Every known Egyptian pyramid, from the 3rd Dynasty to the 18th
Every pyramid, at one scale
All 149 entries on the lists of Egyptian pyramids, a few of them tombs of other shapes, set out on one plain in order of date, each at the size it was built or begun, from Djoser's Step Pyramid to Ahmose's at Abydos. Scroll to walk the line, or open Explore to set any of them side by side.
Sizes from the German and English Wikipedia lists, checked against the articles, Lehner's The Complete Pyramids and the excavation reports; a small marker stands where no size is on file. Levels are metres from each pyramid's own base.
Scroll to walk the line
One row for each period
West to east runs from earlier to later, with a band of rows for each period: the 3rd Dynasty nearest, then the 4th, 5th and 6th, the First Intermediate Period, the 11th and 12th, the 13th, and the 17th and 18th furthest away. A period with many pyramids wraps onto further rows.
Most of the small ones are queens' pyramids and the cult pyramids that stood beside a king's. The 6th Dynasty's 28 entries include 4 kings' pyramids; the 11th and 12th Dynasties' 31 include 17 queens'.
Each colour is a way of making the burial rooms; chapter V comes back to them.
The giants of the 4th Dynasty
Sneferu built three pyramids: Meidum, 144 m a side and perhaps begun for Huni, the Bent Pyramid, 189 m, and the Red Pyramid, 220 m. Khufu's is the largest of all, 230 m a side and 147 m high, and Khafre's is nearly as large, 215 m and 143.5 m.
Radjedef's at Abu Rawash, 106 m, and Menkaure's, 102 m, are under half as wide as Khufu's and hold about a tenth of its volume. The Great Pit at Zawyet el-Aryan, about 204 m if the row of blocks round it marks a pyramid, was never built over.
One size for nearly three centuries
From Sahure on, most kings of the 5th and 6th Dynasties built to one size. Sahure's, Niuserre's, Djedkare-Isesi's, Teti's, Pepi I's, Merenre's and Pepi II's pyramids measure 78.5 to 78.8 m a side, 150 cubits, and those whose height is known rose 47 to 52.5 m. Neferirkare's, 105 m, is larger and Unas's, 58 m, smaller.
Most of the 6th Dynasty queens' pyramids are 21 to 24 m a side.
The Middle Kingdom
The kings of the 12th Dynasty built large again. Senusret I's pyramid at Lisht, Senusret II's at Lahun, Senusret III's and Amenemhat III's first pyramid at Dahshur, and Amenemhat III's second at Hawara each measure about 102 to 106 m a side; Arnold gives Senusret I's as 200 cubits, 105 m. Amenemhat I's, the first of them, is 84 m.
Beyond them, the 13th Dynasty pyramids whose size is known are mostly about 52 to 55 m a side, and most were never finished.
How the burial rooms were made
Gold: built in a trench cut down from the surface and left open to the sky, then roofed, filled and covered by the pyramid. 49 pyramids, 26 on a source's statement and 23 by inference.
Blue: cut into the rock with rock left over them, 26. Cream: built in the pyramid's masonry, 4: Meidum, the Red Pyramid, Khufu's and the Bent Pyramid's satellite. Pink: at the foot of a shaft, 3: Djoser's, Iput I's and Amenemhat I's. Grey: not known, 58, and 9 where no burial room has been found.
Lauer dates the open trench as the usual method from Userkaf on. Where a classification is inferred, its callout says so.
Construction access could differ from the final entrance. At Senusret III, Arnold reconstructs a large pit approached from the south, later filled above the finished rooms, and a separate northern shaft for the sarcophagus. The narrow western entrance was another route. At Behenu, red setting-out lines survive on the backing walls, showing how the builders positioned the chamber lining.
Only the open trenches
Kept alone, they run from the satellite pyramid at Meidum to the 13th Dynasty. 29 of the 49 belong to the 5th and 6th Dynasties, kings' and queens' alike.
The largest are Khafre's and the Bent Pyramid's. Both classifications are inferred. Maragioglio and Rinaldi explicitly argue for a pit beneath the Bent Pyramid's lower chamber, but do not supply a surveyed pit outline.
Nine cuts side by side
Nine of them have a cut whose length, width and depth are on record, pulled together here without their pyramids. The Great Pit at Zawyet el-Aryan is the deepest, 21 m to its granite paving. Radjedef's at Abu Rawash comes next, its floor 15.8 m below the pyramid's base.
Senusret III's at Dahshur is a lower bound: Arnold puts its pit at least 17 × 6.5 m, and its floor is taken at the crypt's, about 12.6 m down (derived). The other six, from Djedkare-Isesi's to the 13th Dynasty's DAS 53, go down 4 to 11 m.
149 pyramids at one scale. Pick any of them and set them side by side.
What is not on file
- A base for 26 entries and a height for 64, mostly unexcavated 13th Dynasty pyramids and those known only from texts.
- The burial room's floor level for all but 29, and several of those are measured from a court or the surface rather than the pyramid's base.
- How the rooms were made for 58; and 23 open-trench classifications still depend on inference, including excavators’ reconstructions from surviving masonry and fill.
Sources
- Liste der ägyptischen Pyramiden and List of Egyptian pyramids, Wikipedia, as of October 2026, with the articles on each pyramid.
- M. Lehner, The Complete Pyramids, 1997.
- V. Maragioglio and C. Rinaldi, L'architettura delle piramidi menfite, 1962–1967; G. Jéquier's reports from South Saqqara, 1928–1940; M. Verner, Abusir III, 1995.
- D. Arnold, The Pyramid of Senwosret I, 1988; J. de Morgan, Fouilles à Dahchour en 1894–1895, 1903; E. Mackay in W. M. F. Petrie, G. A. Wainwright and E. Mackay, The Labyrinth, Gerzeh and Mazghuneh, 1912.
- W. M. F. Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, 1883, and Kahun, Gurob and Hawara, 1890.
- D. Arnold, The Pyramid Complex of Senwosret III at Dahshur, 2002, pp. 26–27, 34–39; P. Collombert, Découvertes récentes à Saqqâra, 2011, pp. 924, 931–933.
The catalogue behind the line, with every disagreement between the lists, is in the project's repository (abu-rawash/report/drafts/pyramid-catalogue/), with the study of which pyramids were built in an open trench.
The pyramid of Radjedef, or Djedefre, at Abu Rawash, 4th Dynasty
Was it ever finished?
Nothing above about 12 m survives, and the people who have dug and surveyed it disagree on whether it ever stood higher. What is left is a hill of rock with a hole in it, 21 m deep. Scroll down through the rock to see what that hole says, and what it leaves open.
Every model here is drawn to scale, from measured sections where they exist and from the excavators' reconstructions where they do not; each callout says which. Levels are metres from the pyramid's own base.
Scroll to descend
Twelve metres and a pit
The pyramid stands on a limestone spur 159 m above sea level, at the northern end of the Memphite necropolis. Its base measured 106.20 m a side; finished, it would have risen about 67 m. About 12 m stands today, and the natural rock makes up 44% of the volume it would have had.
In its middle is an open pit, 23 m east–west and 10 m north–south, 21 m deep from its rim. A trench 5.50 m wide runs down into it from the north. It has been cleared: of the passage built inside it only the fine limestone courses it was bedded on survive, in places, and the rest went with the tomb's stone (chapter VI). At the north-west corner, courses of the masonry that filled it still stand at the top of the pit and overhang it (chapter VIII).
The figure at the south rim is 1.8 m tall.
Cut along the axis
Slice the hill north to south through the apex and the pit takes its real shape. The rock line, the pit floor and the trench are measured from Valloggia's north–south section, which marks the 160 m level and carries a metre scale.
That 160 m line is the pyramid's base, 0 m on this page. The rock hill rises about 9 m above it. The pit floor lies 15.8 m below it.
Valloggia 2019, ill. 2. The section is measured on the axis only; east and west of it the model holds the same profile, then eases it down to the desert floor.
