No one knows exactly how old the pyramids are. A thousand years before Christ, they were already old and mysterious. The Great Pyramid at Giza has been attributed to King Cheops of the fourth dynasty(about 2900 B.C.).

The pyramids are tombs. The ancient Egyptian kings believed that their future lives depended upon the perfect preservation of their bodies. The dead were therefore embalmed, and the mummies were hidden below the level of the ground in the interior of these great masses of stone. Even the inner passages were blocked and concealed from possible robbers. Food and other necessities were put in the tombs for the kings to eat in their future lives.

The building of such a tremendous structure was a marvelous engineering feat. It is said that it took 100,000 men working for twenty years to build the Great Pyramid! Each block of stone is 7 meters high. Some are 5.5 meters wide. Let’s see if we can trace the story of the building of this particular pyramid.

The blocks of limestone and granite used in building the pyramid were brought by boat from quarries across the Nile and to the south. This could be done for only three months each spring when the Nile was flooded. So it took twenty years and some 500,000 trips to bring all the stone needed!

Boats unloaded at a landing space connected to the site of the pyramid by a stone road. The blocks weighing about 2 tonnes each were then pulled up the road on sledges by gangs of men. Stone blocks pulled up the road were laid out in neat rows and then pulled to the site by other gangs of men. The number of blocks in the Great Pyramid have been estimated at 2,300,000.

As the pyramid rose, a huge ramp was built to get the materials to higher levels. Gangs of men pulled the blocks up the ramp. Each layer of the pyramid was made of blocks of limestone set side by side. Mortar was used to slide the stones, rather than to cement them together. Blocks in the center were rough, but those on the outside were cut more carefully. The final surface was made of very smooth limestone with almost invisible joints. The pyramid has three inside chambers with connecting passages.