As an Egyptologist, my phone rings off the hook whenever the news story breaks: new satellite imagery, new scans, new theories-a new discovery has solved the mystery of the pyramid-but it's usually a big nothing burger.
We actually have a pretty good understanding of how Khufu's pyramid was built, and that understanding comes from multiple discoveries, five of which we're going to dive into right now.
Discovery number one: the Giza Quarry.
There is a lot of stone in the Great Pyramid and the Giza Plateau.
Where on earth do these stones come from?
Most of the stone that was used to build the Great Pyramid at Giza was the bedrock of Giza itself.
We have, in fact, an area that was a quarry, a very large horseshoe-shaped quarry south of the pyramid that was used to pull up the blocks that were then used in the pyramid.
Let me show you how you could get a block of stone out of a quarry like this.
It sounds really inexact, but it can actually be done fairly well.
So, looking from the top first, you're going to take a hard stone, a stone like granite or diorite, and you're going to drop it onto the ground in a track, so, in a line.