A room built in the open
The builders cut the pit and the sloping trench down from the top of the hill, then built the burial chamber inside the cut, at the pit's west end. The trench was their way down, not the passage itself. It runs on the pyramid's axis; on Valloggia's plans of 1998 and 1999 the pit's centre lies about 2.7 m west of it, so the passage came down east of the chamber. In the trench they built a passage, of which only the fine limestone courses it rested on survive. Valloggia's 2019 reconstruction makes it granite, about 1.2 m high, level at its foot, where he places portcullises, then rising at about 27° under a corbelled relieving course like the one found at Meidum.
Nothing of the room itself survives. What was seen is its imprint: a rock bench 1.20 m high at the west end and blocks of its limestone envelope against the pit's north and south walls. Valloggia's 2019 reconstruction puts its floor 12.7 m below the base, 3.1 m above the pit floor, and makes it about 5.6 m wide, with walls 4.7 m high and a ridge 7.4 m above the floor, under three courses of paired beams up to 14.9 m above the floor, 2 m above the base. His 1998 proposal drew it narrower, about 3.5 m inside, with its floor about 3 m lower.
Valloggia 2019, ill. 5, measured against its 0–20 m scale bar. His 1998 report gives the pit the chamber was built in as about 5.25 × 7.10 m, long side east–west (BIFAO 98, p. 500); its place at the west end and the trench's on the axis are read off his plans of 1998 and 1999, to about ±0.3 m. Between the passage and the chamber he placed an antechamber, and east of it perhaps a statue niche; neither is drawn. The passage is from ill. 5, where it is marked as reconstruction; its width is not recorded and is drawn 1.05 m. In 2004 Valloggia wrote that nothing showed the corridor was of granite (BSFE 161, p. 17). His 2019 text (p. 116) mentions traces of portcullises at its foot without describing them; in 1998 he wrote that none remained (BIFAO 98, p. 501). The room is drawn open at its east end.
Then buried in masonry
With the chamber roofed, the cut was packed with masonry up to the level of the hill. The pit alone holds about 4,500 m³, the trench about 1,600 m³ more.
The excavators still lifted blocks of over 11 tonnes out of the pit. In the fill lay granite pieces read as roof rafters, one with part of a red sign, and against the pit's walls stand two masses Valloggia took for their abutments. In the north-west corner eight courses of the fill are still bedded against the wall, 7 to 11 m below the base.
Top of the fill reconstructed from the rock line either side of the cut. The blocks are drawn course by course to show the work; their layout is illustrative.
If the pyramid rose
If it was finished, this is what rose over the filled pit: a pyramid 106.2 m a side and about 67 m high, with faces of 52°. Its foot is not in doubt: pink granite casing was laid there on rock beds cut at 12°. How far above it the masonry went is the open question of this site.
On Valloggia's estimate the rock hill would fill 44% of the volume, which leaves about 136,000 to 141,000 m³ to build. Khufu's builders laid twenty times as much stone in one reign.
Radjedef is usually given 7 to 9 years. A date on Khufu's boat-pit blocks, which some scholars give to Radjedef, reads "the year after the 11th count"; Valloggia uses about 25 years.
Taken apart for stone
The pit is open today because its masonry was the easiest stone on the site to take. Valloggia dates the quarrying from the Roman period to the 19th century; Maragioglio and Rinaldi think it began in the New Kingdom.
- Valloggia found cavities cut into the pit floor and handholds cut into the masonry at its corners, which he took for the sockets and guy anchors of Roman cranes.
- Petrie was told in the early 1880s that stone left the site at 300 camel loads a day.
- Petrie also wrote that the pit and passage "were originally lined with fine Mokattam limestone, which, it is said, was stripped out in the time of Mohammed Ali by a mudir".
Whether a whole pyramid went the same way is where the readings part. Maragioglio and Rinaldi found few of the coarse local blocks a core is built of, while the core of the great mastaba west of the pyramid, of the same stone, still stands. Quarrymen who left coarse stone there, they argued, would have left it here too, so at its highest the pyramid probably stood no more than about 12 m, about the height of the ruin today.
Statue fragments lie with Roman pottery and hearths, which dates the smashing of the king's statues to the Roman period. Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1966, vol. V, observation 5, from their survey before the excavation.
Robbed from below
Clearing the foot of the passage in 1997, Valloggia's team found that robbers had been there first. They cut a chimney about 0.85 m across down through the five courses of fine limestone under the corridor, at the south-east end of its level platform, and at rock level dug a gallery about 1.40 m across, first south-west, then north–south along the chamber's entrance. In its floor, on the passage's line, they began a shaft and gave it up 3.10 m down.
They dug through the corridor's foundation courses, which were still in place, so at least that part of the substructure was standing when they came; Valloggia took the chamber for their target. Valloggia linked the first plundering to this tunnel, kept it apart from the Roman quarrying, and thought it might go back to the First Intermediate Period, about 2200–2050 BC. The tunnel also laid bare a block with Radjedef's name painted in red, in place, which confirmed whose pyramid this was; the statues had already named him.
Valloggia, BIFAO 97 (1997), p. 324, and BIFAO 98 (1998), pp. 500–501. The two reports give 0.85 m and 1.40 m, south-west and west; neither gives a length, a height or a level. The route is read off his 1998 plan, and the gallery's height of 1.4 m is drawn, not recorded. The lamp that walks it, its order and its pace are illustrative. He sampled reddened mortar for thermoluminescence dating in 1999; no result has been found. The tunnel shows that the chamber was built and worth breaking into, not that the pyramid above it was finished.
What is still in place
Take the reconstruction away and this is what the excavators found, drawn solid: the pit and its trench, the offset cut round the top of the pit, and the masonry still standing on it. At the north-west corner two courses of large blocks and part of a third stand on that offset, each about 1 m high and laid as headers; on the west side their ends overhang the pit by about 2 m. Along part of the south side one or two courses remain. Low in the same corner, 7 to 11 m below the base, eight courses of the fill are still bedded against the walls.
Valloggia found gypsum mortar under the overhanging ends, which suggested to him that they had been laid on other blocks in the pit, since taken away by quarrymen. Maragioglio and Rinaldi took the courses for the top of the fill, which brought the cut up to the level of the rock round it, and read the overhanging blocks as a corbelled cover that turned the load of the masonry above aside, off the burial apartment; where their own plate cuts through the blocks, the upper course projects less than the lower, the reverse of a corbel. The blocks show how high the fill came. They do not show how much was built above it.
Seen in place: the pit, 23 × 10 m and 21 m deep; the trench and, in places, the fine limestone courses the passage was bedded on; a rock bench 1.20 m high at the chamber's west end and envelope blocks against the pit's walls; the robbers' tunnel; the masonry drawn here. Found loose: granite fragments read as roof beams, one with part of a red sign.
Reconstruction, in gold dashed line: the passage, its granite, its height and its portcullises; the chamber's size, its floor level and its roof of three courses of beams. Valloggia drew these one way in 1998 and another in 2019. On every page of this story the callouts carry the same distinction.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1962, p. 13; 1966, vol. V, p. 16, observations 12 and 13, Tav. 3; Valloggia, BIFAO 95 (1995), p. 548, and BIFAO 97 (1997), p. 325; Genava n.s. 43 (1995), figs 2 and 8; Valloggia 2019, ill. 2 and 5. The extents and levels are measured off their plates; where each block falls is drawn, not recorded, and so is the fill's size in plan. The top of the pit dips west by 6 to 7°, from +4.0 m on the axis to +2.5 m at the west end; on the north side and at the east end the model keeps its own ground, which already lies lower.
The depth was chosen
Only about 5 m of the pit's 21 m runs through the hill above the base. The floor lies about 16 m below the 160 m datum, and about 14 m below the ground outside the casing.
The chamber stood on that floor. The depth was not forced by the hill.
Valloggia's larger section of the passage (ill. 4) gives the same floor, 15.5 m and 16.1 m below the datum. The base on ill. 2 measures about 104 m against his 106.2 m, so the readings hold to about ±1 m.
Or leave the rock in place
Put the rock back, and the same room at the same depth would have had about 9 m of natural rock over its ridge.
Radjedef's builders did not keep it. To make the pit and its trench they removed about 6,100 m³ of rock, built the room in the open, then packed masonry back into the hole.
