Great Pyramid of Giza

Where is Great Pyramid of Giza?

You will find it in Giza, Egypt.

29.9792° N, 31.1342° E

Note: the Great Pyramid was not voted on in 2007. It was given honorary status because it is the only one of the seven ancient wonders still standing.

The story behind it

Around 2600 BC, the pharaoh Khufu ordered the largest pyramid ever built as his tomb, meant to help him rise into the afterlife as a god. For nearly 3,800 years it was the tallest structure humans had ever made, until England's Lincoln Cathedral surpassed it in the 1300s. Ancient Egyptians originally cased the pyramid in smooth, gleaming white limestone that would have made it shine in the sun, but over the centuries most of that outer casing was stripped away and reused to build mosques and palaces in Cairo, leaving the stepped core stones exposed today. Inside, narrow passages lead to burial chambers, including the King's Chamber deep within the structure. Grave robbers emptied Khufu's treasures long ago, and his mummy has never been found inside. Today the pyramid still stands on the Giza plateau beside its smaller neighbours and the Great Sphinx, drawing millions of visitors who marvel at how it was ever built without modern machines.

Find it on the globe

Great Pyramid of Giza is there as a little three-dimensional model of the building itself. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.

How was it built?

Workers quarried huge limestone blocks nearby, and used barges to float in finer white casing stone and granite from as far as Aswan, hundreds of kilometres up the Nile. Teams likely dragged blocks on wooden sledges over wetted sand to reduce friction, then hauled them up ramps using ropes, levers and sheer manpower, since the Egyptians had no iron tools, pulleys or wheels for heavy lifting. A workforce that peaked at around 40,000 people, including skilled masons and rotating crews of farmers, built the pyramid from an estimated 2.3 million blocks in about 26 years.