Khufu - The Pharaoh Who Built the Great Pyramid Documentary

The man known to history as Pharaoh Khufu was born sometime in the second half of the twenty-seventh century BC in Old Kingdom ancient Egypt. Khufu’s father was most likely Pharaoh Sneferu, as, in Old Kingdom Egypt, something akin to primogeniture was practiced, whereby the eldest son of the previous ruler succeeded him upon his death. Since Sneferu had many sons it would have been very unlikely that one of them did not succeed him. Sneferu was clearly one of the most powerful rulers ancient Egypt had ever seen, and as we will see, his pyramid-building programme was a major

influence on Khufu. Khufu’s mother, if Sneferu was indeed his father, was Queen Hetepheres I. Egyptian rulers practiced polygamy and Sneferu would have had numerous wives, with Hetepheres perhaps only rising to become a paramount figure at the Pharaonic court in the capital, Men-Nefer, just to the south of modern-day Cairo, when it became evident that her son Khufu would succeed Sneferu one day. Owing to the polygamy practiced by the pharaohs, Khufu had an extensive array of siblings, many of them being half-brothers and half-sisters. The approximations of Khufu’s time of birth are based for the most part on

lists of ancient Egyptian kings which indicate that his direct predecessor, Pharaoh Sneferu, died around 2590 BC. Since he had reigned for a long time, most likely around 25 years or longer, it is reasonable to assume that Khufu was well into his adult years when he succeeded to the throne, and that, as such, he may have been born sometime between 2640 BC and 2620 BC. Unfortunately, though, it is not possible to be more exact, given the fragmentary nature and very limited extent of the sources available for a period of history some 4,600 years ago. Khufu is

one of the most famous pharaohs of ancient Egypt and even people who have never heard of him will be aware of the monument which he had built during his reign: the Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest of the pyramids on the Giza Plateau outside Cairo in Egypt, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one of those seven wonders still standing today. This enormous monument was built as his tomb, his resting place in death and a statement of his position as a god on earth in his own time. But Khufu presents

something of a historical anomaly. While the Great Pyramid stands as an everlasting testament to his reign, we know very, very little about the man himself. Almost no written records of any kind have survived from this time, as papyrus documents can only survive over such a long periods if preserved in unusual circumstances. Through other sources of evidence, however, such as ancient inscriptions on temple and tomb walls, the writings of classical authors, archaeological research and the enormous block of evidence that the Great Pyramid itself constitutes, a certain amount about Khufu, his life, and reign, can be reconstructed.

Khufu ruled Egypt during the Old Kingdom period of Egyptian history. Ancient Egyptian history is divided up into nearly a dozen different distinct eras. The first such era was the Predynastic period of Egyptian history, running from the late fifth millennium BC down to about 3100 BC. This was a long period in which there was no major centralised polity in Egypt. Furthermore, Lower Egypt around the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt further south along the course of the Nile were not yet united as a kingdom, but a common culture was emerging here centred on trade, agricultural practices, a

religious system and of course the development of the hieroglyphic writing system late on in the period. The second such period began around 3100 BC when a ruler by the name of Narmer succeeded in uniting Upper and Lower Egypt under his rule and established the First Dynasty of Pharaohs, the term pharaoh meaning something akin to ‘great house’ and initially referring to a palace in which the ruler lived, but subsequently being applied to describe the king himself during the New Kingdom period. These pharaohs were soon being identified as living gods of a sort, a designation which is

important to bear in mind when considering how a pharaoh such as Khufu was able to deploy so many resources in Egypt all with the goal of building himself an elaborate tomb. Narmer and his successors in the First and Second Dynasty reigned down to just beyond 2700 BC in a period known as the Early Dynastic era. Then, around 2670 BC the third era of ancient Egyptian history began with the rise of the Third Dynasty, the Old Kingdom era. The Old Kingdom era would last between around 2670 BC and 2180 BC. It consisted of six dynasties, the

Third Dynasty to the Eighth Dynasty. This was the first period of great cultural flourishing in ancient Egypt, when a powerful centralised state began building brilliant monuments and its powerful armies expanded the state west into what is now Libya, east into the Sinai Peninsula and south towards Nubia in modern-day Sudan. Khufu belonged to the Fourth Dynasty, a distinct line of Egyptian pharaohs that ruled between approximately 2630 BC and 2500 BC. We know this because a number of different lists of ancient Egypt’s pharaohs have survived, such as the Abydos King List, found on the wall of a

temple built by Seti I around 1300 BC. By the time this Fourth Dynasty came to power the Old Kingdom was a well-developed state with armies that controlled extensive territory, a large bureaucracy of scribes and administrators that managed complex construction programmes and collected taxes, generally in the form of agricultural goods produced on the alluvial soil deposited along the shores of the River Nile every year during its inundation or flooding. A royal capital had also emerged at Men-Nefer or Memphis, just south of modern-day Cairo and not far from the Giza Plateau and the Dahshur Necropolis, latter on

