All three pyramids rose during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom. The Great Pyramid, built for Khufu around 2560 BC, originally stood 146.6 meters tall and held the record as the world's tallest human-made structure for more than 3,800 years. A few hundred meters to the southwest, Khafre's pyramid appears taller thanks to its elevated bedrock platform but is actually slightly smaller. Menkaure's pyramid, farther southwest still, is the most modest of the three. The Great Sphinx, carved from the natural limestone bedrock on the east side of the complex, is widely attributed to Khafre -- its face perhaps bearing his likeness. Along with these monuments stand queens' pyramids, mortuary temples, valley temples, and boat pits, including the one that housed the 4,600-year-old Khufu ship, now displayed at the Grand Egyptian Museum.

When Herodotus visited in 450 BC, Egyptian priests told him the Great Pyramid took 100,000 men twenty years to build, working in rotating three-month gangs. Modern archaeology tells a different story. Excavations of a workers' village dating to the reigns of Khafre and Menkaure (roughly 2520-2472 BC) reveal something remarkable: not a slave camp, but a planned settlement -- one of the world's earliest examples of urban planning. Evidence from tombs indicates a workforce of around 10,000 laborers rotating in three-month shifts over approximately thirty years. They were fed with bread baked on-site, their injuries treated by physicians, and their dead buried in simple but dignified tombs nearby. Bakers, carpenters, and water carriers supported the stone-cutters and haulers. The metal they processed was arsenical copper, hard enough to shape limestone but soft enough to require constant resharpening.

The sides of all three pyramids are oriented to the cardinal directions within a fraction of a degree -- an achievement that still impresses surveyors. How the builders accomplished this without magnetic compasses remains debated: some scholars favor tracking the shadow of a vertical rod throughout a day, others the simultaneous transit of polar stars. The disputed Orion correlation theory goes further, arguing that the three pyramids mirror the belt stars of Orion, though most Egyptologists remain skeptical. What is certain is that the plateau was alive with astronomical observation. Pharaoh Thutmose IV, visiting a thousand years after construction, reported that the Sphinx spoke to him in a dream, promising kingship if he cleared the encroaching sand. He did, and recorded the event on the Dream Stele still standing between the Sphinx's front paws.

Giza never stopped attracting visitors. Roman emperors cleared sand from the Sphinx. Medieval Arab scholars debated whether the pyramids were granaries built by the biblical Joseph. In 1902, the Egyptian Antiquities Service divided the necropolis among Italian, German, and American excavation teams -- Reisner's wife drew lots from a hat to assign the plots. The twentieth century brought a different kind of attention. In 1978, the Grateful Dead played concerts at the foot of the pyramids, later released as Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978. In 2007, Shakira performed for roughly 100,000 people. Today, electric buses shuttle visitors past a new restaurant, the 9 Pyramids Lounge, and free Wi-Fi covers the site. The pyramids have outlasted every empire that claimed them. They will likely outlast the Wi-Fi too.