Stone, ramps and labour

How they were built

The honest first sentence is that the question has not received a wholly satisfactory answer.

The question of how the pyramids were built, Britannica writes, has not received a wholly satisfactory answer.⁠¹ The most plausible account in that article is a sloping and encircling embankment of brick, earth and sand, with stone blocks hauled up by sledges, rollers and levers.⁠¹

Approximately 2.3 million blocks of stone were cut, transported and assembled to create the 5.75-million-ton structure.⁠¹ The sides of the Great Pyramid, Britannica says, rise at an angle of 51°52′ and are accurately oriented to the four cardinal points of the compass.⁠¹

According to Herodotus, as reported by Britannica, the Great Pyramid took 20 years to construct and demanded the labour of 100,000 men.⁠¹ By the late twentieth century, archaeologists had found evidence that a more limited workforce may have occupied the site permanently, perhaps as few as 20,000 workers plus support personnel.⁠¹

Excavations in the late 1980s and 1990s revealed labourers’ districts near the pyramids, including bakeries, storage areas, workshops, and the small tombs of workers and artisans.⁠¹

In 1984, Mark Lehner and David Goodman measured the elusive base of the Great Pyramid of Khufu.⁠² Stripped of nearly all of its casing, Dash writes, the monument no longer has any corners, nor well-defined edges.⁠²

Historians still debate what the pyramid form represents: a stairway for the pharaoh’s ka, the ancient mound of creation, or sunrays spreading to the earth.⁠¹

Those readings of the pyramid form — a stairway for the ka, the mound of creation, or sunrays — are kept in view. This site does not pick one.