which a complex of mortuary tombs and pyramids were already being built to house the remains of the pharaohs, members of their families and leading figures within the government. This was the context in which Khufu would rule Egypt. Depending on which tradition one is reading, one will encounter different names for Khufu. For instance, while Egyptologists and most scholars today use the name Khufu for him, if you pick up a history book written in the middle of the twentieth century, you are just as likely to find the builder of the Great Pyramid referred to as Cheops. This

is not technically inaccurate, but Cheops was the rendering of his name in ancient Greek, and the version used by ancient Greek writers like Herodotus, to whom we will return shortly. Khufu’s proper and full Egyptian name was Khnum-Khufu, the Khnum part being the name of an Egyptian deity who in the Old Kingdom period was viewed as being both a god of the River Nile, the waterway which allowed life and civilization to flourish in the otherwise inhospitable desert, and also a creator god of sorts who was said to have moulded humanity from clay using a potter’s wheel.

Khnum would be superseded in importance within the Egyptian religious system in centuries to come by Ra, the Sun god, and Amun, but Khnum was much more paramount in the Old Kingdom. Khnum-Khufu means ‘protected by Khnum’ and the name was intended to indicate that Khufu had the divine blessing of the gods. Another version still of Khufu’s name used by Egyptian writers of a later era was Suphis, a different Hellenic version of Cheops. Just as the time of his birth and the parentage of Khufu are imprecisely known, so too is there uncertainty about when he ascended to

the throne, and how long he reigned for. The king lists such as those at Abydos and elsewhere differ somewhat in their data, but they all point broadly to Sneferu dying in the early twenty-sixth century BC and Khufu succeeding him. We can conservatively say then that he succeeded around 2590 BC. There are differing traditions as well concerning how long Khufu ruled for. One or two anomalies suggest a reign of as much as half a century or longer, though for the most part the sources agree that he ruled for a period of about 25 to 30 years,

so down to around 2565 BC or thereabouts. If this is the case, then extrapolating from all of this we might conclude that Khufu lived to be a man of about sixty or so years and would have been entering old age by the standards of the time when he died. When he became pharaoh the Old Kingdom was enjoying a period of unprecedented power and prosperity and was extending its influence into new territories beyond the valley and delta of the River Nile. One such area that Khufu was broadly responsible for the conquest of was the Sinai Peninsula.

Lying to the east of Egypt in the region connecting Egypt to the wider Middle East, the Sinai Peninsula was a region that was rich in valuable resources in ancient times, as enormous copper mines were discovered at Timna, while various other minerals were mined here, including gold and turquoise, the former being a mineral which was used extensively in ancient Egyptian jewellery and funerary goods. At Wadi Maghareh, a site in the southwest of the Sinai Peninsula, there are mines and caves that are the remnants of the mining activity undertaken here in ancient times, ones in which cartouche

reliefs of Khufu have been found, indicating that he sent mining expeditions here during his reign. There is also evidence of further trade connections being cultivated between Egypt and the Levant during his rule to acquire goods such as the valuable Byblos wood produced here. Archaeologists have also located a fort known as Tell Ras Budran in western Sinai. This lay across the Gulf of Suez from the port of Wadi Maghareh and it has been speculated that mined resources were being shipped across the gulf and then transported overland to Men-Nefer during Khufu’s reign. The riverine transport links between

Sinai and the west of the Gulf of Suez point towards the growing Egyptian presence along the Red Sea coastline. In the Predynastic and Early Dynastic era, the rulers of the Egyptian kingdom had been focused on extending their control along the course of the River Nile and uniting Upper and Lower Egypt fully under their rule. With this completed, the next logical phase of expansion was west and eastwards into the oases of the Western Desert and to the Red Sea coast. There are numerous settlement sites along the Red Sea coast which point towards increased activity here during

Khufu’s reign. A very notable one is at Wadi al-Jarf, about 100 kilometres south along the Red Sea coast from the modern-day town of Suez. Here the oldest known artificial harbour anywhere in the world was built right around the time of Khufu’s reign, while dozens of anchors dating to the Old Kingdom period have also been excavated from the seabed, indicating a very high level of maritime traffic in Khufu’s time. While the evidence is typically fragmentary, the overwhelming sense conveyed by sites like Wadi al-Jarf is of a growing level of prosperity and commerce here in Khufu’s reign.

