Egypt Tours & Travel Packages

The Great Pyramid is the main site in Giza Plateau, it is one of the 7 wonders of the Ancient world, and it is the only wonder still exist, the other 6 wonders disappeared one after the other. This building used to be the tallest and biggest building on earth for thousands of years till the twentieth century.

The Great Pyramid is attributed to king Khufu, 4th dynast, Old Kingdom, and it is said that it is the pyramid number 5 in the pyramid constructions in Egypt, after the Step pyramid in Sakkara, Meidum pyramid in Meidum (south of Cairo), the Bent Pyramid in Dahsur and the Red pyramid in Dahshur. But there are remains of pyramids at Sakkara from the 3rd dynasty.

The Great Pyramid was built with more than 2,300,000 blocks of limestone, and there are around 50 huge blocks from rose granite inside the so-called king chamber. We don’t know exactly how many blocks (casing stones) were required to build the external smoothed surfaces, there are some few blocks still attached to the pyramid from the north and the east side.

The blocks are in different sizes, the smallest blocks are 1.5 tons and the average weight for the other blocks is around 5 tons, but we are not sure about the weight of the blocks deep inside the pyramid.

The limestone blocks were cut from a nearby quarry, the casing stone were made from what we call it fine limestone, and its quarry is at the east side of the Nile from Tura quarries, and rose granite is from Aswan. It is believed that the Great Pyramid lost its casing stones because the area was used as a quarry for centuries starting from the Roman time in Egypt, but there are other opinions suggesting that the pyramid lost its casing stones because of natural disasters like earthquakes.

The height of the pyramid was originally 146.59 meters (or 146.7m) nearly 480 ft, please not that because of the missing of the casing stones and the capstone we can not be very accurate when we measure the height or the width of the pyramid. The current height is 138.8 meters (455 ft).

The base of the Great Pyramid id a square base, each side is 230.33 meters (756 ft), the angles of the bas are perfectly 90° degrees, the angle of the slope is 51°52’40”

There are 3 chambers inside the Great Pyramid, or to be more specific, there is one room under the base of the pyramid, it is called the subterranean room, and there are 2 rooms inside the pyramid itself, the first room which close to the middle level of the pyramid is called the queen’s room, and the one in higher level is called the king’s room.

The subterranean room which is on the level of 105 under the base of the pyramid, is empty and there is a kind of a well, it is not deep and leads to nothing.

The so-called queen’s chamber is empty, and it has niche on the east wall but it is not is the middle of the wall as we expected, it is off center, in the north wall and the same in the south wall, there is a rectangular opening goes deep into the wall but no one could tell us any further information about what could be inside this shaft, and it used to be called air shafts.