The volume is measured on this model: Valloggia's axis section carried 23 m east–west for the pit and 5.5 m for the trench, up to the reconstructed rock surface. The next chapter draws one way the room could have been made through intact rock. It was not built.
Tunnel in from the north
A passage with the section of Sahure's corridor, 1.27 m wide and 1.87 m high, could run from the trench mouth to the room's north wall: 37.6 m at 18.6°, removing about 90 m³. The room itself would take about 34 m³ for every metre of its length; over the 7.1 m of the chamber's own pit that is about 240 m³.
It need not be that small while the work goes on. A working tunnel 3 m square, about 340 m³, could bring the blocks down and be lined to a passage afterwards. The room would need a cavity about 7.6 m wide for granite walls and a gabled roof built inside it, some 57 m³ a metre: about 400 m³ over the same 7.1 m, a fifteenth of the open cut. Menkaure's builders worked this way: his rooms are "entirely hewn in the rock", the granite lining of his burial chamber is built in, and its roof blocks came through "a hole … cut from the end of the second chamber, into the top of the lower chamber".
What it asks for is a span. No lined room under rock in this record is wider than Senusret II's, 3.13 m; Menkaure's is 2.62 m. Radjedef's is 5.6 m in Valloggia's 2019 reconstruction, and its cavity would have about 7 m of rock over it, with the roof raised into place from below. The one rock-cut room wider still, Khufu's at 8.28 m, lies under 27 m of rock and was left rough and unfinished. From Radjedef to Pepi II, every room on this page except Menkaure's went into an open pit, including rooms 3 to 3.5 m wide that were no wider than Senusret II's.
Petrie 1883, pp. 19–20 and 39–40. The working tunnel and the cavity are drawn dashed as a sketch: walls 1 m thick, and a roof as thick as Radjedef's beams, 1.8 m. The passage is drawn at 18.6° because it must reach the room's floor at −12.7 m; Valloggia reads the real passage at about 27°.
Between two practices
Radjedef's chamber floor, about 12.7 m below the base, sits between two ways of doing it. Djoser's chamber and Khufu's lower chamber lie 28–30 m down. The 5th and 6th Dynasty kings put theirs at or a few metres below the base: Sahure about 0.2 m above it, Unas 5.4 m and Teti 6.4 m below.
Most finished pyramids built over open pits keep them shallower. The one that comes close is Sneferu's Bent Pyramid, whose lower chamber stands on rock about 15.3 m down; Djoser's chamber is deeper still, at the foot of a shaft 7 m square. The line of rooms near the end sets them all side by side.
Khufu's King's Chamber floor is 43.0 m above his base (Petrie 1883, p. 31). Khafre's and Menkaure's chamber depths were not extracted, so they are not on the rod.
The twin that stopped
The closest match is the Great Pit at Zawyet el-Aryan, laid out the same way: a ramp and stair from the north into an east–west pit, drawn here over Abu Rawash at one scale. Its floor is 25.00 × 11.70 m, its top 28 × 14.5 m; the paving lies 21 m below the rock surface, on a platform of granite and limestone about 4.5 m thick, so the rock is about 25.5 m down.
Zawyet el-Aryan stopped at the floor. It got that platform, of blocks averaging over 8 tonnes, and an oval vat 2.10 × 1.06 m inside cut into one paving block, found sealed and empty, but no chamber walls, no roof and no pyramid; about 4,200 m³ of loose blocks were later thrown in. Abu Rawash went further: granite fragments of the chamber and its roof, one with part of a red sign, fill courses still bedded in the pit, and fill blocks of over 11 tonnes.
Barsanti's reports (ASAE 7, 1906; 8, 1907; 12, 1912), read from the page scans, and Maragioglio and Rinaldi's survey (1967, vol. VI). The Wikipedia articles differ on the size, the depth and the vat. The site lies in a military zone and cannot be checked today.
, drawn at its own place.
Six pyramids at one scale
Four pyramids come closest to Radjedef's in size, with bases between 102 and 107 m: Menkaure's at Giza, Neferirkare's at Abusir, and Senusret I's and II's of the Twelfth Dynasty.
Djoser's step pyramid at Saqqara, 121 × 109 m, is older and larger. It stands with them because its builders also reached the burial chamber from the surface, down a shaft 7 m square and 28 m deep. All six stand in order of date, each on its own base.
Senusret III's pyramid (base about 105 m) is not among the six: its crypt floor, about 12.6 m down (Arnold 2002), was found after this chapter was drawn.
The pit under every apex
Under each apex sits the Abu Rawash pit and room, at the same depth below the base. The gold sheet is the level of its floor, 15.8 m down.
Menkaure's granite burial chamber floor lands half a metre above it, and Senusret II's entrance chamber at the same level. Neither king used an open pit to get there: Menkaure's rooms were tunnelled, and Senusret II's were cut into the rock from shafts.
Djoser's granite chamber lies about 12 m deeper still, at the foot of a shaft only 7 m across.
Laid one over another
Senusret I's builders did use an open trench from the north, as Radjedef's did. His chamber is expected 22 to 25 m down, deeper than the Abu Rawash pit floor; the corridor has been followed down to the groundwater, about 21 m below the base and 9.5 m short of the chamber's expected place under the apex. Neferirkare's corridor stays within a few metres of the base.
Menkaure's burial chamber (about 15.3 m) and Senusret II's antechamber level (about 11.4 m) are derived from recorded lengths and slopes. Explore names the derivation of every room.
Cut in the open
From Userkaf onward, the burial rooms under a pyramid were generally not tunnelled. The builders cut a T-shaped pit into the bedrock: a crossbar for the rooms, and a sloping stem from the north for the corridor.
At Teti's pyramid at Saqqara, Maragioglio and Rinaldi saw the cut rock in the robbers' breach. Scaled from their plan, the crossbar measures about 24 to 26 m by 16 to 18 m, its floor about 10.6 m below the base.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1962, pp. 45–49 and Tav. 7. The plan figures are scaled from the plate, so they are estimates.
Rooms of fine stone, roofed with beams
In the open pit they built the rooms in fine limestone, with granite in the corridor: a burial chamber 7.90 m long, whose sarcophagus still stands at its west end, an antechamber, and east of it a storeroom of three cells, the room often called the serdab.
Over them went limestone beams 2.65 m thick, set on edge in pairs that lean on each other above the rooms, layer on layer. Their feet rest not on the room walls but on rough masonry built against the sides of the pit. Two layers can be seen today; the third is reconstructed, its top about 7.5 m above the base.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1962, pp. 47–49 and Tav. 8. They call the three-cell room a magazzino, a storeroom. The sarcophagus, of grey basalt in their description, is not drawn.
Filled, then buried
The space round the rooms was packed with large rough blocks, the same thickness on every side, and the pyramid went up over all of it: 78.75 m square and about 52.5 m high. Only the corridor stayed open, entered from the court on the north side.
The blocks are drawn course by course to show the work; their layout is illustrative.
Six pits at one scale
These are the pits whose length, width and depth are all on record, in order of date. Solid outlines are measured; dashed ones are scaled from a plate, estimated by the excavator, or a lower bound.
In plan, Radjedef's pit (23 × 10 m) is smaller than Teti's. Its floor, 15.8 m below the base, is deeper than any pit here under a finished pyramid; the next is Hawara's, about 10.9 m. Under the chamber the cut goes deeper still, to about 17.7 m below the base (142.30 m on Valloggia's 1998 section). Only Zawyet el-Aryan, abandoned, goes deeper: 21 m to its paving, about 25.5 m to the rock.
Known only in part: Userkaf's rooms about 10.5 m below the base (scaled from Perring's section), Pepi II's pit at most 6 m deep by the excavator's estimate, the Southern South Saqqara pyramid's 12 m. Neferefre, Khentkaus II, Ibi and Khendjer were also built in open pits, with no full set of dimensions. Explore lists each with its source.
Twenty burial rooms at one scale
The main burial room of seventeen pyramids, and the pit at Zawyet el-Aryan, in order of date from south to north, each at its own level against its own base. Over each stands what covered it.