Because members of the imperial family were interred after death in elaborate tombs and often had their names inscribed on temple walls or on other public monuments, we are able to reconstruct Khufu’s family to some extent. Like virtually all pharaohs, he had multiple wives. The senior queen was Meritites I, who was most likely a half-sister of Khufu’s, it also being a common practice over three-thousand years of ancient Egyptian history for siblings to marry one another to secure the royal line. Her paramount position amongst Khufu’s wives is evident from the building of a small pyramid in honour

of her not far from the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau. Another wife, Henutsen, is listed on the Inventory Stela, a stone tablet dating from the seventh century BC which purports to list statues from a temple first built in Egypt during the Old Kingdom period. These wives, and perhaps other unknown wives, bore Khufu at least a dozen children. The eldest son was Kawab, who might otherwise have become Pharaoh one day, but predeceased his father. Another son was Khafre, who would become the most significant of his sons. A daughter, Nefertiabet, meaning ‘beautiful one of the east’,

has her own important place in the history of the Old Kingdom on account of a slab stela from her tomb at Giza having survived in a remarkable state of preservation. This is replete with hieroglyphs and depicts her seated and eating. Despite having occurred nearly five millennia ago, we are fortunate to have a few pieces of material evidence that have survived from Khufu’s reign to shed light on him and his court. One of these is known as the Westcar Papyrus, so called because it was acquired by a British adventurer by the name of Henry Westcar while

in Egypt in the mid-1820s. Unfortunately we do not know how Westcar acquired it or where it was preserved, as it is exceptionally rare that a papyrus manuscript could have survived so long without literally disintegrating just by being exposed to the air. The papyrus comes from the middle of the second millennium BC, but is a collection of five stories about miracles that were performed by magicians and priests at Khufu’s court, with these tales described as ‘King Khufu and the Magicians’ within the text. The stories are each related by one of Khufu’s sons. Only the fourth relates

directly to the king and outlines a tale of a man who could reattach the heads to animals and bring them back to life after they were beheaded. Khufu had this ancient Egyptian re-animator brought to his court to demonstrate this magic and there the pharaoh has numerous animals and even a servant beheaded in order for the magician to demonstrate his skill. On the one hand, the picture here presented of Khufu is fairly unflattering. He has animals and a person murdered and beheaded before him in order to test the skill of the magician, but other Egyptologists have

pointed out that the story is trying to portray Khufu as an inquisitive ruler, curious about magic and possible religious powers. Another artefact which has survived to shed light on Khufu is the Khufu Statuette. This is a remarkable survival. It is a very small ivory statue depicting Khufu and purportedly dating to the middle of the third millennium BC, though many prominent Egyptologists have expressed scepticism that it dates to Khufu’s own time. It shows the pharaoh seated on a throne and wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt. We know it is meant to depict the pharaoh as

a cartouche on the side of the statue gives his name as ‘Khnum-Khufu’, the god-name of the king. Found in 1903 by Sir Flinders Petrie, a British archaeologist who pioneered many modern methods of rigorous archaeology, it is housed today in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Beyond this material culture, we have numerous works from antiquity which discuss Khufu and his reign, though even these are set at a significant remove away from the pharaoh’s own time. One such writer was Manetho, an Egyptian priest and scholar of the third century BC who composed a major study of the pharaohs

of Egypt entitled the Aegyptica or History of Egypt. His writings have only survived in fragmentary form, but one section addresses Khufu, whom he called Suphis I. We know that he was referring to Khufu as he listed him as being the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, which Khufu indeed was. In general Manetho’s account is hard to take at face value. While Khufu did reign for several decades, Manetho claimed he did so for 63 years, far too long to match with the archaeological record or the other extant king lists. He does state that Khufu, quote, “reared

the Great Pyramid.” Intriguingly, Manetho claimed that the pharaoh was contemptuous of the gods early on in his reign, but that he then made amends for his actions by composing a “Sacred Book”. Egyptologists generally doubt this assertion, as Egyptian kings were not known to write books of any kind generally and certainly not so early in Egyptian history, but one wonders what tradition Manetho was drawing on in stating this about Khufu. Manetho cited a Greek writer of the fifth century BC in his short passage on Khufu, noting that Herodotus, the ‘father of history’ famous for authoring the

Histories, an account of the rise of the Persian Empire and the Persian invasions of Greece in the early fifth century BC, referred to a pharaoh called Cheops as being the builder of the Great Pyramid. Manetho did not realise that Cheops was the Greek name for Khufu. The first half of Herodotus’s Histories is actually a mix of geography, anthropology and fantastical stories which describe the known world at that time and the people in it. In the midst of this Herodotus turns to consider Khufu, claiming that he had been informed by the priests of Egypt that the

country had been well-governed until the reign of Khufu, who then, quote, “brought the people to utter misery”, by shutting “up all the temples, so that none could sacrifice there; and next, he compelled all the Egyptians to work for him, appointing some to drag stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile.” He went on to suggest that such was Khufu’s love of money and power that he had even prostituted one of his daughters to make money from her, though we can probably discount Herodotus’s claim that each of the stones used in the Great

