Great Pyramid of Giza Egypt

Legendary

The oldest and largest of the pyramids in Giza.

Photo by Mat Hampson

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For 3,800 years, no building on Earth was taller than this one. Nothing came close until a cathedral spire in England finally passed it in the Middle Ages.

The pyramid was built for a pharaoh named Khufu in the early 26th century BC. Workers cut and moved roughly 2.3 million blocks of stone to make it.

Most of the limestone came from quarries right there on the Giza plateau. But the finest white stone came by boat down the Nile, along with granite blocks from Aswan that weighed up to 80 tons each.

We even know a little about how it arrived. An ancient logbook kept by a work supervisor named Merer survives today, recording boatloads of stone being delivered to the site.

The pyramid stood about 481 feet tall when it was finished. It's shorter now, around 454 feet, because the smooth white outer casing was stripped away long ago and the very top stone is missing.

Inside are three known chambers. One was cut down into the bedrock beneath the pyramid and never finished.

The other two sit high up inside the stone itself, which no other Egyptian pyramid does. They're called the Queen's Chamber and the King's Chamber, though those names were made up much later.

A red granite coffin still sits in the King's Chamber, carved from a single block. Khufu's body was never found in it.

To reach that chamber, you climb through the Grand Gallery, a tall sloped passage with a stepped ceiling rising 28 feet overhead. It's considered one of the finest pieces of engineering in the ancient world.

The Great Pyramid is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It's also the only one still standing.

Walk around the base first to get a sense of the scale, since photographs really don't manage it. Buy the separate ticket to go inside if you don't mind tight spaces, and climb the Grand Gallery to the King's Chamber. Then visit the Grand Egyptian Museum nearby to see Khufu's full-size wooden boat, buried beside the pyramid and found in pieces in 1954.