How tall are the Pyramids of Giza?

The short answer first, because most people are here for exactly that reason: The Great Pyramid of Khufu measures around 138.5 meters today. The Pyramid of Khafre reaches about 136.4 meters, and the Pyramid of Menkaure stands at approximately 61 meters.

The height of the Great Pyramid, as it is often written in German texts without a hyphen (Cheopspyramide), is the only one of these three figures that is actually debated. These numbers are correct, yet you will constantly find different ones in books and online. There you see 146.6 meters, 143.5 meters, 65 meters. Both sets of figures are right; they simply describe different points in time. Therefore, the height of the Pyramids of Giza is not just a number, but a number with a date attached.

The reason is simple: The pyramids have shrunk. Not subsided, not collapsed, but eroded away. What is missing is the smooth outer skin of fine limestone that once covered the entire structure and converged into an apex at the top. Without it, the Great Pyramid of Khufu is missing more than eight meters.

So, if you need a figure for school, a quiz, or a bet, you should specify which one is meant. The original height of 146.6 meters is the figure used by the builders, calculated up to the apex that once existed. The 138.5 meters is the figure a measuring device would yield today if standing on the plateau.

Interestingly, neither of these two numbers is exact. The pyramid stands on slightly uneven bedrock, its edges are chipped, and what counts as the end at the top is a matter of definition. Different surveys therefore arrive at values that differ by a few decimeters. For everyday purposes: just under 140 meters today, just under 147 back then.

A preliminary note on reliability: The dimensions of these three structures are among the most thoroughly investigated data in archaeology. The necropolis has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1979, it has been the subject of systematic surveying for over two hundred years, and the figures have been independently verified multiple times. If you read anywhere that the true height is kept secret or has never been determined, that is simply false.

The rest of this page explains where the missing meters went, why the middle pyramid looks taller than the highest one on almost every photo, and what 146 meters means in comparison to structures you know.

The missing meters now stand in Cairo

The missing meters are no mystery. They now stand in Cairo.

Originally, each of the three pyramids was clad with carefully cut white limestone from Tura. This layer was smooth, reflected light, and came to a point at the top. What you see today is the core masonry beneath, which was never intended for viewing and therefore looks rough.

The casing was removed primarily in the Middle Ages. After a severe earthquake in the 14th century, large amounts of it lay on the ground anyway, and a quarry with ready-cut material directly outside the city was a gift for the builders of Cairo. The blocks moved into mosques, palaces, and fortifications.

The trigger was a major earthquake in 1303, which tore large parts of the casing off the flanks. Suddenly, before the gates of Cairo, lay a pile of ready-cut, high-quality building stones for which no one had to operate a quarry anymore. What followed was not a plundering in the heat of the moment, but decades of orderly removal. Buildings from this period in the Old City of Cairo contain material that originally lay on the plateau. If you read the description of the original structure and then stand before the current pyramid, you can see the difference between a clad and an unclad structure.

Therefore, the upper finish of the Great Pyramid of Khufu is no longer an apex today, but a flat surface. Depending on how you count, it measures about nine to ten meters square, roughly the area of a large living room. On historical photos, travelers in suits sit there and picnic.

Whether there was ever an apex in the strict sense, a so-called pyramidion, is not secured. Such capstones have been found for other pyramids, made of granite or limestone, sometimes gilded. For the Great Pyramid of Khufu, there is none. Reports from Roman times already describe the apex as flattened. So both possibilities exist: It was removed early, or it was never placed.

On the Pyramid of Khafre, however, the proof is still there. The top meters retain their original casing, a light, smooth lid on the otherwise rough structure. From below, it looks like a hat. In fact, you are seeing the only significant remnant of the original appearance of all three pyramids.

Dmitrii Zhodzishskii

Why the middle pyramid appears larger

And now to the issue that triggers most discussions on the plateau. Anyone looking at the group from the east or south is sure: The middle pyramid is the largest. It is not.

Four effects work together here, and each one alone would be noticeable.

The most important is the ground. The Pyramid of Khafre stands on bedrock that is around ten meters higher than that under the Great Pyramid of Khufu. The plateau slopes towards the northeast, and the second pyramid was set further up. Its apex thus lies above that of its larger neighbor, even though the structure itself is lower. However, a pyramid is measured from its own base, not above sea level.

The second effect is the angle. Khafre rises at around 53 degrees, Khufu at about 51.5 degrees. One and a half degrees sounds like nothing, but it visibly changes the silhouette: The steeper pyramid appears more towering, the shallower one broader and stockier.

Third effect: the preserved lid. The light casing at the top draws the eye upward and gives the Pyramid of Khafre a clean finish, while the Great Pyramid of Khufu ends frayed at the top. A structure with a clear apex appears taller than one that frays at the top.

