Great Pyramid

Colossus

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Zeus

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The Pyramids of Giza are located outside Cairo, Egypt. They were old before the other six wonders were even built.

The tradition of monumental tombs for Pharaohs began with the step pyramid of Zoser, which gave the impression of a stone hill 197 feet high. Later pharaohs wanted bigger, more impressive tombs.

The largest is the Great Pyramid of Kufu , built for King Kufu about 2590-2570 B.C. by his engineer, Imhotep. The Great Pyramid was about 482 feet high, on a base measuring 755 square feet. The interior of the pyramid was almost solid, with gangways and burial chambers. Some of the chambers were empty, serving as decoys for thieves.

The Great Pyramid's base area would allow enough parking space for ten jumbo jets, and it is as high as three space shuttles stacked on top of each other, nose to tail. From its huge base it comes to a point 4 inches wide which was gold plated and glittered in the sun. The pyramid is made from more than two-million stone blocks, each of them twice the weight of an average car. If the pyramid was hollow, it would easily hold the Houses of Parliament and St. Paul's Cathedral from London, or the Pentagon and the Capital from Washington D.C. If the stones were broken up and made into a wall 1 feet wide and 3 feet high, it would stretch all the way around France.

It is the main building in a town of the dead near Giza. The Greeks sometimes called it the Cheops Pyramid. Around it are remains of more than eighty other pyramids, as well as temples, tombs, altars and ceremonial roadways. Behind the pyramids is the Sphinx, a stone lion with a bearded, human face.

The whole place, pyramids, roads, temples, Sphinx, is almost always being scoured by desert sand, which has pitted and scarred the surface of the stone.

Even today with dynamite to blast the rocks and cranes and bulldozers to move them, it would take years of effort to build such an enormous pile. The Egyptians made do with muscle and brains. To get the stone, they chiseled holes in sandstone cliffs, then hammered wooden wedges into them and soaked the wedges with water. When the wood swelled, it split the stone. When each two to three-ton block was ready, they raised it with levers on a huge wooden sledge, and harnessed a team of men to it. About a hundred men pulled, while ten more lubricated the sledge-runners. They hauled the stone to the Nile River, floated it on rafts down-river to the building site at Giza, pulled it up sloping earth ramps and fitted it in place.

When the basic pyramid was finished, the builders faced it with smooth stones to make it smooth and flat (the stones were later removed to use on other buildings.) Inside, passageways led to a burial chamber about the size of a modern house. Its walls were polished pink granite and inside was a sarcophagus (coffin-box) carved so perfectly from a single stone that if you hit it it would make the sound of a bell.

The Ancient Egyptians believed that a human being had two different parts, a body and a spirit. They thought that the spirit world was just like the body world and the spirit needed clothes, food, furniture, money, and even games and toys. The Egyptians believed that the spirit's home was it's body, and they tried to preserve the body as long as possible after the death. Funeral priests began by removing all soft parts, brain, lungs, heart, liver, intestines, and pickling them in gigantic clay jars. They packed the rest of the body with preserving salts and wrapped it tightly in bandages. They laid the mummy to rest in a tomb with all of it's food, clothing, and anything else it needed in the spirit world.

At the king's funeral, his body was brought down river on a royal barge, carried to the pyramid, down the passageway and into the chamber, where he was laid to rest with all of the belongings he would need in the afterlife. The doorway was plugged with a stone, and a curse was placed on anyone who broke it down. The priests and mourners left, and the builders stayed and hid the entrance and then left leaving King Kufu's body and spirit to enjoy the afterlife in peace.

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