Pyramid of Cheops was donated by one of her customers. Herodotus’s account needs to be taken with a healthy degree of scepticism, given how fantastical some of the material in his Histories was, but it is interesting that he claimed he had learned all of this from the priests of Egypt who passed on these traditions and knowledge from generation to generation. Herodotus was not alone in portraying Khufu in this manner. In the first century BC a Greek historian from Sicily, Diodorus Siculus, composed an enormous history of the world called the Bibliotheca Historica, the Library of History. Only

fifteen of the forty books into which this was divided have survived, but amongst those that we still have today was a section on Khufu. Referring to his as ‘Chemmis’, a derivation of the Greek Cheops, he notes that he built the largest of the three great pyramids at Giza, a complex which Diodorus noted was already considered one of the seven wonders of the world at that time. Diodorus marvelled at how the pyramids could have been built without any evidence being left behind of the construction work. Yet he concurred with Herodotus that Khufu was a tyrant who

had committed what he termed “many cruel and violent acts” and under whom the Egyptians suffered many hardships. It should be noted in saying this that both Herodotus and Diodorus were deeply confused about the dating of Khufu’s reign, claiming it came after the Ramesside period of Egyptian history during which a long succession of pharaohs generally all called Ramesses ruled. This Ramesside era occurred in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC, nearly a millennia and half after Khufu’s time, so both Herodotus and Diodorus were completely wrong in this, though Diodorus did note that another tradition held that the

pyramids had been built over 3,000 years earlier, a dating which was much more accurate. While each of these ancient accounts need to be treated with caution, it is interesting that there was a unanimous sense, whether in the writings of Herodotus, Manetho or Diodorus, that Khufu had been an oppressive tyrant. This alleged tyranny was all connected to the foremost accomplishment of Khufu’s reign, the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. At the time of his birth, the building of pyramids to act as tombs for deceased pharaohs had been underway for about a century. The first pharaoh

to do so was Pharaoh Djoser of the Third Dynasty when he had the Step Pyramid built at Saqqara to the south of modern-day Cairo. This stood over sixty metres high and was built in six large tiers. Were it not for what followed it, it would be considered an enormous achievement for an ancient civilization, but it would soon be dwarfed by more impressive pyramids. Sneferu, who is believed to have been Khufu’s father and the founder of the Fourth Dynasty was responsible for building three pyramids during his long reign which foreshadowed the work of Khufu. These were

the Pyramid of Meidum, the Red Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid. Of these the Red Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid are the most elaborate, both reaching over 100 metres in height. The Red Pyramid was the most sophisticated pyramid built in Egypt up to that time, being a ‘true’ pyramid in terms of its mathematical proportions, although the Bent Pyramid has a point of interest in terms of its unusual shape and in that it is the only pyramid extant in Egypt today that retains a substantial amount of its limestone casing. Not all pyramids from early on in the

Old Kingdom era were as accomplished. Some were rough mounds and some collapsed either during the reigns of their rulers or not long after, indicating that by the time Khufu came to the throne there had been an extended period of trial and error when it came to pyramid construction, which he was the beneficiary of. Sneferu was clearly obsessive about pyramid construction, not just in that he was responsible for ordering the construction of several pyramids, but also because he moved on to build new ones, always in search of a more anatomically sophisticated structure. If Khufu was his

son, it is interesting to speculate that he inherited his interest in pyramids from his father, perhaps visiting the site of the Bent and Red Pyramid as they were under construction on the Dahshur Necropolis during his childhood. It was not far away where Khufu elected to begin building a new complex on the Giza Plateau, a necropolis which towers over the River Nile valley below and which would have made the pyramid he chose to build here look particularly imposing in ancient times. Khufu’s pyramid would also dwarf his father’s. The Great Pyramid stood over 146 metres high when

it was built, while the structure was a perfect square on the base, measuring 230 metres on each side. To put that in perspective, it is about two and a half times longer than the average modern football field and five times wider. The sheer amount of material used to build Khufu’s Great Pyramid was staggering. It has been estimated that the core of the pyramid consisted of 2.3 million blocks, many measuring well over a metre on the sides and weighing an average of about 2.5 tons per block. That means that over six million tons of stone needed

to be quarried, cut and moved into position, although the process was made slightly easier by the fact that the stones were not uniform in size or smoothly finished. Instead they were fitted together as well as they could be and mortar was used to bind them thereafter. Much of the material involved was limestone which was cut out of quarries near the Giza Plateau itself, however some of the stone was brought vast distances to Giza. 8,000 tons of granite, for instance, was used in certain sections of the pyramid and this type of rock was not available near

