The Sphinx is a huge stone statue with the body of a lion and the head of a pharaoh; it is about 240 feet long and more than 65 feet tall. Much of it was carved directly out of the limestone rock of the Giza plateau, probably about 4,500 years ago. For most of its life, desert sand buried it, sometimes up to its shoulders. Khafre is credited with the statue because its limestone matches his pyramid's and its face resembles his statues, though there is no definitive proof that he built it. A popular story says Napoleon's troops shot off the Sphinx's nose; a drawing made in 1737 already shows the nose destroyed, and an Islamic source reported that the nose was removed in the late 14th century; the Egyptians never called the statue "the sphinx." That is a Greek word; in the New Kingdom they knew it as Horemakhet.

The three Giza pyramids were built within a 70-year span during the Fourth Dynasty, dated 2575-2465 B.C. Khafre's pyramid is about 471 feet tall, a little shorter than his father's. Until the Eiffel Tower was finished in 1889, the Great Pyramid was the tallest structure on Earth built by human hands; it held that record for over 3,000 years. Its granite beams for the inner chambers were quarried at Aswan, hundreds of miles south along the Nile, and a boat of Khufu's, made of about 1,700 pieces of wood, was found in a pit beside it in 1954. No mortar was used to hold the blocks in place. Hemiunu, Khufu's vizier and nephew, is credited with the design and building of the Great Pyramid, whose white limestone covering fell away long ago and was reused as building material for the city of Cairo.

Some of the best evidence comes from a diary. In 2013, a team found 30 papyri at the ancient port of Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea, the oldest inscribed papyrus ever found. They include a diary kept by an inspector named Merer, who led a crew of about 40 men on boats that carried limestone from the Tura quarries to Akhet Khufu, the Great Pyramid. At the port the team found some 130 anchors, a sign of a busy harbor that may have opened in the time of the pharaoh Sneferu; the Tura blocks were the sort used to encase the Great Pyramid, but they were most likely used as roofing for one of the pits near the pyramid. Boats would have been carried in parts across about 100 miles of desert to the Red Sea coast.

On the ground at Giza, archaeologists found not one workers' town but two, side by side. Mark Lehner suspects the first, which grew slowly, was the settlement of permanent workers. His team removed sand with trucks and front-end loaders and, by his account, exposed about five hectares of the workers' city. Estimates of how many people worked on the Great Pyramid have ranged widely, including the 100,000 cited by the Greek writer Herodotus. Egyptians also owed a kind of labor service, called bak, to people above them in society, and even the highest officials owed it. Work crews had team names such as "Friends of Khufu" and "Drunkards of Menkaure." Egypt did have slaves, but the pyramids were built by Egyptian laborers, and excavations have found no evidence of forced labor on them.

Words to know

• plateau: high flat land
• papyri: paper scrolls
• anchors: boat weights
• archaeologists: past diggers
• bak: labor service