Building the Great Pyramid

Page 2 of 8

• 1. Great debate
• 2. Levelling
• 3. Aligning
• 4. Ramps
• 5. Raising blocks
• 6. Quarrying
• 7. Cutting blocks
• 8. Find out more
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Levelling

Between 1880 and 1882, Flinders Petrie, the first truly scientific archaeologist to work in Egypt, undertook some careful survey work on the Giza plateau. This was the site of the pyramid complexes of the rulers Khufu, Khafra and ë - all of whom lived in the Fourth Dynasty.

The results of Petrie's work suggested to him that the Egyptians had levelled the area intended for the Great Pyramid by cutting a grid of shallow trenches into the bedrock, flooding them with water, and reducing the intervening 'islands' of stone to the necessary height.

'...in the 1980s the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner began to produce a meticulous new map of the plateau...'

After this was suggested, for most of the next century, there was surprisingly little archaeological work on the pyramids at Giza, but in the 1980s the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner began to produce a meticulous new map of the plateau, incorporating the various holes and trenches cut into the rock around the pyramids. On the basis of this project, Lehner argued that the Egyptians had in fact not levelled the whole area intended for the pyramids, but had simply ensured that the narrow perimeter strips around the edges of the pyramid were as perfectly horizontal as possible.

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Published: 2002-10-28