Giza or the capital Men-Nefer nearby. Thus, 8,000 tons of granite blocks were quarried at Aswan way up the River Nile in what is now southern Egypt and transported north over 850 kilometres to Giza. The stones involved were then assembled into 216 different layers of blocks averaging two-thirds of a metre in height each. Given the enormous amount of blocks involved, the sheer weight of the construction materials, and the labour which was needed to build this colossal monument, how was such a construction project achieved, and who performed the building process itself? This is a question that has

fascinated Egyptologists and anyone with an interest in ancient Egypt for centuries. Because of the sheer manpower involved and the apparent drudgery of the labour, a common misconception which emerged centuries ago and which still holds some sway today, is that the pyramids were built by a small army of slaves. Whilst an understandable conclusion to reach, the archaeological evidence, which includes a workers’ village uncovered in the Giza area to the southeast of the Great Pyramid itself back in the late 1980s, points towards the builders of the pyramids being paid labourers who actually lived reasonably well, with the

average worker eating considerably better than others in Egyptian society at the time. Their protein intake was certainly higher. As to how many labourers were involved, it is hard to tell, as seasonal workers may have been drafted in at certain times. Diodorus Siculus argued that 360,000 workers were involved. Herodotus claimed that 100,000 were employed in shifts of three months at a time. While these are suppositions made two millennia after Khufu’s own time, there is no doubt that the pharaoh was footing the bill for at least tens of thousands of workers to erect his pyramid. It is

the only way that a monument this size could have been built given the technology available at the time. In recent decades, more scientific approaches to determining the size of the workforce involved have been utilised, specifically by actually having people use the tools that were available at the time and to try and cut out the sort of two and half ton limestone blocks that make up the majority of the Great Pyramid. This approach was aided enormously by the discovery back in the mid-2010s of a complete quarried block and some ancient tools in a limestone quarry dating

to Khufu’s reign. Using precise replicas of these tools, a team determined that it would take four workers three 8 hour days to quarry and carve out one of these two and a half ton blocks. However, if they employed water to wet the stone, the process could be accelerated significantly, though it is doubtful that the kind of water necessary to do so could have been made available. All in all, the team determined that a labour force of 3,500 workers on site at this quarry would have been able to produce 250 blocks every day. Double this number

to 7,000 workers producing 500 blocks per day and it would have taken about 13 years to produce all the blocks needed for the Great Pyramid. This is an entirely feasible analysis, though clearly if you had 7,000 men working on quarrying and stone-cutting alone, this would only constitute a proportion of the entire workforce, as others would be needed to transport the stones from the quarries to Giza and to work at the pyramid site itself, while others still would be working in an ancillary capacity producing tools, transporting food and water for the workers, and so on and

so forth. A study which has just appeared in 2024 has added a further piece of evidence to explain how the pyramids were built on the Giza Plateau. This revealed that a 64-kilometre branch of the River Nile, known as the Ahramat Nile Branch, one which dried up several thousand years ago and was buried under farmland, once flowed from the main River Nile to Giza, allowing workers to transport the blocks by river to close to the building site. It was an enormous operation no matter how you look at it, but achievable. Incredibly, a diary of sorts kept

by an overseer of some of the workmen, a man named Merer, has survived. Merer was a mid-ranking official who was responsible for a team of workmen operating at the Tura quarries where limestone blocks were being quarried and cut to the southeast of Giza. His diary itemises the cutting of blocks and the teams involved in working on the pyramid, or what was described by Merer as Akhet-Khufu, meaning ‘The Horizon of Khufu’. Further details outline transportation of the blocks by boat and the cost of food and other materials. Not all of the Diary of Merer, which was

found buried near a cave at the Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast of Egypt in 2013, and which is written in hieroglyphs, constituting the oldest papyrus text to have survived in the world, have been deciphered yet, and it might reveal more about the construction of the Great Pyramid in due course. Some of the issues concerning the construction of the pyramids have been a source of unending debate, notably where the stones came from and how they were lifted into place. Diodorus commented on this in his Bibliotheca. He noted that many people were of the view

that the stones that were used to build the pyramid had been dragged all the way from Arabia, while they had been lifted into place using enormous ramps, as cranes of any kind which might be able to lift such enormous blocks had not yet been invented. We know that for the most part the stones involved were actually quarried in the wider Giza region and were not brought from afar, although the granite blocks used were transported considerable distances. The issue of how the blocks were raised is much more contentious. Many scholars contend that a ramp of some

kind was used, along which the labourers dragged the stones at an elevation, however in order for it to be possible to drag stones which weighed two and a half tons, particularly to the higher sections of the pyramid, the ramp would have had to have been around a mile long and would have been larger in size than the pyramid itself. Furthermore, space is limited on the Giza Plateau, a necropolis with a fairly sheer cliff face. As such, it would have been difficult to build such a ramp here. Egyptologists still cannot agree on how the Great Pyramid

was actually constructed, with new theories emerging in recent decades to suggest water power was employed to move the stones. One of the more interesting accounts of the building of the pyramids comes from Herodotus. He claimed that Khufu first had great roads constructed all the way from Arabia to Egypt, and then the quarried rock was brought overland, with some transported by sea. He further claimed that the work was seasonal, with 100,000 men working at any given time in rotating shifts of three months, a system which suggests a perception that these were not slaves. The Greek historian

