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Inside a Pyramid

History · Year 3–Year 6

The Great Pyramid cut in half, outside and in.

About the inside a pyramid

The Great Pyramid of Giza, cut in half. A photograph of it is a triangle: every word a class is asked for, the burial chamber, the grand gallery, the passages and the shafts, is inside it where nobody can see. Two boards, the outside and then the inside, and Next carries on from one into the other.

The outside board is honestly to scale. The pyramid was 146.5m tall when it was finished and it was the tallest building in the world for about 3,800 years, which is longer than the time between it and us. It stands on rock rather than sand, which is a large part of why it is still there.

The inside board is a close-up, and it has to be. Every chamber in the pyramid sits within about 73m of the base, so drawn on the same board as the whole thing the passages are a scribble in the middle of a triangle. The close-up is the same pyramid at a larger scale, and the chambers are drawn bigger still, which the board says: the King's Chamber is about 10m by 5m inside a building 146m tall.

NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE SHAFTS WERE FOR, and that is the most useful thing on the board. Two narrow shafts run from the King's Chamber out through the masonry. They may have been for religion, or for air, and it is not settled. History is not a list of facts: it is what can be worked out from the evidence, and a question that is still open is worth more to a class than an answer somebody invented.

The Queen's Chamber was not a queen's. No queen was buried in it, nobody knows what it was for, and the name is a guess that stuck. It is labelled with the name every book uses, because that is the word a class will meet, and the line under it says what is actually known.

The pyramid was smooth and white when it was built. The core is local stone, about 2.3 million blocks of it, and over that went a casing of fine white limestone brought across the Nile from Tura and polished. Almost all of the casing was taken away in medieval times and used to build Cairo, which is why the pyramid we see is stepped and brown.

How to use it on your whiteboard

  1. 1Tap a part to name it. The whole shape is the target, not just the dot.
  2. 2Tap Next to work round the outside, then on into the inside.
  3. 3Ask the class what the shafts were for before you tap them.
  4. 4Tap Show all to put every label up, and Hide to ask the class again.

Questions

Who was the Great Pyramid built for?
King Khufu, who ruled about 2589 to 2566 BC. It was his tomb. His stone sarcophagus is still in the King's Chamber, and it is too big to have come up the passage, so it must have been put in place while the pyramid was being built around it.
What are the shafts for?
Nobody knows. Two narrow shafts run from the King's Chamber out through the masonry. Some think they had a religious purpose, pointing the king's spirit towards the stars; some think they were for ventilation. Reputable sources say plainly that it is not settled, so this board says so too.
Was a queen buried in the Queen's Chamber?
No. The name is a convention that stuck, and no queen was ever buried there. What it was actually for is unknown. It is one of three chambers: the unfinished one cut into the rock below, the Queen's Chamber, and the King's Chamber high up in the masonry.
Why does the real pyramid look stepped and brown?
Because its skin is missing. The core is local stone, and over it went a casing of fine white limestone, cut and polished so the whole pyramid was smooth and bright. Almost all of that casing was taken away in medieval times to build in Cairo, leaving the stepped core we see now.
Did slaves build the pyramids?
The evidence says no. Archaeologists have excavated the workers' town beside the pyramids, with bakeries, breweries and the remains of the food they were given, and the graves of workers buried with honour close to the king's tomb. It was an enormous organised workforce that was housed, fed and paid, not slave labour.