And fourthly, perspective. On most photos, including the famous ones, the photographer stands southwest, at the panorama point. From there, the Pyramid of Khafre is closer to the camera than the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Closer means larger in the image. This arrangement is so widespread that many people only know the pyramids in this order.

This can be exploited or avoided for photos, depending on what you want. If you want the Pyramid of Khafre to look monumental, go to the southwest and place it in the foreground. If you want to show the actual proportions, look for a position further east, roughly on the connecting line between the two structures, and step back far enough so that both bases are in the picture. Then the impression is correct, and the Great Pyramid of Khufu gets the size it deserves. A wide-angle lens intensifies the illusion, while a slight telephoto lens softens it.

Taken together, this results in one of the most persistent optical illusions in travel photography. If you want to test it on site: Stand between the two structures, at roughly equal distance, and look at the bases rather than the apices.

How big are the pyramids when you stand in front of them?

Numbers on a page are one thing. How big are the Pyramids of Giza when you actually stand in front of them?

The honest assessment is: smaller than expected first, then much larger. This is because there is nothing in the surroundings against which the eye can measure. No tree, no house, no vehicle near the structure. From a distance of two hundred meters, a pyramid therefore looks like a clean geometric object without reference.

This changes when approaching, and abruptly. The lowest stone courses are the thickest. A block at the base often reaches an adult's chest, and the course above that too, and the one above that too. As soon as you see a person at the base of the pyramid, the impression shifts. The human becomes the scale and shrinks to the size of a detail.

A second effect comes when circling. One side is 230 meters long, and you need a good twelve minutes for a round around the Great Pyramid of Khufu at a normal pace, more in sand. During this time, the view changes continuously, and the corners are the most interesting part because you can look along them up to the apex.

The trick to grasping the height

There is a trick to grasping the height after all. Find a spot on the north side where the wind has blown away the sand and the lowest courses are exposed, and count the stone courses upwards as far as you can. The Great Pyramid of Khufu has around 200 of them. The lowest are more than one and a half meters high, becoming thinner towards the top. Twenty courses are about as high as a residential house, and you haven't even reached a tenth of the way yet. This calculation works better than any comparison with a TV tower because you have the unit directly in front of you and can touch it with your hand.

Height on the plateau is rarely experienced as height anyway, but as area. You stand at a wall that runs upwards without you seeing the finish. This is why many visitors report that photos did not prepare them well: A photo shows a silhouette, on site you stand at an embankment of stone.

By the way, the height has a consequence that is easily overlooked: Range. Because the plateau is elevated and the structures rise almost 140 meters above it, they are visible from large parts of the western urban area of Cairo, from rooftop cafes, from the approach to the airport, from bridges over the Nile. Many travelers see their first pyramid not on the plateau, but accidentally between two high-rises while sitting in a taxi. However, they disappear completely in haze, and haze is common in Cairo. Those who want to see the silhouette from afar have the best chances in winter after a day of rain.

Those who want to experience the height as a number still have one option. From the panorama point in the southwest, all three structures lie in one line of sight, and the tiered arrangement makes the size differences between Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure truly visible for the first time.

How do you measure a pyramid?

The question remains: how do you measure something like this at all, and why do reputable sources cite slightly different numbers.

The basic problem is the base point. A pyramid does not begin on a clean line, but on a bedrock plateau that was leveled but is not equally high everywhere. Add sand, which has accumulated at the edges for millennia and covers the corners. Where exactly the measurement starts is therefore a decision, not a self-evidence.

The second problem is the apex. For the original height, one calculates to a point that no longer exists today. It is determined from the angle of inclination of the preserved surfaces and the base side, extending the edges mathematically upwards and seeing where they meet. If someone sets the angle differently by a tenth of a degree, they get a different height.

The calculation itself is simpler than it sounds. The base side is measurable; it lies on the ground and is exposed in several places. The angle of inclination can be determined from the preserved casing remnants and the slope of the core masonry. From half the base side and the angle, the height results via the tangent: 115.15 meters half base side, multiplied by the tangent of around 51.8 degrees, results in about 146.6 meters. If one calculates with 51.5 degrees instead, one lands at more than 144 meters. A third of a degree difference in the angle costs two and a half meters of height, and precisely this is where most of the deviations between sources originate.

Flinders Petrie set the standard for all later statements in the 1880s. He surveyed the plateau for months using theodolites and measuring chains, presenting an accuracy that Egyptology oriented itself to for a century. Modern methods, from laser scanning to satellite surveying, have confirmed his values in surprisingly many points and corrected them in a few.

