Pyramids of Giza

The Giza plateau holds three royal pyramids, a sphinx, several queens' pyramids, a field of mastaba tombs and two boat pits. Most visitors see it in about two hours, which is enough for the three big pyramids and the Sphinx and not enough for anything else.

The thing worth knowing before you arrive is that Giza is not a monument you look at from one spot. It is a working archaeological site roughly two kilometres across, on open desert, with no shade. How much you enjoy it depends almost entirely on what time you get there and whether you have a way to move around it.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the last surviving member of the ancient list of seven wonders. It held the record for the tallest structure made by people for something like 3,800 years — a span longer than the time between its own completion and the Roman conquest of Egypt.

But the reason to go is not the record. It is the masonry. Standing at the base, the individual blocks are chest height and there are about 2.3 million of them, cut and set without iron tools, without pulleys as we would recognise them, and without a wheel that could carry that weight over sand. No photograph carries that. The pyramids are one of the few famous things that are genuinely more impressive in person than in pictures.

The second reason is the panorama point on the ridge to the south-west, where all three pyramids line up. It is the single most photographed view in Egypt and it is a five-minute drive from the entrance.

All three pyramids belong to the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, built across roughly three generations in the 26th and 25th centuries BC. Khufu built the largest, his son Khafre the middle one — it looks taller because it stands on higher ground and still keeps a cap of its original casing stone — and Khafre's successor Menkaure the smallest.

They were never standalone objects. Each pyramid was the centrepiece of a complex: a valley temple down by the flood plain, a causeway climbing the escarpment, a mortuary temple at the pyramid's foot, and satellite pyramids for queens. Most of that is now foundations, but the layout is still legible on the ground, and Khafre's valley temple survives nearly intact.

The smooth white limestone that once covered all three was stripped over centuries for building material in medieval Cairo. What you see today is the stepped core. The cap still clinging to the top of Khafre's pyramid is the best surviving sample of what the whole plateau once looked like.

• The Great Pyramid of Khufu — the largest, and the only ancient wonder still standing
• Khafre's pyramid, with the original casing stone still in place at the summit
• The panorama viewpoint on the south-west ridge where all three line up
• Khafre's valley temple — massive granite piers, one of the best-preserved Old Kingdom buildings anywhere
• The mastaba fields, where the officials and craftsmen who built the pyramids were buried
• The Great Sphinx, at the end of Khafre's causeway