Pyramids of Giza

The Pyramids of Giza stand on a limestone plateau at the edge of the Western Desert, about 9 kilometres west of the Nile and some 13 kilometres south-west of central Cairo. Three kings of the Fourth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, Khufu, his son Khafre and Khafre's son Menkaure, raised them as royal tombs between roughly 2600 and 2500 BCE, together with temples, causeways, smaller queens' pyramids, cemeteries for courtiers and the Great Sphinx. Of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the Great Pyramid is both the earliest and the sole survivor.

Pottery from the Maadi culture shows that people lived on the plateau long before the pyramids, perhaps between about 3800 and 3400 BCE. The great building phase began with Khufu, whose pyramid is usually dated to around 2580–2560 BCE. It originally rose to about 146.6 metres and remained the tallest structure made by humans for more than 3,700 years. Khafre's pyramid, raised a short distance to the south-west, looks taller because it sits on higher ground and slopes more steeply, but it is smaller; Menkaure's, finished around 2510 BCE, is far more modest.

Most of the stone was quarried on the plateau itself, while fine white limestone for the outer casing was shipped across the Nile from Tura and granite came from Aswan. Papyri found in 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea, including the logbook of an inspector named Merer, record a team ferrying Tura limestone to Giza in the final stages of the Great Pyramid. Egyptian belief held that the king's body had to be protected so that he could ascend to the afterlife, and many scholars link the pyramid form to the sun god Ra.

How many people did the work is debated. Herodotus, writing around 2,000 years later, was told of 100,000 men labouring in three-month shifts for 20 years. Modern estimates are much lower, commonly 20,000 to 30,000 workers over two decades or more. Excavations led by Mark Lehner south-east of the pyramids uncovered a planned town with bakeries, breweries, a copper workshop and a cemetery, dated to the reigns of Khafre and Menkaure, and workers' tombs found from 1990 onwards suggest a fed, organised and honoured workforce rather than slaves.

The tombs were probably robbed early, perhaps as soon as the First Intermediate Period, yet Giza stayed a sacred place. New Kingdom pharaohs built chapels and a temple near the Sphinx, and Twenty-first Dynasty builders reconstructed the temple of Isis, Mistress of the Pyramids. Greek and Roman writers came as visitors: the geographer Strabo arrived around 25 BCE, shortly after Egypt was annexed by Rome.

Egypt passed to the Rashidun Caliphate in 642. Tradition credits the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun with forcing a tunnel into the Great Pyramid around 820 or 832, although many scholars think the passage is older and that his men only cleared it. Medieval Arab writers told tales of treasure inside, while the scholar Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1163–1231) measured the pyramids and admired them as feats of engineering. In the Middle Ages most of the smooth casing was stripped away, and much of it is said to have been carried off to build Cairo under the Bahri Mamluk sultan an-Nasir Hasan in 1356.

European study began with travellers such as John Greaves, who surveyed the Great Pyramid in 1646. Giovanni Caviglia cleared its descending passage in 1817, Howard Vyse blasted into the chambers above the King's Chamber in 1837, and Flinders Petrie made the first precise measurements in 1880–1882. In 1902 Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, restricted permits to public institutions, and the plateau was divided between Italian, German and American teams, the last led by George Reisner, whose work on the surrounding cemeteries lasted decades.

The pyramids form the northern end of the World Heritage site "Memphis and its Necropolis", inscribed by UNESCO in 1979, which also covers Saqqara, Abusir and Dahshur. One of Khufu's boats, found intact in a pit beside his pyramid, has been restored and moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum. The plateau now lies within the city of Giza, part of greater Cairo, and the Egyptian government has invested in new visitor facilities there.