Practically, this means for you: If one source writes 138.8 meters and another 138.5, they are not arguing. They just measured or rounded differently. Only when someone cites a number that deviates by several meters is a second look at the source worthwhile.

Why 146.6 meters and not a round number?

One question remains open with all these numbers, and it is the most interesting: Why 146.6 meters? Why not a round number?

The answer is that the height was not fixed. The inclination was fixed, and the height resulted from that.

Egyptian builders did not think in angle degrees. They described a slope with a quantity called Seked: How far does the surface recede horizontally while rising by one cubit? The royal cubit was divided into seven palms, each palm into four fingers. A Seked of five palms and two fingers therefore means: per cubit of height gain, the surface recedes by five and a half palms inward.

Exactly this value is hidden in the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Five and a half palms correspond to an inclination of around 51.8 degrees, and this is exactly the angle that the surveys deliver.

This calculation method is not transmitted from the construction period itself, but from later schoolbooks. The Rhind Papyrus in the British Museum contains a series of exercises that practice exactly this: Given are base side and height, sought is the Seked. Or conversely, given are base side and Seked, sought is the height. These are exercise tasks for aspiring officials, and they show that pyramid geometry in ancient Egypt was a craft with fixed rules, not a one-time stroke of genius.

Practically, this was a smart choice. An angle cannot be controlled on the construction site, but a ratio of palm to cubit can: You apply a measuring tool and measure afterwards. Every stonemason could check on every block whether the slope is correct without knowing the overall plan.

And that explains the crooked height. It is not a target value, but the result of a chosen base side and a chosen Seked. The builders determined how wide and how steep. How high, that calculated itself.

The smaller pyramids on the plateau

The three large pyramids are not the only ones on the plateau, and the smaller ones explain the height relationships.

East of the Great Pyramid of Khufu stand three significantly smaller structures, the Queen's Pyramids. Each reaches around thirty meters, partly less, and are heavily eroded today, so they rather resemble stone mounds. Next to a structure of 138 meters, they almost disappear, although each individually is a large tomb.

They are assigned to women from the closest circle of Khufu. Hetepheres is considered the likely owner of the northernmost one, the mother of the king, whose grave equipment was found in 1925 in a nearby shaft and is now in the museum. The other two are attributed to queens whose assignment is less certain. Additionally, there is a fourth, very small pyramid at the southeast corner, which was only recognized as a so-called cult pyramid in the 1990s. It was not a tomb, but belonged to the religious program of the complex, and that it was overlooked for so long says a lot about how much lies under sand on this plateau.

The Pyramid of Menkaure also belongs in this consideration. At around 61 meters, it is less than half as high as its two neighbors, and the difference in volume is even more drastic because the construction volume develops roughly with the third power of the height. It is therefore not just a slightly smaller third pyramid, but a structure of a completely different magnitude.

Why this is the case belongs to the open questions of Egyptology. Explanations range from economic exhaustion after two giant constructions to a shorter reign to a conscious change in religious focus, away from construction volume and towards temples and statues. None of this is proven.

If you count all structures together, you arrive at nine to eleven pyramids on the plateau depending on the counting method. The exact number depends on whether you include heavily destroyed cult pyramids.

Annie Spratt

Frequently asked questions

How tall is the Great Pyramid of Khufu?

Today around 138.5 meters, originally 146.6 meters. The difference is the missing outer casing.

Which of the three pyramids is the highest?

The Great Pyramid of Khufu, both then and today. The Pyramid of Khafre only appears higher because it stands on bedrock ten meters higher.

Was the Great Pyramid of Khufu really the tallest building in the world?

Yes, and for around 3,800 years, until the tower of Lincoln Cathedral was completed in 1311.

Can you climb the pyramid to experience the height?

No. Climbing is forbidden and penalized. The steps are irregularly high and the edges are rounded; there have been serious accidents.

What the number 146.6 does not say

Height is the number asked about most frequently for these structures, and simultaneously the one that explains the least.

146.6 meters say nothing about the fact that this height remained unsurpassed for almost four thousand years, not because no one wanted to build higher, but because no one could. They also say nothing about the fact that the number is the result of a plan that was fixed before the first stone, because the inclination of a pyramid cannot be corrected later.

And above all, they say nothing about how the last meters must have felt. Right at the top, on a workspace of a few square meters, without railings, with blocks that had to be hauled up from below, in a country without cranes.

For context, once again the European perspective: The tallest church tower in Germany, the Ulm Minster, surpasses the original Great Pyramid of Khufu by nearly fifteen meters. It was built in stages between 1377 and 1890, i.e., over more than five hundred years. The pyramid arose in about twenty.

If you want to remember just one number from this page, take not 146.6. Take 3,800. That many years this structure stood at the top before another people on another continent surpassed it.