claimed the road alone took ten years to build and describes it in such a way as to suggest that the remains of the road were still visible in his time two millennia after Khufu’s reign. Turning to the Great Pyramid itself, Herodotus was knowledgeable enough to know that there were underground chambers in it. His belief was that the pyramid took twenty years to build and that the stone slabs were lifted up from tier to tier using giant wooden logs which he referred to as ‘levers’. Finally, in Herodotus’s time there were still hieroglyphics on the outside which

spoke about the range of foodstuffs that were necessary to feed the workmen, with an Egyptian interpreter telling Herodotus that 1600 talents of silver had been spent on feeding the workers alone. An Attic talent at Herodotus’s time of writing weighed just over 25 kgs, so this would suggest that 40 tons of silver were needed to buy all the food which fed the workmen who built the Great Pyramid before other construction costs were ever taken into account. The most striking element of all of this is that any of it happened at all. Given the sheer amount of

labour involved and the secondary labour needed to supply the workers with food, tools and other resources, a substantial proportion of Egyptian society was effectively co-opted into building an enormous tomb for one man. The explanation for this is that many Egyptians by the Fourth Dynasty were used to viewing kings like Khufu as semi-divine beings. The Egyptian religious system was already geared around identifying members of the royal family as being earthly manifestations of the gods, hence Khufu’s broader name Khnum-Khufu. It was this idealisation of the pharaohs as being the gods in human form that allowed a society

like Old Kingdom Egypt to dedicate the resources necessary to construct such an enormous monument. In doing so, the idea of the kings as celestial beings became self-fulfilling. Imagine the impression it must have made on individuals in the mid-third millennium BC when they travelled to the capital Men-Nefer and saw Khufu’s enormous pyramid tomb towering over the River Nile on top of the Giza Plateau. It is still an awe-inspiring spectacle today, in an age of skyscrapers and space travel. To a person over four and a half millennia ago it would have reinforced the perception of the king

as a divine being. This view was attested to in antiquity, with Diodorus noting of the blocks used that they, quote, “do not have the appearance of being the slow handiwork of men but look like a sudden creation, as though they had been made by some god and set down bodily in the surrounding sand.” Khufu did not simply order the construction of an enormous pyramid of blocks on top of the Giza Plateau. There is a highly complex series of shafts, chambers and tunnels inside the Great Pyramid. These are accessed through an entrance that was left in

the exterior roughly 17 metres above the base of the pyramid. This then leads off into other passageways and chambers, some of which are extremely narrow and the exact purpose or symbolism of which are still intensely debated. One is the Subterranean Chamber which was actually cut down into the bedrock below the pyramid, so that it now is over 25 metres below the base of the Great Pyramid. It is an extensive chamber, measuring over eight metres by 14 metres, with a large pit. What the purpose of it was meant to be is unclear, though one theory is

that Khufu had originally intended for this to be his burial chamber, but later changed his mind and ordered the incorporation of a chamber for his sarcophagus and grave goods much higher up within the pyramid proper. Another room much further up is the Queen’s Chamber, a somewhat misleading title as it is not at all clear if it was intended that one of Khufu’s wives would be interred here. One of the more mysterious elements of the Queen’s Chamber are a series of very small shafts running out from it, ones which cannot be entered or explored by humans

and which have only begun to reveal their secrets as a result of the use of modern technology in recent years. The most widely discussed part of the interior of the Great Pyramid is the King’s Chamber and the passages and rooms surrounding it. This was a room measuring roughly ten and a half metres by five metres, with a flat ceiling six metres high. It is found roughly a third of the way up the pyramid, the base of the King’s Chamber lying around 46 metres above the base of the pyramid itself. The construction of the chamber is

fascinating. The roof is made out of nine enormous granite blocks which were brought all the way from Aswan in southern Egypt and which weigh between 25 and 80 tons. The process of trying to get 80 ton blocks some sixty metres up to near the midway point of the Pyramid and then lowering them down onto the roof of the King’s Chamber was one of the engineering marvels of history. Unfortunately, though, the splendour of the King’s Chamber is otherwise lost to us. Despite the inclusion of an Antechamber which was designed to fend off would-be robbers, when the

