Located some 16 km (10 miles) southwest of the centre of Cairo, on the edge of a desert plateau, the three great pyramids of Giza rise up majestically. They were built by pharaohs of the 4th Dynasty (Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus) and are the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World to have survived to the present day. As so often happens with the great monuments of humankind's distant past, the pyramids are shrouded in an aura dense with mystery and have attracted innumerable myths, which are now deeply rooted in the popular imagination. The pyramids are often linked with a picture of thousands of slaves who, goaded and whipped by pitiless overseers, toiled endlessly to satisfy the vast ambitions and dreams of eternal greatness of a cruel pharaoh.
This is the core of the tale as told by Herodotus, who entertains us with other fanciful details about the perversity of the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty, and in particular the famed Cheops, who went so far as to prostitute his daughter in order to finance the building of his pyramid, according to the Greek historian.
The reality is somewhat different: the pyramids were not built by masses of toiling slaves, as Herodotus tells it, but rather by free citizens,
craftsmen or peasants, who, during the period of the Nile's floods (from June to September), when the river's waters covered the country's arable land, performed a sort of obligatory 'community service', that was paid for by the pharaoh. The precise construction techniques used by the ancient builders of the pyramids are still much debated, and there are no documents to shed any light. One current theory is that they were built with overlapping ramps that were extended and raised as the pyramid rose higher. Recent research suggests that the enormous limestone blocks of the body of the pyramid were quarried locally on the Giza plateau itself and then dragged to the construction site by teams of labourers using huge wooden sledges. The blocks were subsequently covered with a casing (long since lost) of harder limestone slabs, mostly taken from the quarry at Tura, on the opposite, east bank, of the Nile.
This is the core of the tale as told by Herodotus, who entertains us with other fanciful details about the perversity of the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty, and in particular the famed Cheops, who went so far as to prostitute his daughter in order to finance the building of his pyramid, according to the Greek historian.
The reality is somewhat different: the pyramids were not built by masses of toiling slaves, as Herodotus tells it, but rather by free citizens,
craftsmen or peasants, who, during the period of the Nile's floods (from June to September), when the river's waters covered the country's arable land, performed a sort of obligatory 'community service', that was paid for by the pharaoh. The precise construction techniques used by the ancient builders of the pyramids are still much debated, and there are no documents to shed any light. One current theory is that they were built with overlapping ramps that were extended and raised as the pyramid rose higher. Recent research suggests that the enormous limestone blocks of the body of the pyramid were quarried locally on the Giza plateau itself and then dragged to the construction site by teams of labourers using huge wooden sledges. The blocks were subsequently covered with a casing (long since lost) of harder limestone slabs, mostly taken from the quarry at Tura, on the opposite, east bank, of the Nile.
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