Rock was left over the burial room in only three: Khufu's rock chamber, never finished, Menkaure's and Senusret II's. Twelve were built in open pits, and ten of those lie under finished pyramids, from Sneferu's Bent Pyramid to Hawara. Radjedef's builders chose the common way.
Each room is turned so that the span its roof crosses faces east. The Bent Pyramid's open excavation is inferred, not seen: its built room stands on rock 15 m down with its vault at the base, but no one has described the cut. Explore gives the size, level and source of every room.
Perhaps the widest gabled room
In Valloggia's 2019 reconstruction Radjedef's room is 5.6 m wide under three layers of gabled beams, its ridge 7.4 m up; his 1998 proposal drew it about 3.5 m wide inside, in a pit 5.25 m across. If the 2019 figure holds, no other gabled room found is as wide: Khufu's “Queen's Chamber” spans 5.23 m, Khafre's burial chamber 4.97 m. Khufu's King's Chamber, 5.24 m, is roofed flat in granite; Sneferu's rooms, 4.18 to 4.96 m, are corbelled. The 5th and 6th Dynasty rooms span 3.1 to 3.45 m.
The span is of the size Khufu's and Khafre's builders roofed, about 7% beyond the widest of them. Such roofs did not always hold: in the King's Chamber "every roof beam was broken across near the South side", and at Sahure nearly every gable beam is broken.
Radjedef's room is Valloggia's reconstruction (2019, ill. 5). Petrie 1883, pp. 23, 27–28, 35; German Wikipedia for Sneferu's rooms and for Sahure, where English Wikipedia says all but two beams are broken.
How deep the open pits went
Radjedef's pit floor lies 15.8 m below his base. Under the finished pyramids of the 5th to 12th Dynasties the open pits stop higher: Hawara's about 10.9 m, Teti's about 10.6 m, Userkaf's about 10.5 m, Djedkare's about 9.5 m.
One finished pyramid has a room nearly as deep: Sneferu's Bent Pyramid. Its lower chamber is a built room standing on rock about 15.3 m below the base, and its corbelled vault rises to about the base, so it must have been built from an excavation open at the top, as Maragioglio and Rinaldi concluded. No one has described that excavation, though, and they left open whether the corridor below it was trenched or tunnelled. Only Zawyet el-Aryan, abandoned, goes deeper, 21 m to its paving. In plan, 23 × 10 m is within the range: Teti's pit was about 25 × 17 m, Djedkare's at least 19.2 × 8.5 m.
Bent Pyramid, seen: the chamber about 15.30 m below the foot of the north face (Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1964, pl. 10), its walls on rock in place (Jéquier 1925, pp. 72–73), its vault at the base (Perring in Vyse 1842, pls. I and IV). Inferred from those levels: the open excavation, which Maragioglio and Rinaldi call certain for the chamber but leave open for the corridor (1964, vol. III, p. 98). The other pits as in "Six pits at one scale".
In line, at the deep end
Set beside the other pyramids, a finished pyramid over Radjedef's open pit would not be out of line. It would sit at the edge in two of four measures.
None of the four rules a finished pyramid out, and none shows that one stood. They ask only whether the pit is of a kind other builders covered.
Still an open question
Nothing above about 12 m survives, so whether a pyramid ever covered this pit is inferred, not seen, and the same ruin is read both ways. Valloggia, who excavated the complex from 1995 to 2007, concluded in 2019 that it was very likely completed. Maragioglio and Rinaldi, who surveyed it before him, thought it almost certain that it never was, and Stadelmann agrees with them.
Valloggia 2019; Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1962, p. 10, and 1966, vol. V, observation 5; Stadelmann 1985, p. 128, as cited by Müller-Römer 2008, p. 80. Valloggia has argued both ways: Müller-Römer reads a chapter of his from 2004 as calling the pyramid unfinished. What would decide it, how much masonry the clearance met and at what levels, is in his final report of 2011, not available here.
Next: , the same kind of pit, abandoned at its floor.
About 12 m stands today. Whether a pyramid ever rose over the pit is still open.
What would settle it
- How high the masonry went. Valloggia's final report, Abou Rawash I (2011), has a section on the pyramid's masonry (§2.4) and José Bernal's study of the construction levels (Appendix II). How much coarse core stone the clearance of 1995–2007 met would answer Maragioglio and Rinaldi's count of almost none.
- The chamber as found. The chamber here is Valloggia's reconstruction; what survives in the pit is listed in §2.5.2 of the 2011 report.
- Sahure's and Teti's room heights, and Khafre's and Menkaure's chamber depths.
- The length of the reign: 7 to 9 years, or about 25.
Sources
- M. Valloggia, Construction d'une pyramide, l'exemple d'Abou Rawash, Académie des beaux-arts, 2019, ills. 2, 4 and 5.
- M. Valloggia, Abou Rawash I, IFAO 2011, table of contents.
- W. M. F. Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, 1883.
- V. Maragioglio and C. Rinaldi, L'architettura delle piramidi menfite, vol. V, 1966, observation 5, and Notizie sulle piramidi di Zedefrâ, Zedkarâ Isesi, Teti, 1962, p. 10.
- F. Müller-Römer, Pyramidenbau mit Rampen und Seilwinden, dissertation, Munich 2008, p. 80.
- J. S. Perring's survey tables in H. Vyse, Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh, vol. 2, 1840.
- Wikipedia: Pyramid of Djedefre, Baka-Pyramide, Grande excavation, Menkaure, Neferirkare, Senusret I, Senusret II, Sahure, Teti, Unas, Djoser, Great Pyramid.
Every page was opened on 18–19 October 2026.
The Great Pit at Zawyet el-Aryan, 4.6 km south of Giza
A tomb with no pyramid
A ramp about 110 m long runs down into a pit 21 m deep, floored with granite blocks of 8 tonnes and more. In the floor is a stone vat that was found sealed and empty. Nothing was ever built over it, and whether a pyramid was meant to stand there rests on a single row of blocks round the pit.
Drawn to scale from Maragioglio and Rinaldi's survey of the 1960s and Barsanti's excavation reports of 1906 to 1912. Levels are metres below the rock surface. Its closest match is .
Scroll to descend
An open cut in the desert
The cut runs in from the north: a ramp about 110 m long and 8.5 m wide at the top, ending in a pit that lies east to west, 25 × 11.7 m at its floor and 28 × 14.5 m at the rock surface. The floor is 21 m down. The walls lean back slightly. They were smoothed and plastered with a pink mortar, and patches of it remain.
Alessandro Barsanti found it in May 1900, walking back to Giza from the pyramid at Zawyet el-Aryan, when his foreman, Ibrahim Fayed, pointed out granite chips strewn over the plateau. He began clearing it in March 1904 and reached the floor in February 1905. Maspero, head of the Antiquities Service, wrote that the scale of the work strikes a visitor only "at the foot of the staircase, when they set foot on the granite paving".
The figure at the south rim is 1.8 m tall. The low dry-stone wall round the rim, holding back the sand, was probably built by Barsanti (Maragioglio and Rinaldi). Maspero's note is in Barsanti 1906, translated from the French. The site lies in a military zone today.
Down in four stages
Slice the rock along the ramp's axis and its profile appears. From the surface a gentle slope runs 38 m and ends in a low step. A level stretch 23.6 m long follows, 8.5 m down. Then a double stair falls at about 25° to the floor, and a last level stretch, 16.3 m long, runs on into the pit.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi noted that a first slope as gentle as this one is found at no other pyramid of the Old Kingdom.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, vol. VI, Tav. 3 fig. 2, scaled from the drawing; Barsanti gives the corridor as 110 m long. The beds of hard and soft rock are drawn after their transverse section and are not measured.
Set out on the rock
The ramp does not meet the pit in its middle. Its axis lies 3.4 m east of the pit's, and Maragioglio and Rinaldi were sure the offset was meant. A sketch of the ramp and pit was found drawn on a block, and on the finished walls red lines on strips of plaster mark the axes: the ramp's on the south wall, the pit's east–west axis on the west wall.