King’s Chamber was re-opened in modern times, everything except a granite sarcophagus that would have once housed Khufu’s remains, had long since been pilfered by thieves, and the sarcophagus itself was broken. The riches of this chamber in antiquity must have been immense, when we consider that Khufu was a great ruler at the height of the Old Kingdom, whereas the only intact pharaonic tomb that has ever been found, that of the New Kingdom ruler Tutankhamun, contained immense wealth in the burial chamber of a relatively minor king. From the King’s Chamber there are further chambers and passages. These

include the Star Shafts, two narrow ducts which run all the way from the King’s Chamber to the exterior of the Great Pyramid. They run upwards at angles and point into the sky and the stars at night. The purpose of them is contentious. One theory suggests that the south shaft may have pointed towards the star constellation Orion’s Belt in ancient times. Other Egyptologists have proposed more pedestrian explanations, claiming that these were just air ventilation shafts used so that workers could breathe while working on the chambers during the construction period. However, there are no such Star Shafts

on any other Old Kingdom pyramids and so this theory seems unlikely. The most plausible explanation is that the shafts, of which two more flow outwards from the Queen’s Chamber, were designed to point towards stars and constellations which Khufu and the Old Kingdom Egyptians considered to be particularly important in their cosmology, notably Orion’s Belt, Sirius or the ‘Dog Star’, and Alpha Draconis, the latter of which would have been close to the north celestial pole in the middle of the third millennium BC. A visitor to Giza today is presented with a sight which is quite different to

what Khufu would have beheld when he arrived on the Plateau to view his pyramid when work was completed in the twenty-sixth century BC. Today one sees the layers of limestone blocks exposed and a rather flat top to the pyramid, but the original finish was much different. For starters the entire outside of the pyramid was encased in white limestone which was then finished by workmen to give the entire pyramid a smooth, polished finish. At the very peak there would have stood a pyramidion, a capstone that gave the whole pyramid a pointed top and which would have

made an impressive finish to it, one that glittered in the warm Sahara Sun. This pyramidion, contrary to popular belief, would not have been made of gold or electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, nor was it gilded by putting gold casing around the outside of the pyramidion. In later times, some pyramidions were produced in Egypt which were gilded, but in the Fourth Dynasty the pyramidions were generally made from smooth limestone or some other well-worked and polished stone. We know this because while the pyramidion from Khufu’s Great Pyramid has long since been lost, several

others from Fourth Dynasty pyramids are extant and they were not made of gold. When the pyramidion from Khufu’s Great Pyramid was lost is unclear, but Pliny the Elder, the Roman encyclopaedist of the first century AD, noted that it was gone by his time. The limestone casing collapsed off of the Great Pyramid owing to natural disasters such as the 1303 Great Earthquake of Crete and was carried away and reused to build mosques and other buildings in Cairo over the centuries. Estimates vary as to how long it took for the Great Pyramid to be constructed, but a

conservative estimate is around twenty years, though others suggest that the incomplete nature of some of the inner chambers suggest that it was still not fully complete when Khufu died some time in or around 2565 BC. We can assume that he was buried in great splendour with a mass of gold and bejewelled funerary goods, while after elaborate religious ceremonies his mummified body was placed in the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber. However, everything, including his mummy, was pilfered at some point in antiquity or during the medieval era. Another tradition holds that Khufu was not interred at all

in the great pyramid which he had employed such great resources on the construction of. Diodorus Siculus stated that Khufu was so loathed at the end of his reign for his tyrannous rule that he enjoined his family to bury him instead in an unmarked grave, as the people in their anger would enter his tomb and defile his mummy if he was laid to rest in the Great Pyramid. This is highly implausible, given that the passages and entry-points would have been sealed up after the interment of a pharaoh within them and it was only by burrowing a

large tunnel, now referred to as the Robber’s Tunnel, that people in centuries gone by were able to enter the King’s Chamber and pilfer it. Khufu seems to have been succeeded by his son Djedefre, though it is also possible that he only co-ruled with his father for a time and died before Khufu himself. Regardless of whether he ruled on his own briefly after his father died, the various king lists which have survived agree that Djedefre’s rule was brief and he was eventually succeeded by another of Khufu’s sons, Khafre. Khafre ruled for a long time, like his

father, and he also emulated Khufu in erecting a great pyramid on the Giza Plateau. His is the second largest of the three great pyramids, standing just in the shadow of his father’s tomb, while the consensus today amongst Egyptologists is that Khafre was responsible for erecting the Sphinx here as well, with the head of the half-man, half-lion statue being an image of Khufu’s son. A son of Khafre’s, Menkaure, would later add the third and last of the three great pyramids there. The other, smaller pyramids are those of Egyptian queens, while further excavation work in modern times

has revealed that there were hundreds of other stone and brick mastaba tombs built at Giza to house the remains of the extended royal families of the Old Kingdom and senior priests and government officials. Not long after Menkaure’s death around 2500 BC, the Fourth Dynasty came to an end, perhaps following the death of a son, Shepseskaf, who ruled as pharaoh down to around 2496 BC. The Fifth Dynasty followed thereafter as a new imperial family rose to rule in Egypt. The Fourth Dynasty is generally deemed to have been the peak of Old Kingdom Egypt, although the Old

