c. 2670 BCE
The Step Pyramid at Saqqara
Djoser's architect Imhotep stacks six diminishing mastabas into the first monumental stone building anywhere. It is the moment the technique begins.
Section 06
A Timeline
Forty-six centuries in one column. Note how much of it is not construction at all, but people arriving afterwards to dig, measure, argue about, quarry and photograph what was already there.
06.1The record
Before Giza
c. 2600 BCE
Sneferu builds three
Khufu's father builds at Meidum and twice at Dahshur. The Bent Pyramid changes angle part-way up — a mid-construction correction, probably for stability. The Red Pyramid that follows is the first successful true pyramid, and the template for Giza.
The Fourth Dynasty at Giza
c. 2560 BCE
The Great Pyramid
Khufu moves the royal necropolis to the Giza plateau and builds the largest pyramid ever attempted. A harbour, a workers' town and a planned field of mastabas go up alongside it.
c. 2570–2530 BCE
Khafre's complex, and the Sphinx
The second pyramid is built higher up the slope with a steeper face. Its causeway, valley temple and — on the current consensus — the Great Sphinx are all cut as one integrated scheme.
c. 2510 BCE
Menkaure's pyramid
The third and smallest pyramid, cased in Aswan granite. The king dies before the casing is dressed; his successor Shepseskaf finishes the temples in mud brick.
Antiquity
c. 1400 BCE
Thutmose IV clears the Sphinx
A New Kingdom pharaoh digs the sand out of the Sphinx enclosure and erects the Dream Stele between its paws to record why. The monuments are already more than a thousand years old.
c. 450 BCE
Herodotus takes notes
The Greek historian visits and writes down what the guides tell him — a hundred thousand labourers, twenty years, and a slander about Khufu that has stuck to him ever since.
c. 140 BCE
Listed among the wonders
Antipater of Sidon names the pyramids in his catalogue of marvels. They are the only entry on that list still standing.
The medieval and early modern plateau
1196 CE
An attempt at demolition
Al-Malik al-Aziz Uthman, a son of Saladin, sets out to pull the pyramids down. Eight months of work on Menkaure's produce one large scar and a ruined budget.
1303 CE
The earthquake
A major quake shakes loose much of the smooth Tura limestone casing. The fallen blocks are carted off to build Cairo, leaving the stepped cores we see today.
1378 CE
The Sphinx is defaced
Al-Maqrīzī records that a Sufi named Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr attacks the face with chisels and is killed by locals for it. The nose has been missing ever since — and Napoleon's army will not arrive for another four hundred years.
The century of measurement
1798–1801
Napoleon's savants
The French expedition brings 160 scholars, engineers and draughtsmen. They survey and draw everything they can reach.
1809–1829
Description de l'Égypte
The expedition's results are published in enormous folio volumes. Most of the engraved plates in this guide come from them — accurate in survey, imaginative in atmosphere.
1837
Vyse and Perring open the chambers
Howard Vyse blasts into the relieving chambers above the King's Chamber and finds quarry graffiti naming Khufu — still the only inscription in the pyramid identifying its owner.
1842–1846
The Lepsius expedition
A Prussian team under Karl Richard Lepsius produces the first systematic survey map of the necropolis and records tomb after tomb in the mastaba fields.
1860s–1880s
The photographers arrive
Félix Bonfils, the Zangaki brothers and Francis Frith set up commercial studios and sell albumen prints to travellers. Their negatives are the first mechanical record of the site.
1880–1882
Petrie measures it properly
Flinders Petrie lives in a rock-cut tomb on the plateau and surveys the Great Pyramid with instruments precise to fractions of a millimetre. His numbers are still the ones people quote.
Modern excavation
1902–1942
Reisner in the mastaba fields
George Reisner's Harvard–Boston expedition works the cemeteries for forty years, developing much of the recording practice that modern field archaeology still uses.
1925
The tomb of Hetepheres
A photographer's tripod leg breaks through plaster over a hidden shaft. At the bottom is the burial equipment of Khufu's mother — gilded furniture, a carrying chair, a sealed alabaster sarcophagus. The sarcophagus turns out to be empty.
1925–1936
The Sphinx fully cleared
Émile Baraize excavates the enclosure down to bedrock and consolidates the body. This is the campaign that leaves the Sphinx as visitors see it now.
1954
The Khufu ship
Kamal el-Mallakh opens a sealed pit on the south side and finds 1,224 pieces of a dismantled cedar ship, 43.6 metres long, with its ropes intact.
1988–present
The workers' town
Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass excavate Heit el-Ghurab and the workers' cemetery, replacing the slave-labour story with bakeries, breweries, named gangs and evidence of long-term medical care.
Now
2013
Merer's logbook
Pierre Tallet's team finds the oldest inscribed papyri in the world at Wadi al-Jarf — including the working diary of a boat captain hauling casing stone to Giza while the Great Pyramid was being finished.
2017
The Big Void
The ScanPyramids project images the Great Pyramid with cosmic-ray muons and reports a previously unknown space at least thirty metres long above the Grand Gallery.
2023
The north-face corridor
A nine-metre corridor behind the chevron blocks on the north face is confirmed and inspected with an endoscope. It appears to be structural.
2025
The Grand Egyptian Museum opens
After two decades of construction, the museum on the edge of the plateau opens in full — with the reassembled Khufu ship, moved there in 2021, among its centrepieces.
