How were the pyramids built?
Stone Mountain Recipe
How were the pyramids built?
The Great Pyramid of Giza towers over the Egyptian desert — a mountain of stone blocks, each weighing as much as a small car, stacked higher than a 40-story building. For thousands of years, people have looked at it and wondered: how did workers without cranes, trucks, or power tools pull this off?
First, the basics: the pyramid is made of about 2.3 million stone blocks. Quarries near the Nile River gave up most of them — teams of workers used copper chisels and wooden wedges to split limestone away from the rock face. They'd hammer wedges into cracks, soak the wood with water, and let the swelling wood pop the stone free like opening a giant stone pistachio.
