A mountain with a thin thread inside
The Great Pyramid contains about 2.5 million cubic metres of stone. The spaces inside, laid end to end, would barely fill a small house. Look at a cross-section and you see a thin thread of corridors running through a solid mass. Each of them had a purpose: to lead the king’s body to its chamber, to protect it, and to stop the weight above from crushing it.
From the entrance to the King’s Chamber
The original entrance is on the north face, about 17 metres above the ground, under a pair of huge limestone blocks leaning against each other like a roof. From there a narrow passage, about a metre high, slopes down through the masonry and into the bedrock, ending in an unfinished chamber some 30 metres below the base. It may have been the first plan for the burial, later abandoned.
Partway down, a second passage climbs up. Its lower end was blocked with granite plugs slid down from above after the funeral. Around 820 CE, according to tradition, workers of the caliph al-Ma’mun of Baghdad dug a tunnel through the solid stone, missed the passage, heard a block fall, and turned towards the sound. They came out just beside the granite plugs and went round them. Visitors still enter the pyramid through their tunnel today.
The ascending passage leads to the Grand Gallery, the most astonishing space in the pyramid: about 47 metres long and 8.6 metres high, with walls that step inwards in seven courses. This technique is called corbelling, from the old French corbel, a projecting bracket: each row of stone sticks out a few centimetres beyond the one below, until the two sides are close enough to cover with a short beam. The gallery may also have served to store the granite plugs before they were slid into place.
A horizontal passage at the foot of the gallery leads to the so-called Queen’s Chamber, a room of about 5.7 by 5.2 metres with a gabled ceiling. The name was given by early Arab explorers. No queen was ever buried there, and it probably held a statue of the king or ritual equipment.
A granite box under five hidden rooms
At the top of the gallery, through a low antechamber once closed by sliding stone slabs, you reach the King’s Chamber. It is a box of red granite from Aswan, about 10.5 by 5.2 metres and 5.8 high, roofed with nine granite beams weighing tens of tonnes each. At the west end stands an empty, lidless granite sarcophagus. It is slightly wider than the passage, so it must have been placed in the chamber while the pyramid was being built.
A flat ceiling under thousands of tonnes of stone would crack. So above the chamber the builders stacked five low compartments, the relieving chambers, each roofed with granite beams, and capped them with a pair of huge limestone blocks leaning against each other. The weight of the pyramid runs down the sloping blocks to the sides, around the King’s Chamber instead of on it. The beams did crack in antiquity, probably in an earthquake, but the roof held.
The relieving chambers were never meant to be seen. The British diplomat Nathaniel Davison found the lowest one in 1765. In 1837 Colonel Howard Vyse blasted his way up with gunpowder and found the other four. On their walls, untouched since they were sealed, were marks painted in red by the builders: levelling lines, instructions, and the names of the work gangs, such as “the gang Friends of Khufu”. Together with the Diary of Merer, they are among the strongest proofs of who built the pyramid, and when. For tools, ramps and workers, see our guide to how the pyramids were built.
Shafts, robots and voids
Two narrow shafts, about 20 cm square, run from the King’s Chamber to the outer faces of the pyramid. They may have been for the king’s spirit to rise to the northern stars and to Orion; nobody knows for sure. The two shafts from the Queen’s Chamber stop inside the masonry. In 1993 the German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink sent a small robot, Upuaut 2, up the southern one: after about 60 metres it found a small limestone slab with two copper pins. A camera pushed through a hole in 2011 saw red marks painted behind it. What it closes is still unknown.
Since 2017, muon scans have also revealed empty spaces inside the pyramid, including a large void above the Grand Gallery and a short corridor behind the north face, explored with a camera in 2023. They are more likely construction spaces or relieving structures than secret treasure rooms.
Is there a pyramid inside the pyramid?
The idea comes up often online. Does a smaller pyramid hide inside the Great Pyramid? No: the scans and the passages show a solid core of masonry, with no buried monument. But the idea is not absurd, because some earlier pyramids really did grow in layers. Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara began as a single flat tomb, a mastaba like the mudbrick tombs of the first kings, and was enlarged twice until it had six steps. At Meidum, a step pyramid was later filled in and cased to make a true pyramid, and when the outer casing collapsed the stepped core was left standing like a tower. At Dahshur, the Bent Pyramid changes angle halfway up. By the time of Khufu, builders had learned to plan the true pyramid from the start.
Khafre and Menkaure: simpler, but full of stories
The two other pyramids of Giza have simpler interiors, with passages leading down to burial chambers cut mostly into the bedrock. Khafre’s, the middle one, still keeps part of its casing at the top. In 1818 the Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Belzoni found its entrance, reached the burial chamber and painted his name on the wall, where it still is. Menkaure’s, the smallest, has a chamber lined with granite and a room with carved niches. Its basalt sarcophagus, removed by Vyse, was shipped to England in 1838 aboard the merchant ship Beatrice, which sank off the coast of Spain. It has never been found.
Where to see it
On the Giza plateau, the inside of the Great Pyramid needs a separate ticket, and the number of visitors is limited; the Grand Gallery and the King’s Chamber are open, the subterranean chamber and the Queen’s Chamber usually are not. Khafre’s and Menkaure’s pyramids open in rotation. The passages are steep, low and humid, so they are not for everyone. Meidum and the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur are an hour or two south of Cairo and much quieter. Check current openings with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. To place the pyramids in the wider history of Egyptian architecture, start from the temples.
Sources
- M. Lehner, The Complete Pyramids (1997).
- Harvard University, Giza Project, “Royal pyramid complexes”.
- R. W. H. Vyse, Operations Carried On at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837 (1840-42).
- R. Gantenbrink, The Upuaut Project (1992-1993).
- K. Morishima et al., Nature 552 (2017); S. Procureur et al., Nature Communications 14 (2023).
- G. B. Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries… in Egypt and Nubia (1820).
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