramids to figure out exactly how it was done.

The Pyramids: Ancient Engineering Marvels

One of the things that everyone notices about the pyramids of Egypt is that they are incredibly large. The smallest of the Giza pyramids is over 200 ft high.

The pyramid built by the pharaoh Khufu (pronounced Koo-foo) was originally 480 ft high and is made up of over 2.3 million stone blocks.

Each of the blocks weighs about 5,000 lbs and had to be cut to the right size, brought to the pyramid, and put in place by hand.

The engineers of ancient Egypt were familiar with the difficult mathematics that were involved in creating a structure of such size.

Secret Chambers: Inside the Pyramids of Ancient Egypt

If building the pyramids isn't enough of a challenge, the ancient Egyptian engineers planned the blocks so that there were inner chambers and tunnels.

It was thought that the pyramid chambers were for the burial of the pharaohs.

Some of the huge stone burial sarcophagus have been found inside the pyramids but never any of the mummies or anything that would have been buried with the pharaoh.

Pyramids: Ancient Marvels with a Timeless Appeal

Once a pyramid was completed, it had armed guards to try to protect it from tomb raiders.

The tombs were raided on such a regular basis that it is thought that the secrets were told to others by the builders.

If anyone was caught raiding a pharaoh's tomb, it was an instant death sentence.

The pyramids that we see today have crumbled quite a bit and don't look at all like they would have upon completion.

Once all of the stones were in place, the entire pyramid was covered in white limestone and the top or cap of the pyramid would have been tipped in gold.

In the bright Egyptian sunshine, the white and the gold would have gleamed brightly.

How many pyramids are there in Egypt?

Knowing exactly how many pyramids were built in Egypt is a challenge, as some were poorly made or small and have since fallen apart or been buried by sand.

However, the discovery of more pyramids continues to surprise us. Karl Richard Lepsius compiled a list of pyramids long ago and counted a total of 67. But since then, we have unearthed countless more pyramids, many of which are in poor condition or concealed by sand, making them appear like nothing more than piles of rocks.

It's interesting to note that with the exception of one, all pyramids are located on the western side of the Nile River, and they tend to be clustered together in what is known as pyramid fields.

These magnificent structures have stood the test of time, and their sheer majesty continues to amaze us even after all these years.

The mystery of the pyramids continues to captivate us, and we can't wait to see what other secrets they hold.

Abu Rawash

Abu Rawash boasts Egypt's northernmost pyramid, the Pyramid of Djedefre, constructed for Pharaoh Khufu's son.

Although now mostly in ruins, this pyramid was once among the largest in Egypt, comparable in size to the Pyramid of Menkaure. It's unclear if the pyramid was ever completed, but its grandeur in its prime cannot be denied.

Giza

Giza, an ancient city in Egypt, is renowned for its pyramids including the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure. Additionally, there are smaller pyramids known as the Queen's pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza.

The Great Pyramid is a must-visit as it is the only remaining one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, making Giza a popular tourist destination.

Abusir

Abusir boasts 14 pyramids, serving as the primary burial location for royalty in the Fifth Dynasty. These pyramids are smaller and feature lower-quality limestone than their counterparts from the Fourth Dynasty.

Niuserre's, Neferirkare Kakai's, and Sahure's pyramids are the largest at Abusir, with the unfinished Pyramid of Neferefre also present on site.

Dahshur

Dahshur, a crucial pyramid site in Egypt, remained obscure until 1996 due to its location within a military base.

It houses the Bent Pyramid, constructed for Sneferu, which was the first pyramid planned with smooth sides from the outset. The Meidum pyramid also boasts smooth sides but initially began as a step pyramid before being modified.

Despite its significance in Egyptian history, archaeologists were the only ones aware of Dahshur until it became accessible.

Lisht

Lisht, situated near the Faiyum oasis and approximately 100 kilometers south of Cairo, boasts two significant pyramids constructed for Pharaoh Amenemhat I and his son, Senusret I.

The Pyramid of Senusret I, surrounded by the debris of ten smaller pyramids, one of which belonged to Amenemhat's cousin, Khaba II, stands tall in the Dahshur and Meidum burial grounds.

Additionally, it is believed to be in proximity to Itjtawy, Egypt's capital during the Twelfth Dynasty.

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The pyramids that we see in Egypt today continue to be 'Wonders of the World'. They were built thousands of years ago and yet still stand.

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The Basics

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Ancient Egyptians were buried with their belongings and the tomb walls were painted with scenes from the dead persons life. By examining the objects (artifacts) and paintings in the tombs, we have been able to understand a lot more about life in Ancient Egypt.

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How-To: Building the Great Pyramid - Slideshow

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How-To: Building the Great Pyramid - Slideshow

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Slideshow Presentation

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Ancient egypt Question? What were the tools, materials and steps to building a pyramid?

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Information Website

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BBC - History - Ancient History in depth: Building the Great Pyramid

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Enter the world of the pyramids with Ian Shaw. Explore the mysteries surrounding how the great egyptian pyramids were built.

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Intro Presentation & Overview

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Information Website

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The building of the pyramids with rope rolls - a new method by Franz Löhner

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The building of the pyramids with rope rolls - a new method by Franz Löhner. The ropes are attached to the stone block on a sledge and slung up and over the reel and back down. The workers didn't pull the stone up but were walking down and by pulling the attached rope the stone was carried up.