How was a large pyramid built?

Answer 1

Shortly after ascending the throne in 2589BC, Pharaoh Khufu commanded his overseer of works to prepare a burial place in keeping with his status as a god-king, a pyramid tomb far grander than anything that had been built before or since. A site was chosen on the Giza plateau west of the Nile across from his capital at Memphis. The site was surveyed and levelled to provide a foundation for Khufu's Great Pyramid.

As the slaves cut the first stones for the pyramid from nearby quarries, thousands more began building the causeway, erecting storehouses and digging a canal to link the foot of the plateau to the Nile. Meanwhile scribes, the Pharaoh's project managers, dispatched orders for more supplies.

A town was built for the crafts people where they were provided with houses, food, clothing and even medical care. Less comfortable accommodation in the form of barracks was provided for the slaves.

Through Khufu's reign, the construction site teemed with workers of all kinds hard pressed to complete the monument before the king's death. Khufu and his architects did not make it easy for them. The royal planners decided to enlarge the structure several times and relocate the burial chamber from beneath the structure to its inner reaches. Day after day, year after year, the quarries rang with the sound of hammer and chisel on stone. Through the dust the naked bodies of quarry slaves stand out dark against the yellow stone. After the stone blocks are hacked out of the quarry face they are lowered onto sledges. A note of each load is taken down by a scribe.

From dawn to dusk, naked slaves dragged sledges loaded with stones each weighing about 2.5 tons each to staging areas at the base of the pyramid. Here the skilled masons chiselled the blocks to prescribed dimensions, smoothed the sides and squared the corners. Slaves then reloaded the sledge and began hauling them slowly up the ramp that spiralled around the emerging structure. The noise here was one of chanting slaves and the rumble of heavy sledges. Water is poured under the blades of the sledges to ease their passage.

When the sledges reached the working level teams of slaves called setters shifted the blocks from the sledges into their designated positions. Toiling below were the tool makers, cooks, porters and guards under the watchful eyes of the scribes.

Other slaves were employed in maintaining and extending the ramps as the pyramid grew. Rows of slave labourers are seen breaking up waste material from the quarries, mixing them with the desert tafla clay and loading the finished mixture into baskets. Individual baskets are loaded onto the shoulders of slaves for delivery to the ramp builders on the pyramid.

Barges made from papyrus reeds deliver fine white limestone from Tura just across the river which will used to case the pyramid. Granite from Aswan over 400 miles upriver was used to build the internal galleries and chambers. Some of the granite stones from Aswan weighed up to 70 tons. Copper chisels were using for quarrying limestone but harder stones such as granite required stronger materials. Balls of dolerite, a hard, black igneous rock, were used in the quarries of Aswan to extract hard granite.

These dolerite "pounders" were used to pulverize the stone around the edge of the granite block that needed to be extracted. Teams of 60 to 70 slaves would pound out the stone. At the bottom, they rammed wooden pegs into slots they had cut, and filled the slots with water. The pegs would expand, splitting the rock.