They argued that ramp and pit were dug together. The axis marks tie them to one plan, the spoil could only leave by the ramp, and small heaps of it lie to the north beside the ramp.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, vol. VI; their Tav. 2 fig. 8 reproduces the sketch, from Barsanti. The red lines appear in the next chapter, once the walls are cut.
Deeper than planned
The cut went down through beds of hard and soft limestone. Near the bottom it met a bed so soft that its face had to be lined with courses of small limestone blocks.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi think the builders reached the level they had planned, found that bad rock under it, and dug it all out rather than set the weight of a pyramid on it. The pit and the last level stretch of the ramp went down to about 25.5 m, leaving a drop of about 3.2 m at the foot of the stair.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, vol. VI, observation 4. The platform of the next chapters brought the floor back to the level of the plan, so the gold dashed line takes that level as the finished floor, 21 m down.
Stairs for men, a slide for blocks
The stair is two flights side by side, each 1.55 m wide, with sloping benches 0.65 m wide against the walls and a smooth slide between the flights. In Maragioglio and Rinaldi's reading the stairs were for the men and the slide was for lowering the stone.
Every block of the floor came down this way. The slide is as wide as an ordinary descending corridor of the time and about as steep, which later suggested to them how the finished tomb would have been entered (chapter XI).
Widths from Tav. 3 fig. 1, where the number of steps is, by their own note, only indicative; so it is here. The sledge and its crew are illustration.
A platform 4.5 m thick
The builders filled the excavation back up to the planned level with a platform of three or four courses of large, well-dressed blocks set in a very hard mortar, their joints staggered. Along the sides of the pit, and in part of the last stretch of the ramp, the blocks are fine limestone; the rest are granite. They average more than 8 tonnes, and Barsanti met one of about 30 tonnes where the corridor reaches the pit.
They laid it from west to east and from south to north, working back towards the ramp the blocks came down. Its top is the floor, 21 m below the rock surface, level with the foot of the stair.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, vol. VI; Barsanti 1906 and 1907. Lauer thought the mortar was mostly calcium sulphate. The joints are drawn to a plausible pattern; Maragioglio and Rinaldi say theirs are only indicative too.
A coffin cut into the floor
Near the middle of the west side, one granite block of the top course, 3.15 × 2.22 m, was hollowed into an oval vat 2.10 × 1.06 m inside and 1.05 m deep, with a projecting rim. A lid of polished red granite, 2.95 × 1.90 m and 0.43 m thick, with bosses for handling, fitted over it and was fixed with gypsum mortar.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi read the setting as a date. A sarcophagus sunk into the floor is known in Khafre's pyramid and probably in the first plan for Menkaure's, and in no pyramid before or after. The lid was too large for any corridor, so it had to be on the floor before rooms were built round it.
Barsanti 1906 (ASAE 7), fig. 10; Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, Tav. 3 fig. 8 and observations 5 and 6. Of Radjedef's coffin only fragments are known; it was perhaps oval.
Sealed, then buried
No walls, no roof and no rooms were built. The vat was sealed instead: a layer of lime over the lid, a thick bed of clay over the lime, and limestone blocks set side by side on the clay, which Barsanti called a sort of insulating building. Then the pit was filled. Limestone blocks of 3 to 4 tonnes were thrown in from above, about 4,200 m³ of them piled 15 m high, and sand and pebbles went over them.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi read this as the work of the king's successor after the king died: even if he was never buried there, they wrote, it was his tomb. They compared Sekhemkhet's unfinished pyramid at Saqqara.
Barsanti 1906 (ASAE 7); Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, vol. VI, observation 6. Barsanti gives the blocks as 15 m deep; Maragioglio and Rinaldi as reaching to 5 m below the surface. The casing of blocks over the vat is drawn to his description; its form is not recorded.
Lifted, and found empty
Barsanti's men lifted the fill out with a crane. On 12 March 1905 he found the vat, and he lifted its lid, he wrote, with real emotion. It was completely empty except for a blackish band 10 cm high on the inside walls, which he took for the trace of a liquid offering that had dried away.
On 31 March a storm flooded the pit 3 m deep, and around midnight the water fell by about a metre. Sure that it had drained into a hidden chamber, Barsanti dug shafts and galleries under and beside the platform and moved most of its granite blocks. No chamber was found, and the blocks were never put back.
Barsanti 1906 (ASAE 7), translated from the French; Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, observation 5, which dates the storm to 1903. In 1912 Barsanti still held that the vat had been a basin for libations. Where he set the lid down is not recorded; it is drawn on the blocks west of the vat.
A pyramid, a mastaba, or neither?
Round the pit lies a single row of large blocks of coarse local limestone, two courses high in places, elsewhere spaced blocks or squared outcrops of rock. Barsanti, the first to see it from the hill to the north, took it for "probablement un grand mastaba" (probably a great mastaba). Maspero concluded that a pyramid had been begun and abandoned, but allowed that it might have been a mastaba like the one at Beit Khallaf, and wished the workman who sketched the pit on a block had drawn the monument as it was to be when finished: "il nous aurait épargné bien des recherches" (it would have spared us much research).
Maragioglio and Rinaldi read the row as a pyramid's core, set out and no more. They measured its north side at about 203 m and its east side at about 204 m, and saw in the sand beside them the trace of a trench for the casing. Cased, the side would have been at least 400 cubits, about 209 m, and perhaps 410, about 215 m, the size of Khafre's. With faces at 52°, the slope they assumed, it would have stood about 134 to 138 m high. Khufu's pyramid stands 4.6 km to the north-north-west.
Barsanti 1906 (ASAE 7), p. 260, and Maspero in the same report, pp. 258–259, translated from the French; Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, vol. VI, observation 2 and Tav. 2 fig. 4. No height is recorded; this one follows from the base and an assumed slope. Barsanti had given the outline as 180 × 200 m, Lepsius as a square of 180 m.
A plan in dashed lines
Taking the pyramid as given, Maragioglio and Rinaldi attempted what they called a purely ideal reconstruction. A corridor would follow the stair's slope up to its north face, meeting it about 11 m above the ground. A vestibule would stand where the ramp runs level at the bottom, then one or three portcullises, then an antechamber and a burial chamber along the pit's east–west axis, roofed with leaning blocks.
The granite of the top course marks where those rooms would have stood, about 13 m by 3.3 m, with the vat at the west end. Nothing above the floor was ever built.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, vol. VI, observation 7 and Tav. 3 figs. 1–2. The heights of the rooms are illustrative.
A king with an unread name
Barsanti recorded 66 graffiti in black and red ink, about 57 of them in the pit itself, most naming gangs of workmen. Six carry a king's name in a cartouche, in a cursive hand his copies make hard to read: Černý read it Nebka, Lauer Bikka. The oldest known cartouches are Sneferu's, so the king probably reigned after him.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi put the pit in the middle of the 4th Dynasty. The size of its blocks, the amount of granite, the pink mortar, the size of the outline and the sunken vat all fit that time, and so does its likeness to Abu Rawash. With reserve they suggested Djedefhor or Baufra, named after Khafre in a list at Wadi Hammamat. German Wikipedia gives Sethe, Swelim and Stadelmann for the end of the 3rd Dynasty instead; Stadelmann's own entry of 1984 leaves it open between the late 3rd and the late 4th.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, observation 1; German Wikipedia, Baka-Pyramide, after Verner 1999 and Stadelmann 1985, for the graffiti and the other view.
A name in the workmen's huts
When work began in 1904, Barsanti cleared what was left of the workmen's huts to the north, at the foot of the hill, barely two or three rows of rough stones piled one on another. In one of their rooms his foreman, Ibrahim Fayed, picked up "une plaquette en schiste verdâtre qui porte le cartouche du roi Didoufrâ" (a small plaque of greenish schist bearing the cartouche of King Didoufrâ, that is Radjedef), with bronze chisels, a small cylinder of barely legible signs, worked flints and sherds of jars.
Maspero asked whether the king of the Great Pit might be Radjedef himself, who began a tomb here and then took his works to Abu Rawash; the other king's name on the blocks need not stand in the way, since blocks could lie in a quarry for years. He did not press it. Edwards found it "difficult to attach special significance" to the name, then later made Radjedef the father of the Zawyet king. Maragioglio and Rinaldi called it "not a determining fact"; Valloggia, who dug Abu Rawash, saw "a likely historical link". Reisner, Černý, Lauer, Stadelmann and Lehner, writing on the pit's date, do not mention it.
