Giza's pyramids, and the city that grew up around them

Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World listed by classical writers, only one still stands in anything like its original form. The Great Pyramid of Giza, built as a tomb for the pharaoh Khufu around the middle of the third millennium BC, held the record as the tallest human-made structure on Earth for roughly four thousand years, a span so long it makes most modern records look provisional by comparison.

An engineering problem nobody has fully explained

The pyramid's scale is easier to state than to picture: originally faced in polished white limestone, most of which was later stripped for other building projects, it was built from an estimated two million blocks of stone, some weighing several tonnes, without the wheel, iron tools or draught animals playing any confirmed major role in the process. Exactly how the ancient Egyptians moved and positioned stone on this scale remains debated among archaeologists and engineers, with theories ranging from ramps of various designs to methods not yet fully understood, a genuinely open question that keeps the pyramid interesting to specialists as well as visitors.

The Sphinx, and a nose nobody can properly explain either

Nearby, the Great Sphinx, carved from a single outcrop of limestone with a lion's body and a human head generally believed to represent the pharaoh Khafre, is the largest monolithic statue in the world. Its missing nose has attracted more speculation than almost any other detail of ancient Egyptian archaeology, with reliable accounts placing the damage well before modern times; the popular story blaming Napoleon's soldiers for target practice does not hold up against the evidence, and the true cause remains, like so much else about the site, genuinely uncertain.

A capital that came much later

Modern Cairo is, by Egyptian standards, a young city: founded in the tenth century AD, more than three and a half thousand years after the pyramids were built, some distance from the earlier capital of Memphis whose ruins lie a little further south. Over the following centuries Cairo grew into one of the great cities of the Islamic world, filled with mosques, minarets and a historic core still known for its architecture, and in the modern era it has simply kept expanding, its suburbs now reaching most of the way to the edge of the Giza plateau itself. A recently built museum near the plateau has been designed specifically to house a fuller display of the treasures recovered from Tutankhamun's tomb, drawing the ancient site and the modern city a little closer together still.

Alexandria, a different kind of Egyptian city

North on the Mediterranean coast, Alexandria offers a useful contrast to both Cairo and Giza. Founded by Alexander the Great and built explicitly as a Greek city on Egyptian soil, it looked outward to the wider Mediterranean world in a way Cairo, oriented inland along the Nile, never quite did, and its ruins and museums tell a story of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt rather than the pharaonic one that dominates further south.

Giza's plateau in fact holds three major pyramids rather than one, built for Khufu, his son Khafre and his grandson Menkaure across successive generations, along with a cluster of smaller subsidiary pyramids built for queens and other family members nearby. Khafre's pyramid, though slightly shorter than his father's, appears taller from some angles because it sits on higher ground, and it retains a small cap of its original smooth limestone casing near the summit, a rare surviving hint of how brilliantly white and reflective the whole structure would once have looked under the desert sun.

Old stone, new suburbs

What makes Giza worth the visit is not simply the scale of the pyramids, striking as that remains, but the strangeness of their setting: a monument built deliberately on the desert edge, away from the city of its day, now standing at the literal edge of a metropolis of more than twenty million people. Few ancient wonders anywhere in the world have ended up quite this close to quite so much modern life going on around them.