15/09/2026
How the Egyptian pyramids were built has long been a mystery. Constructed as tombs for the pharaohs over 4,000 years ago, more than 100 of them remain. The largest one, the Great Pyramid of Giza, was originally 147m tall (482ft).
It’s made up of about 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing between 2.5 and 15 tonnes, and would have had to be transported to the building site and lifted into place with techniques available at the time. To put this into context, it’s akin to lifting a double-decker London bus to the top of St Paul's Cathedral a few million times.
“There’s still debate between scientists on the exact method of raising these heavy blocks to such great heights,” says Dr Eman Ghoneim, a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington in the US.
Recent research is helping to fill in pieces of the puzzle, however. The most widely accepted theory is that ramps were used to haul the stones up, and it’s supported by remains of inclined structures found close to some of the pyramids. But the steepness of these ramps has been the subject of debate.
New studies are helping us understand how the Egyptian Pyramids were built, with modern scanning techniques helping things along.