The plaque went to the Cairo Museum, entered as JE 37097, with the cylinder from the same room as JE 37094. Nobody has drawn, photographed or described it in print since 1906.
Barsanti 1906 (ASAE 7), p. 261, and Maspero, pp. 258–259, translated from the French; Edwards 1961, p. 128, and 1985; Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1967, p. 24; Valloggia in Hawass (ed.), The Treasures of the Pyramids, 2003, ch. 19; Porter and Moss III², 1974, p. 313. Both printings are type, not a drawing of the object: Barsanti's has two djed pillars and no ring, though his sentence says cartouche, and Maspero's one djed in a cartouche. German Wikipedia says Sethe, Swelim and Stadelmann doubt the find; the Stadelmann article it cites does not mention it. The huts were never mapped; the marker only shows the direction.
Abu Rawash went further
Laid over the Great Pit at one scale, Radjedef's pit is smaller and shallower: 23 × 10 m against 25 × 11.7 m, its floor 15.8 m below the pyramid's base against 21 m below the rock here. Both were reached from the north and both lie east to west. In both the way down runs on the axis of the square set out round it, about 3 m east of the pit's centre, and the burial place lies about 6 m west of the centre: Radjedef's chamber at the west end, the vat near the middle of the west side. Maragioglio and Rinaldi could compare an excavation this deep and this open to the sky only with Abu Rawash's, leaving Djoser's aside. The square set out round the Great Pit is twice as wide as Radjedef's base.
A floor of granite, a sealed vat found empty, and a king's name still unread. Nothing was built over it.
What would settle it
- The king's name. Six graffiti carry it, and Barsanti's copies of its first sign are too careless to read with certainty.
- The floor as built. Barsanti moved most of the granite blocks and never put them back; his drawings and Reisner's are the record of how they lay.
- The plaque itself, Cairo JE 37097. No drawing or photograph has been published, so its signs, size and condition are unknown; the museum's register is the only other record of it.
- What the row of blocks round the pit was for. Maragioglio and Rinaldi read a pyramid's core; Barsanti first saw a mastaba, and nothing above the floor survives to decide it.
- The site today. It lies in a military zone, and nothing here could be checked on the ground.
Sources
- A. Barsanti and G. Maspero, Fouilles de Zaouiét el-Aryân (1904–1905), ASAE 7, 1906.
- A. Barsanti, the continuation of the same report, ASAE 8, 1907, and ASAE 12, 1912.
- V. Maragioglio and C. Rinaldi, L'architettura delle piramidi menfite, vol. VI, 1967: the Great Pit, with Tav. 2 and 3.
- M. Valloggia, preliminary reports on Abu Rawash in Genava n.s. 46 (1998), p. 83, and 47 (1999), p. 48, for where Radjedef's trench and chamber lie in his pit.
- Wikipedia: Baka-Pyramide, Grande excavation, Unfinished Northern Pyramid of Zawyet El Aryan.
Every page was opened on 18–19 October 2026. The site is drawn at the coordinates German Wikipedia gives, with its rock surface at the level of Giza's; the desert round it is illustrative.
The pyramid of Khufu at Giza, 4th Dynasty
How was it built?
About 2.6 million m³ of stone stands in Khufu's pyramid, 230.36 m a side and 146.71 m high. No Egyptian text says how it was raised. Here every way proposed is drawn to scale on the pyramid, at its true place on the plateau, beside the ramps that have actually been found.
Scroll to build
Most of the stone is near the ground
A pyramid narrows as it rises, so its bulk lies low. A quarter of Khufu's lies below 13.4 m and half below 30.3 m; three quarters is in place by 54.3 m and nine tenths by 78.6 m. The top third of the height holds less than 4% of the stone. Whatever the method, it had to deliver hundreds of blocks a day near the ground and only a few near the top, some of them the heaviest. Stadelmann's often quoted rate, 2.3 million blocks in 23 years, comes to about 340 a day.
The shares are worked out here from the shape alone: below a height h lies 1 − (1 − h/146.71)³ of the volume. The base is 230.36 m a side (Dash 2015, measured) and the height 146.71 m (worked out from Petrie 1883). Some of the volume is a knoll of rock left inside, put at 7.7% (Haase 2004, an estimate). Stadelmann's rate is given by Lehner 1997, p. 224.
Cut next door, shipped from across the river
The core came from beside the pyramid. Khufu's quarry is a horseshoe bitten into the plateau south of it, its floor up to 30 m below the old surface, and Lehner reckons about 2.76 million m³ was taken out of it. Analyses of about 1,500 samples tie the core to this quarry and to the pyramid's own site.
The fine white casing came from Tura, across the Nile. The oldest written papyri yet found, the logbook of an inspector named Merer, record it on the move in the year after the 13th count of Khufu's reign: a team of about 40 men loading blocks at Tura, two days sailing to Akhet-Khufu, "Khufu's horizon", and one day back, two or three round trips every ten days. How the stones went up once they arrived, the log does not say.
The workers' town south of the Wall of the Crow, Heit el-Ghurab, covers more than 7 hectares. Its sealings name Khafre and Menkaure, so what has been dug is a little later than Khufu's pyramid.
Lehner 1997, p. 206; Klemm and Klemm 2010, pp. 82, 88. Tallet 2017, Annexe I, in C. Clement's translation; the team's size is Tallet's estimate from its bread ration. AERA, the Lost City and Dating the Lost City pages. The quarry and the town are placed as the Giza Plateau Atlas places them.
The ramps that were found
Four finds stand here in front of the south face at one scale, each rising toward the pyramid. None belongs to Khufu's pyramid, and none climbs a great pyramid's face.
Small ramps straight at the faces survive only at little pyramids; at Sinki, against a step pyramid 18.5 m square, the east one still stands 1.35 m high. No ramp for the body of a large pyramid has been found.
Meidum: Wainwright in Petrie 1910, the length and rise scaled off pls. II and III; Borchardt 1928, p. 20; Lehner 1997, p. 217. Lisht: Arnold 1992, pp. 94–95, the slope his estimate. Giza: Hölscher 1912, pp. 71–73, scaled off Abb. 59. Hatnub: the IFAO mission's page and its 2019 and 2021 reports; the widths of slide and stairs and the places of the posts are drawn here. Sinki: Müller-Römer 2008, p. 42.
One ramp, straight up
The simplest answer, and the one most often drawn: an embankment straight out from one face, raised and lengthened as the pyramid rose. Diodorus, writing about 2,400 years after Khufu, has the stones go up on mounds, "since cranes had not yet been invented at that time". At 1 in 10, the slope Lehner calls functional, it needs a run of 1.47 km to reach the top, its foot 1.35 km south of the face, far beyond the quarry.
Its bulk turns on its width and the slope of its sides. With a roadway 10 m wide and sides at 80°, as drawn, it holds 2.57 million m³, about as much as the pyramid; twice as wide, 3.56 million. Cemeteries were laid out east and west of the pyramid early in the reign, so it could only come from the south, and Lehner notes it would have overrun the quarry by two-thirds of the height.
Lengths and volumes worked out here on level ground at the level of the base; no one has published a width for this ramp. Diodorus 1.63.6, Oldfather's translation; Lehner 1997, pp. 215–216; Lehner 1985, p. 129. Generally rejected for the whole height.
Steeper and shorter
Jean-Philippe Lauer's answer in 1948 was to make the ramp steep: 375 m long to the apex, rising 21.4°, and 160 m wide at its foot from the start, so that it only ever had to be raised, never widened. Drawn so it holds about 0.85 million m³; Lauer put it at just under two-fifths of the pyramid. No ramp found is as steep, the Hatnub slide included, and Lauer gave it up himself in 1982 for a ramp leaning along one face.
Müller-Römer 2008, pp. 127–128; Graefe 2003. Lauer does not say which face; the south is drawn.
