The Great Pyramid of Giza: The One Ancient Wonder Still Standing, and an Honorary Modern One Too

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built as a tomb for the pharaoh Khufu, the second ruler of Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty, over an estimated 10 to 20 years starting around 2560 BC. It originally stood 146.6 meters tall, a height not surpassed by any human-made structure on Earth for roughly 3,800 years, until England’s Lincoln Cathedral was completed in the 14th century AD. Millennia of erosion, earthquake damage, and the removal of its original polished limestone casing stones, quarried and hauled away for other building projects in medieval Cairo, have brought its current height down to about 138.5 meters, still enormous, just no longer record-setting.

The scale of the construction project remains difficult to fully process even with modern engineering knowledge. Estimates put the pyramid’s total mass at roughly 5.9 million tons, built from an estimated 2.3 million individual limestone and granite blocks averaging about 2.5 tons each, with some interior blocks weighing far more. How Khufu’s builders quarried, transported, and precisely stacked that much stone without modern machinery remains debated in its engineering specifics, ramps, sledges, and levers are all part of the accepted general picture, but the exact construction sequence isn’t settled, even as the broader consensus is clear that it was built by a rotating, largely seasonal workforce of skilled laborers and farmers, not by slaves, a popular misconception that excavated worker settlements and cemeteries near the pyramid have substantially undermined.

The Great Pyramid holds a distinction none of the ancient world’s other celebrated wonders can claim: it’s the only one of the classical Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a list first compiled by Hellenistic writers including Antipater of Sidon, still standing largely intact. The Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the rest have all been destroyed by earthquake, war, or time, leaving Giza’s pyramid as the sole physical survivor of a list that’s over 2,000 years old.

That singular status carried into the modern era in an unusual way. When the New7Wonders Foundation organized a global public vote in the mid-2000s to select a new, contemporary list of Seven Wonders, the Great Pyramid was deliberately excluded from the voting itself. The Egyptian government objected to having one of the ancient world’s most storied monuments subjected to a public popularity contest against modern sites, and in response to that pushback organizers granted it automatic, non-competing “honorary” status when the New7Wonders results were announced in 2007, a designation UNESCO itself has publicly distanced from, since the organization has no official connection to the privately run New7Wonders campaign despite public confusion conflating the two.