Kingdom continued down to beyond 2200 BC when civil war split Upper and Lower Egypt, leading to a century and a half long era of decline known as the First Intermediate Period. The Great Pyramid of Khufu captured the imagination of writers and travellers even in ancient times, as the discussion of it by figures like Manetho, Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus indicates. There were many other writers who discussed it, though without mentioning anything about its alleged builder. For instance, Pliny the Elder, a Roman encyclopaedist of the first century AD, in his Historia Naturalis, remarked on the internal passages

and how he believed there was a well inside the pyramid which reached down far enough to access the water table of the River Nile. He also stated that Thales, one of the great early Greek philosophers and scientists, who hailed from the city of Miletus in Asia Minor in the sixth century BC, had travelled to Egypt and had carried out mathematical observations there using the shadows cast by the sun on the pyramid, almost as though it were a giant sundial. Before Pliny’s time, the Greek poet, Antipater of Sidon, writing in the early first century BC, included

the Great Pyramid in his list of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Seven Wonders are generally derived from Antipater’s list and it included the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus and the others that we are familiar with. All of the other six Wonders of the World were destroyed at various times in antiquity or thereafter. The exception was the Great Pyramid. Part of the reason why it was so undisturbed was that there were few major wars in Egypt itself in antiquity and there was an incredible continuity of culture in the land of the

Nile between Khufu’s time down to the end of the Ptolemaic Dynasty and the beginning of Roman rule here in the first century BC. As such, the people and priests here revered the old tombs, pyramids and temples century after century and protected them. This situation changed with the advent of Arab rule in the seventh century as the followers of Muhammad burst out of Arabia and conquered the Middle East and North Africa. One of the rulers of the Arab Caliphate, al-Ma’mun, is understood to have ordered his followers to blow a hole in the side of Khufu’s pyramid

and to tunnel into it in the early ninth century. At least al-Ma’mun was simply inquisitive. Much more nefarious were the actions of the governor of Egypt in the late twelfth century, al-Aziz Uthman, a son of the Muslim warlord Saladin. Uthman decided that he would destroy the pyramids in a fit of iconoclastic religiosity which aimed to get rid of these false idols. Fortunately his engineers failed to do so and only succeeded in damaging the pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the three pyramids on the Giza Plateau. In more recent times natural disasters have been more troublesome.

In 1303, the Great Earthquake caused such devastation that it cracked and knocked off a large amount of the marble casing around the pyramid, an event which incidentally did much to destroy one of the other remaining wonders of the world as well, the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Despite a common misperception that they badly damaged the pyramids and the Sphinx on the Giza Plateau during their expedition to the country under Napoleon Bonaparte at the end of the eighteenth century, there is no concrete evidence to suggest the French damaged anything at the Giza complex. What they did do was

initiate the modern discipline of Egyptology, which over time has led to preservation work being undertaken extensively at Giza. Unfortunately, though, the site is still susceptible to natural disasters and another earthquake in 1992, the epicentre of which was in the suburbs of Cairo, damaged the Great Pyramid, causing it to shrink by several feet as blocks caved in internally. Given the level of interest in Khufu’s tomb over the four and half millennia since it was built, one would think that it had revealed all of its secrets long ago. But this certainly isn’t the case. The Great Pyramid

was built in such a way that passages and shafts were covered up by subsequent layers and made inaccessible for humans. As such, parts of it simply cannot be accessed unless one were to systematically dismantle the pyramid. Therefore Egyptologists are still working today to try to uncover all of its secrets and to determine what the purpose of the shafts and tunnels inside it were and how the whole thing was built. New scientific methods, for instance by using small robots and cameras to investigate parts of the pyramid which simply cannot be accessed by humans, are being employed

all the time and are throwing up new discoveries. As recently as March 2023, a new 30-foot long corridor was revealed using infra-red thermography and other technologies. Khufu’s mysterious tomb continues to fascinate in the early third millennium AD. As the foregoing has outlined, there is far more about the Pharaoh Khufu that we don’t know than what we do know. From the king lists and other ancient sources it is clear that he ruled Egypt as part of the Fourth Dynasty around 2600 BC, while there is also no disputing that he was responsible for building the greatest of

the pyramids on the Giza Plateau as his tomb. But beyond this, very little else can be said about him with certainty. He was evidently one of the strongest rulers of Old Kingdom Egypt, expanding the kingdom’s control further into the Sinai Peninsula and towards the Red Sea. Other issues are more speculative. Perhaps he was a ruler who had little respect for the gods and who tyrannized his people into building him his great tomb, much as later Greek writers claimed, but it is just as plausible that these are elaborate myths that developed in the centuries between Khufu’s

time and that of Herodotus and others. Then again, perhaps it is just as fitting that we know so little about Khufu, the mystery of his life correlating with the many mysteries of the pyramid which he had built and which still towers over Cairo today, a testament to the dawn of civilization on the banks of the River Nile. What do you think of Pharaoh Khufu? How is it possible that during his reign, a society that had only so recently emerged as a Bronze Age culture could start to build an enormous monument such as the Great Pyramid

of Giza? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.