Only part of the way
Because the stone lies low, a ramp that stops short does most of the work. Jean-Pierre Houdin's outer ramp runs straight in from the south to 43 m, the floor of the King's Chamber, by which height about 65% of the stone is laid. At 1 in 10 it is about 425 m long and, drawn 10 m wide, holds 0.12 million m³, a twentieth of the pyramid. Houdin builds it of limestone blocks and then takes it apart, its blocks going up a second ramp, inside the pyramid.
Müller-Römer 2008, p. 145; Brier 2007. Houdin gives no width; 10 m is drawn. Bormann (2004) proposed a ramp to about 40 m with a lifting device above it.
Four ramps from the corners
Dows Dunham's ramps of 1956 start one at each corner and climb the faces at 1 in 8 on the rough casing, each with a roadway about 10 feet (3 m) wide: three for loaded sledges, one for the way down. Carried to the top, each is about 1.2 km long, and all four hold about 0.26 million m³ as drawn. Dunham designed them for a museum model of Menkaure's pyramid. Edwards answered that undressed casing blocks, like those still at the foot of Menkaure's, are not stepped and would not have held a ramp, and every load must turn a right angle at each corner.
Dunham 1956, pp. 161–165; Edwards 1961, p. 221; Lehner 1997, p. 215. The batter of their outer faces is drawn here; Dunham says only that it was considerable.
One ramp all the way round
Georges Goyon in 1977 wound a single brick ramp 17 m wide round the pyramid, resting on the bosses of the undressed casing and rising only 3.2°, so gently that it wraps the whole building. Carried as high as it can go, it runs about 2.8 km and holds about 1.34 million m³, half the pyramid; at 136 m the top is too narrow for a roadway that wide. With every face covered, Goyon checked the slope with a plumb line down a shaft in the middle; no such shaft has been found. Henri Paul worked out 43 years for the pyramid on Goyon's system.
Müller-Römer 2008, pp. 131–132; Graefe 2003. The way it turns is not given; the one drawn is this project's choice.
From the quarry, round the pyramid
Mark Lehner's ramp of 1985 follows the ground. It climbs from the mouth of the quarry to the south-west corner, 320 m long and 30 m wide, reaching 30 m, then wraps the pyramid clockwise on embankments leaning against the faces, in five ever steeper stretches, the last at 18°: by his figures 950 m of roadway and one and a quarter turns to the top. It is built of the quarry's own waste, limestone chips, gypsum and tafla clay, which is what fills the quarry today.
Lehner gives no volume; drawn here, the stretches and their embankments come to about 2 million m³, three quarters of the pyramid. In 1998, while cables were relaid south-west of the pyramid, Hawass found two parallel walls of rubble and tafla, 1.40 and 1.45 m wide with sand and gypsum between, and took them for the foot of this ramp. Lehner himself called the last stretch "probably too steep".
Lehner 1985, pp. 129–132; Lehner 1997, pp. 215–216; Hawass 1998, pp. 56–58. The start of the first stretch is read off Lehner's plan; the later stretches are drawn 12 m wide, set off from the faces to give the lengths he states. The most cited ramp for Khufu, and still a hypothesis.
Ramps cut into the faces
Rosemarie and Dietrich Klemm (1998) leave nothing outside. Their two ramps are level notches 4–5 m wide built into the faces as the pyramid rose, from the south-west and north-east corners at 6°: one up for loads, one down for empty sledges. When the casing went on, the notches were filled, so no ramp material is left over, which suits the absence of ramp debris. Müller-Römer reckoned 54 years for it: a roadway that narrow takes one line of sledges, and every block has to turn the corners.
Müller-Römer 2008, pp. 135–138, after Klemm and Klemm 1998 and 2002. The way they turn is not given; the one drawn is this project's choice.
Steep ramps on a stepped core
Frank Müller-Römer (2008) starts from the core. Under the casing he puts twelve steps 11 m high, from a change in the masonry he saw in the robbers' tunnel and from the stepped cores of Khufu's queens' pyramids. On the treads stand short ramps at 2:1, each 22 m long with a landing, up which blocks are wound with a roller and spokes: 24 on the first step, one on the last, 137 in all. A stepped mantle round the whole pyramid then serves to lay and dress the casing. His is the only proposal with a full calculation, 22.2 years with the preparation; neither the winch ramps nor the mantle is attested on any pyramid.
Müller-Römer 2008, pp. 179–209. The core is shown stepped in place of the finished faces; where on each tread the flights stand is drawn here.
A ramp inside
Above 43 m, Houdin takes the stone up a corridor built into the pyramid from its base, just behind the faces: 2.6 m wide, rising 7% to 106 m and then up to 20% to about 130 m, turning at each corner in a notch open to the air, where a small crane swung the sledges round. As drawn it is 1.6 km long and adds almost nothing to the bulk.
On the north-east edge, about 82 m up, there is a notch, with an L-shaped room behind it, which Bob Brier climbed to in 2008; travellers had described the room since the 17th century. A microgravity survey of 1986 shows the edges less dense than the middle, but the man who analysed it found that ordinary building in steps gives the same picture. The void found by muon imaging in 2017 lies over the Grand Gallery, and what it was for is unknown.
Müller-Römer 2008, pp. 144–149; Brier 2007 and 2009; Bui 2012; Morishima et al. 2017. Its depth behind the faces (10 m) and its height are drawn here, neither of them published; the corner notches are drawn 6 m high, as Brier estimated the one on the north-east edge. Disputed; Houdin's association reports that no survey to test it has been permitted.
Tiers round the pyramid, ramps on the tiers
The newest full design, posted by Jong-Hun (Huni) Choi and Jean-Jacques Dubray in October 2026, keeps the ramps on the faces but stands them on tiers of dry-laid block built against all four faces as the pyramid rose: 35 of them, 7.7 m high at the base and 1.6 m at the top, their heights following the quarry beds. Each course of the pyramid, casing included, is finished before the next.
Two ramps at 1 in 8 go back and forth, one leg a tier, from 62 m long at the bottom to 12.5 m at the top: on the south face 4 m wide, on the east 11 m to the King's Chamber floor and 9 m to 65.9 m, wide enough for the 570 men a 54 t beam needs, then 4 m. At each turn the rope slides round a fixed stone post while the crew walks on along the next leg. The tiers and ramps hold 268,800 m³, a tenth of the pyramid; drawn here to their figures they come to 265,800 m³, without the men's ramp down the west face.
Their simulation, run course by course, gives 22.1 years of lifting with every unmeasured value at its worst and 24.5 for the whole work, inside the 27 years of reign that Merer's log attests. The result turns most on how long a turn and a loading take at the ramps, which nobody has measured; they propose testing it with a 2.5 t sledge on a wetted 1 in 8 track round a stone post.
Choi and Dubray 2026, Preprints.org, doi:10.20944/preprints202610.0852.v1 (CC BY 4.0), §§3–6, 9, 13–15; a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed. Their tier rule, drawn here, reproduces their volume table to 0.1%. The corner each ramp starts from is this project's choice; the legs above 138 m, which turn the corners, are left out.
Finished from the top
Herodotus says the top was finished first and the lowest parts last, and the stones agree. Menkaure's pyramid "has never been quite finished", Petrie wrote: its granite casing still has its outer faces in the rough, though dressed smooth on the joints, where the line of the finished slope is marked. In Menkaure's temple Reisner found the builders' platforms taken down as the walls were dressed, and concluded "that the granite casing was dressed from the top down". At Khafre's pyramid, whose top casing survives, its corners lie within about an inch of the base's diagonals.
In Choi and Dubray's design the tiers come off from the top once the pyramidion is set: the strip against the face first, the face behind it dressed as the blocks go, 432 working days in all. Khufu's court was paved only after the lowest tier came down; holes cut in the rock about six cubits out from the base, used to set it out, were filled with stone and mortar before the pavement was laid.
The Great Pyramid construction study in this repository builds the Qvist method on these tiers: every casing block scored with the face's slope before it is laid, the pyramidion set, and the faces cut back to the scored lines from the top down, so that the four faces must meet in a point. Its ramps zigzag to 65.9 m and wind round the pyramid above, carrying a block of about 10 t to course 206; its capacity model gives 19.3 years at worst and 11.5 at expected values.
