The Great Pyramid of Giza

Of the seven wonders that Greek travelers listed more than two thousand years ago, only one survives, and it was already ancient when they saw it. The Great Pyramid of Giza was raised for the pharaoh Khufu around 2560 BCE, and for close to 3,800 years it was the tallest structure humans had built. Its precision still startles engineers: the base is level to within a few centimeters, and its sides align almost exactly with the cardinal directions. It is a royal tomb, a feat of state organization and the single most recognizable image of ancient Egypt. When the New7Wonders campaign ran its global vote in 2007, the organizers gave the pyramid honorary status rather than make it compete.

The pyramid stands on the Giza Plateau, a limestone shelf at the edge of the Western Desert, with the sprawl of greater Cairo pressing up to its foot. It was built from roughly 2.3 million blocks, most of local limestone, with granite hauled from Aswan for the King's Chamber deep inside. It originally rose about 146.6 meters and was sheathed in polished white Tura limestone. Most of that casing was stripped for building stone in medieval Cairo, and today the stepped core stands about 138.5 meters tall on a base about 230 meters on each side. Visitors can enter through a tunnel cut by early treasure hunters and climb the Grand Gallery. The pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure and the Great Sphinx stand close by.

Khufu belonged to Egypt's Fourth Dynasty, and the pyramid was likely built over about two decades by an organized, paid and fed workforce housed in a town south of the plateau, as excavated workers' cemeteries and the Wadi al-Jarf papyri now show. The spire of Lincoln Cathedral finally surpassed its height around 1311. Scientists are still finding new spaces inside: the ScanPyramids project detected a large void above the Grand Gallery in 2017 and confirmed a hidden corridor in 2023. The Grand Egyptian Museum, about 2 kilometers away, opened officially on November 1, 2025, and the plateau has shifted to a southern entrance with electric shuttles in place of tour coaches. Egypt drew a record of nearly 19 million international visitors in 2025, and Giza is the first stop for most of them.

• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
  The terraced gardens of ancient legend whose existence and location are still debated another ancient wonder
• The Lighthouse of Alexandria
  The towering Pharos that guided ships into Alexandria for some 1,500 years another ancient wonder
• Egypt
  The gift of the Nile and a bridge between Africa and Asia located in
• The Nile Valley
  A green ribbon through the desert, holding a hundred million people located in
• Cairo
  Egypt's capital, the Arab world's largest city beside the Nile near
• Nile
  The world's longest river, lifeblood of ancient Egypt stands beside the valley of