Three great stone pyramids on the Giza plateau outside modern Cairo, built during Egypt's Fourth Dynasty in the Old Kingdom, roughly 2600 to 2500 BCE. The largest, the Great Pyramid of Khufu, rose about 146 metres and was the tallest human-made structure on earth for nearly four thousand years. With the pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure, the Great Sphinx, queens' pyramids, and mortuary temples, they formed royal burial complexes meant to turn a dead king into a god. Built by a large organized workforce, not by enslaved Israelites or whip-driven slaves, they are the only surviving Wonder of the ancient world and the global emblem of Egypt.
For nearly four thousand years, the tallest thing any human being had ever built stood on a desert plateau west of the Nile. Cathedrals rose and fell, empires came and went, and still nothing on earth reached higher than the Great Pyramid of Khufu. When its smooth white casing was intact, it caught the sun and could be seen from far across the valley, a mountain made by hands. The pharaoh it was built for had been dead for centuries before the first Greek tourist arrived to gawk. The tomb had already become what it remains: a machine for defeating time.