Why are the Pyramids of Giza important?

The question of why the Pyramids of Giza are important is usually answered with a list: the largest, the oldest, the last surviving wonder of the ancient world. This list is partly incorrect and explains the wrong things.

Because here two things converge that have nothing to do with each other. Fame arises from visibility, size, and longevity. Significance arises from what an object attests to, which could not be proven anywhere else. A structure can be very famous and scientifically unproductive, and there are sites of enormous significance that no one photographs.

At Giza, both aspects come together, but for different reasons, and the reasons for its significance are less well known. They lie not in the height, but in the administration, planning, and surveying technology required to achieve that height. And they lie in a second circumstance that hardly anyone mentions: It was at these structures that archaeology became the science it is today.

This page separates the two strands. First fame, because it is quickly explained. Then significance in two parts, once as testimony to the time when they were built, and once as a touchstone for the methods by which we investigate the past. And finally, the justifications that are often cited but do not hold up.

Famous because they were never gone

If you ask why the Pyramids of Giza are famous, you get an unromantic but complete answer: because they were never gone.

Most ancient structures have become ruins, built over, dismantled, or buried. These stood continuously visible on the edge of a densely populated valley, on one of the most traveled routes of the ancient world. For roughly 3,800 years, the largest of them was the tallest structure of humanity, until the central tower of an English cathedral surpassed it in the early 14th century. Its height is an estimate, and it collapsed in 1548. The pyramid remains.

Remarkable is less the duration than the uninterrupted nature of the attention. Already in the New Kingdom, more than a thousand years after their construction, the complexes were a destination for travelers and a place of veneration. In Greek and Roman times, visitors came from across the Mediterranean and left inscriptions with names and places of origin, a precursor to the guestbook. There is hardly another structure that has been visited continuously for four and a half millennia.

How vast this gap is becomes clear from a single calculation. Between the construction of the largest pyramid and the reign of Cleopatra lies roughly 2,500 years. Between Cleopatra and the first moon landing lies roughly 2,000 years. Thus, the last queen of Egypt lived closer to spaceflight than to the construction of the structure that was already ancient to her. Standing before the complex, one does not look back at antiquity, but at something that was unimaginably distant even to antiquity itself.

Today, this continues in numbers. The site counts several million paying visitors annually, and its silhouette has become a symbol understood without caption. This fully explains its fame. It says nothing about its significance.

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Not the height, but the accuracy

Let us turn to the first of the two serious reasons. If you want to know why the Great Pyramid of Khufu is important, you must look away from the height and focus on the accuracy.

The four sides of the largest pyramid are aligned with the cardinal directions, and the deviation from true north lies, depending on the measurement, at three to six arcminutes, i.e., less than one-tenth of a degree. Even more telling is a second finding: The neighboring pyramid and an older complex further south deviate by similar amounts and in the same direction according to the same surveys. A single lucky guess looks different. The pattern points to a procedure that was repeatable and passed down.

That is the real point. This accuracy was achieved without iron tools, without the wheel as a means of transport, without a compass, and without optics. What was needed for this was not secret knowledge, but organization: an administration that planned for decades, brought labor forces in shifts, fed and housed them, transported material from several hundred kilometers away, and documented the process so that it remained controllable.

How far this organization reached is shown by a single material. The beams of the burial chamber inside consist of granite, and granite does not exist in Egypt near Giza, but only around eight hundred river kilometers further south at Aswan. Blocks weighing many tons had to be quarried there, loaded, brought down the Nile, unloaded, and hauled onto the plateau, in rhythm with a construction schedule that could not wait. This is not a question of muscle power, but of scheduling.

Thus, the structures are the earliest surviving proof that a state could do such a thing. Not the proof that humans can move heavy stones, which was known beforehand. But the proof that a society could sustain a project of this magnitude for two generations without breaking apart. The structure is, so to speak, the byproduct. The actual find is the administration behind it.

The place where a hypothesis broke

The second reason is the more surprising one, because it does not lie in the past, but in the history of science in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 1864, the Scottish court astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth traveled to Giza to prove a thesis: That a divinely given unit of measurement was hidden in the dimensions of the largest pyramid, from which the British inch derived. He published extensive measurements and became very successful with it. In 1880, a young surveyor followed, whose father was convinced of the same thesis, and measured afterwards. Over two years, he systematically recorded the complex, more accurately than anyone before him.

The result went against the thesis. The dimensions could be explained most simply using the Egyptian cubit according to the new recordings, i.e., with the measure used by the builders themselves. The young surveyor was Flinders Petrie, and from the working method he developed during this process, field archaeology emerged: record everything, even the inconspicuous, date everything, read nothing into it.

Concretely, this meant three things: record everything, including fragments and seemingly worthless items; document exactly where it lay; and date finds based on their morphological development rather than the excavator's estimation. Before Petrie, excavation in large parts was a search for presentable objects, afterwards it was a recording of the entire context. That this turnaround occurred precisely at a structure where a mystical theory was to be tested belongs to the useful ironies of the history of science.

The site has retained this role. Because so much is known and so much is unknown about the structures, new procedures are regularly tested here first. Muon radiography, which uses cosmic particles to penetrate rock, detected a large cavity above the Grand Gallery here in 2017; a second corridor behind the stone beams on the north side was confirmed in 2025 through the combination of several methods. The structures are thus not just a find, but a permanent test field.

Justifications that do not hold up

Let us remain with the justifications one often hears but which do not hold up.

It is not the oldest pyramid. Roughly a century earlier, a step pyramid arose in Saqqara, and the father of the patron of Giza had already erected three large complexes before that, where the geometric form was first developed. Giza is the peak of a development, not its beginning. This is not a diminishment, quite the opposite: The comparison with the predecessors makes visible how much was learned there.

The argument of uniqueness also holds only limited weight. Aligned large-scale structures exist in several cultures. What sets Giza apart is the combination of size, accuracy, condition, and datability at a single location.

A special case is the figure in front. If you ask why the Great Sphinx is important, you get an answer that has less to do with art than with layers of time. The figure was already buried in the sand up to its neck in the New Kingdom, more than a thousand years after its creation. A king had it cleared and placed a stele between its paws, documenting this process. Thus, the site documents its own rediscovery, emerging from antiquity. Such self-testimonies regarding how a culture dealt with its own past are extremely rare.

And finally: Significance is not something a structure possesses. It arises from the questions that can be answered by it. At Giza, there are unusually many such questions, and some of them remain open.