Herodotus 2.125; Petrie 1883, §§66, 79; Reisner 1931, ch. V; Choi and Dubray 2026, §§3, 11, after Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1965, p. 66, and Lehner 1983; great-pyramid-construction/HANDOVER.md and its model/capacity.py. The tiers are drawn here taken down to 74.8 m, the top of Choi's sixth tier.
Levers, step by step
The oldest account of the method is Herodotus's, about 2,000 years after Khufu: the pyramid was "made like stairs", and the other stones were raised from step to step by machines made of short timbers, which Godley renders "short wooden logs as levers"; the top was finished first. For NOVA, Martin Isler's crew levered a one-ton block up one step on timber cribbing; the mason Roger Hopkins doubted it was "a very practical way of bringing blocks up". Levering needs notches in the blocks, which core stones do not have. For the top it is widely accepted: above 100 m lies about 3% of the stone.
Herodotus 2.125, Godley's translation (1920); NOVA, This Old Pyramid, 1997; Lehner 1997, pp. 209, 222. The rigs on the steps are illustrations.
The heaviest stones went high
The hardest loads were not low down. The King's Chamber, 43 m up, is built of granite brought 934 km down the Nile from Aswan. Over it five low spaces stack up to about 64 m; the chamber and the four lowest are roofed with granite beams, 56 by Petrie's count and 44 by Maragioglio and Rinaldi's, of about 54 t each on Petrie's average. Choi and Dubray put 570 men on the ropes for one; Müller-Römer leaves open how they came up; Houdin draws them up the Grand Gallery, then still open, against a counterweight.
The granite coffer was there first: it is "nearly an inch wider than the beginning of the ascending passage", so, Petrie concluded, it was placed in the King's Chamber before the roof went on. And near the top, where the pyramid is under 10 m across, a block of about 10 t lies in course 206, about 140.5 m up.
A date painted in the second of those spaces, read in 2024 as the 6th count of Khufu's reign, would put the stack this high by about year 11 or 12 if the count came every two years, with three quarters of the pyramid's volume below it. But such marks may have been painted in the quarry, before the blocks were set.
Petrie 1883 (1990 reprint, pp. 84 and 88): the beams average 320 × 52 × 73 in, 700 cubic feet, 54 tons; Choi and Dubray 2026, §9, after Maragioglio and Rinaldi 1965, pp. 53–54; Lehner 1997, p. 207; Müller-Römer 2008, pp. 147–148, 207; the block at course 206, and its height from Petrie's course table, as great-pyramid-construction/HANDOVER.md gives them; Ciavatti, Hawass et al. 2025, §12, preliminary. The share of the volume is worked out here for 51–56 m.
One block, twelve men
For NOVA, 10–12 men easily pulled a 2-ton block on a sledge up a roadway rising 1 in 14, laid with timber cross-pieces like those found at Lisht. That crew is drawn here on the 1 in 10 ramp; on wet mud each would pull about 25 kg-force. The painting of the colossus of Djehutihotep, about 58 t, shows 172 men on the ropes and a man pouring liquid in front of the sledge, about ⅓ t a man. Wetting sand to a few percent water can cut the pull by as much as 40%.
Lehner's count for Khufu's pyramid: about 1,200 quarrymen, 1,360 haulers in divisions of 20 and up to 680 setters, "two crews of 2,000", and 20,000–25,000 people with all who fed and supplied them. Herodotus's 100,000 in three-month shifts would be 25,000 at a time.
Lehner 1997, pp. 203, 208, 215, 224–225; Fall et al. 2014. The pull is worked out here as Q (sin α + μ cos α) for 2 t, with μ = 0.05 from Chevrier's wet mud at Karnak (Müller-Römer 2008, p. 39).
Against the reign
Few proposers say how long their method would take. The figures that exist, theirs or worked out by others, fall on both sides of the reign: Khufu ruled 23 years by the Turin Canon, and Merer's log has casing still arriving in his 26th or 27th year.
Every figure rests on times nobody has measured: how long a crew takes to turn a sledge, to load it, to set a block. In Choi and Dubray's model each extra minute at a turn or a loading adds five or six years. The straight ramp at 1 in 10, Lauer's, Dunham's and Houdin's come with no figure at all.
Müller-Römer 2008, pp. 117, 130, 132, 135, 137–138, 204–209; Choi and Dubray 2026, §§13–14; great-pyramid-construction/HANDOVER.md; Tallet 2017; Verner 2006, p. 131. The bars are the whole work where the source gives it; the fainter end of Lehner's bar is the top of Keyssner's range.
What is known, what is argued
Every ramp here can be made to work on paper, and not one has been found on Khufu's pyramid. What the finds and the texts settle is narrower.
Half its stone within 30 m of the ground, the top dressed first, and not one ramp left on it.
What would settle it
- The fill of Khufu's quarry. Lehner thinks it holds the ramp, pushed back in; dug in layers and dated, it would show what the ramp was made of and how big it was.
- Hawass's walls south-west of the pyramid: their full length, their slope and where they start.
- The pyramid's edges. A survey of them with muons would find a corridor inside if there is one; Houdin's association reports that none has been permitted.
- The core. Whether Khufu's is stepped rests on one look inside the robbers' tunnel and on the queens' pyramids.
- Hatnub. The size and spacing of the post holes, measured but not yet published.
- Choi and Dubray's own tests: a 2.5 t sledge turned round a stone post on a wetted 1 in 8 track, traces of the tiers along the base lines, and different tooling on Khufu's lowest casing.
Sources
- M. Lehner, The Complete Pyramids, 1997, pp. 200–225, and The development of the Giza necropolis: the Khufu project, MDAIK 41, 1985.
- F. Müller-Römer, Pyramidenbau mit Rampen und Seilwinden, dissertation, Munich 2008.
- J.-H. (H.) Choi and J.-J. Dubray, Understanding the Construction of the Great Pyramid: Mastabas, Back-and-Forth Ramps and Finishing from the Top, Preprints.org, 10 October 2026 (CC BY 4.0, not peer-reviewed); the Great Pyramid construction study in this repository,
great-pyramid-construction/, for the Qvist method and its figures. - G. A. Reisner, Mycerinus: The Temples of the Third Pyramid at Giza, 1931, ch. V.
- E. Graefe, Über die Determinanten des Pyramidenbaus, 1998, published 2003.
- D. Dunham, Building an Egyptian pyramid, Archaeology 9, 1956; I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, 1961.
- Z. Hawass, Pyramid construction: new evidence discovered at Giza, in Stationen, 1998.
- B. Brier, How to build a pyramid, 2007, and Return to the Great Pyramid, 2009, Archaeology; K. Morishima et al., Discovery of a big void in Khufu's Pyramid, Nature 552, 2017.
- W. M. F. Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, 1883, and with E. Mackay and G. Wainwright, Meydum and Memphis (III), 1910.
- D. Arnold, The Pyramid Complex of Senwosret I, 1992; U. Hölscher, Das Grabdenkmal des Königs Chephren, 1912; L. Borchardt, Die Entstehung der Pyramide, 1928.
- Y. Gourdon, R. Enmarch et al., Hatnoub (2019) and Hatnoub (2021), BAEFE; IFAO, Hatnoub.
- P. Tallet, Les papyrus de la mer Rouge I, 2017, extract; A. Ciavatti, Z. Hawass et al., Inside the Great Pyramid (2024), BAEFE 2025.
- D. and R. Klemm, The Stones of the Pyramids, 2010, ch. VI; A. Fall et al., Sliding friction on wet and dry sand, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 2014.
- Herodotus 2.124–128, Godley's translation; Diodorus 1.63, Oldfather's translation; NOVA, This Old Pyramid, 1997.
- AERA, on Heit el-Ghurab; the Giza Plateau Atlas in this repository, for the ground, the quarry and the town.
Every page was opened on 20–21 October 2026. The ground is Copernicus GLO-30 elevation on a 10 m grid, as in the Giza Plateau Atlas; ramps are measured on level ground at the level of the base and drawn on the ground as it is. Volumes, lengths and shares not credited to a source are worked out here from the figures given.