The Pyramids Of Giza

They Pyramids of Giza are one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
When most people think of the pyramids, they think of the three main large pyramids. There are actually ten pyramids on the Giza plateau: the three main ones for the Pharaohs Menkaure, Khafre, and Khufu, and seven Queens' pyramids. Plus, there are dozens of mastabas, temples, ruins of the workers' village, and of course -- The Sphinx.

Note: Sometimes there is a variation on the spelling of the pharaohs of Giza -- one is Greek, one Roman/Latin. So Menkaure = Mycerinus in Latin, Khafre = Chephren, and Khufu = Cheops. Either pronunciation/spelling is correct. A matter of your teaching or preference. Sherri, our tour guide, used Menkaure/Khafre/Khufu, so that is what I came to use in my writing and story-telling.


During the Fourth Dynasty (2613 - 2494 BC) when the Giza Plateau pyramids were being constructed, the Nile came very close to the plateau. Each of the great pyramids has a temple in front of it, on the river side, and a temple causeway connected the temple to the river. The causeway was basically a canal excavated into the rock, so that the royal barges could float from the Nile directly up to the temple. When you approached a pyramid, you had to go through its respective temple for rituals prior to seeing the tomb, which was the pyramid.
Much has been made, recently, about the site of the plateau and the positioning of the great pyramids. If looked at from the sky, the positions of the pyramids seem to echo the positions of the stars in the belt of the constellation Orion. Are they patterned after the stars? Recent documentaries make compelling arguments for this. Did the ancients receive "extra-terrestrial" help in their construction? There has been no definitive evidence of this, but much speculation.
There has also been much speculation about how the pyramids were actually constructed, block by block. Remember, these multi-ton blocks were put into place before the incorporation of the wheel into transportation -- so many theories have the huge rock blocks on sledges, pulled by either humans or oxen up dirt ramps and levered into place. The theory that water was poured in front of the sledge to make the ramp slippery makes sense, to help glide the massive blocks up the ramps.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu is estimated to have been built with 2.3 million limestone blocks, each one weighing an average of almost 3 tons! That's a lotta rock!
Napoleon is reported to have calculated: If he took apart the three great pyramids, he could build a wall ten feet high all the way around France! Fortunately, he did not take them apart for this task!
Originally, the pyramids had a shiny casing on the outside -- picture giant limestone tiles, making the outside of the pyramids smooth and glistening. Some say the sides of the pyramids were painted, also, and that Khufu's pyramid was capped in gold at the top. Can you imagine? Unfortunately, after the worship of the ancient gods was usurped by Judeo-Christian theology, the pyramids were stripped of this limestone casing -- many buildings in Cairo and the village of Giza are allegedly made out of this limestone. Nice house -- yeah, my ancestors built it with stone they ripped off they pyramids. Neat, eh?

As for the workers who built the pyramids, some people say that it was slave labor. Most modern theories, however, state that while there was a year-round worker village, a great deal of the building of the pyramids took place in the agricultural "off-season" -- so, when farmer's weren't growing their crops, they worked for the government building the pyramids. In other words: they pyramids were built by Egyptians who built these monuments in service to their king, the pharaoh, who was god incarnate on Earth. In either scenario, the undertaking of building such gigantic monuments took many years, and millions of hours of man-power.

I took the photo above from a "photo site" where we were driven, just so we could get all 3 of the great pyramids into one photo shot. Up close, there is no way to get all 3 pyramids into a photo -- they are that massive!