PLUS: Making sense of the pyramids’ enduring mysteries
Nothing has captured our imagination quite like the Pyramids of Giza. Built 4,600 years ago during Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the three monuments served to honor and house the remains of the Pharaohs Khufu, his son Khafre, and grandson Menkaure. In the thousands of years that followed, they awed and inspired everyone from the ancient Greeks to Napoleon Bonaparte. For several thousand years, the Great Pyramid reigned supreme as the world’s tallest human-made structure, originally standing 481 feet high. The pyramids are icons of ingenuity and imagination, and yet almost from the moment they were constructed, they have been shrouded in mysteries.
Perhaps the biggest and most popular one is, How exactly were they built? The Great Pyramid comprises over two million stone blocks,…