How Were the Pyramids Built? Ancient Egypt for Students

A river in the desert

From above, Egypt is a thin green ribbon along the Nile, and desert on both sides. Rain is almost unknown, but every summer the river rises and floods its banks. The Egyptians divided their year into three seasons: akhet, the flood; peret, the time of growing; and shemu, the harvest. When the water went down, it left a layer of fine black silt, and crops grew in it very well. That is why Egyptians called their land Kemet, “the black land”, and the desert Deshret, “the red land”. This reliable farming fed the state.

One land, two crowns

Around 3100 BC the valley in the south (Upper Egypt) and the delta in the north (Lower Egypt) were joined into one kingdom. Tradition names a ruler, Narmer, as the one who did it. On the carved Narmer Palette he wears the white crown of the south on one side and the red crown of the north on the other. Later pharaohs wore both crowns together. Historians are careful about this. The union may have taken generations rather than a single battle. The pharaoh was seen as a living god who kept the world in order.

The first pyramid

Early kings were buried in low, flat-topped mud-brick tombs called mastabas. Around 2670 BC the architect Imhotep tried something new for King Djoser at Saqqara. He built the tomb in stone, and he stacked six mastabas on top of each other, each smaller than the one below. The Step Pyramid is about 60 metres tall and was one of the first large stone buildings in the world. Imhotep was remembered for thousands of years, and in later centuries the Egyptians worshipped him as a god of healing.

The Great Pyramid

About 2560 BC, King Khufu’s pyramid begins to rise at Giza. When finished it stood 146.6 metres tall. Today it is about 138.5 metres, because the top and the smooth outer casing are gone. It holds about 2.3 million blocks of stone, with an average weight of around two and a half tonnes, and it was built in roughly twenty to twenty-seven years. That means placing a block every couple of minutes, day after day. For nearly four thousand years it was the tallest building made by people. Its sides are almost exactly aligned to north, south, east and west.

Ramps, sledges and boats

How did they lift the stones? No one knows for certain. Theories include a long straight ramp, a zigzag ramp, a spiral ramp around the pyramid, or a mix. A steep ramp was found at an alabaster quarry in 2018, so ramps were used. To drag heavy blocks the workers put them on wooden sledges. A painting from a tomb shows a man pouring water on the sand in front of a sledge. Modern experiments show that wet sand halves the pulling force. Stone came by boat down the Nile, as we shall see next.

Who built it

The builders were not slaves. Near the pyramids archaeologists found a town with bakeries, breweries and workers’ cemeteries, where crews lived and were fed bread, beer and meat. In 2013 a logbook on papyrus, written by an official named Merer, was found at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea. It records boat trips carrying white limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza during Khufu’s reign, and it is the oldest inscribed papyrus known. Skilled crews took pride in the work, and even gave their gangs names.

Reading the silence

After the last hieroglyphic inscription, carved in AD 394, nobody could read the signs for 1,400 years. The key was the Rosetta Stone, a slab found in 1799 by French soldiers. It carries one decree from 196 BC in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Scholars could read the Greek and compare. In 1822 Jean-François Champollion announced his solution. The hieroglyphs write sounds as well as ideas, and the royal names inside oval cartouches helped him prove it. Since then, the voices of ancient Egypt can speak again.

Egypt and the Pyramids