Egypt’s Pyramid-Building Mystery Outlasts a Wave of Rival New Studies

Two rival teams of scientists have each claimed, within the past ten months, to have solved how workers raised 2.3 million stone blocks into the Great Pyramid of Giza. Neither has cut into the stone to prove it.

The renewed attention traces partly to twin 5,000 year old tombs unearthed at Jabal Al-Tayr, north of Minya, where stepped mudbrick walls sparked headlines about pyramid origins. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said only that the style “may represent an early stage in the development of geometric thought that later led to the appearance of the terraced pyramid, then the full pyramid.” The bigger question, how the blocks themselves got lifted, is still open, and Egypt’s own Egyptologists say the newest computer models have not closed it.

A Ten-Month Run of Rival Pyramid Papers

Two peer-reviewed papers, published in the same journal ten months apart, offer flatly different answers to how Old Kingdom crews lifted stones weighing up to 60 tonnes without a single crane.

In September 2025, a paper proposed pulley systems fueled by sliding counterweights running down the pyramid’s internal passages, arguing the Grand Gallery worked as machinery rather than a ceremonial corridor. Its author, Simon Andreas Scheuring, is a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, not an engineering department.

Seven months later, a different fix arrived. A computational model tested a helical ramp built into the pyramid’s own edge, backfilled course by course as the structure rose. Vicente Luis Rosell Roig, the independent researcher behind it, has said he began sketching the idea in 2020 after watching a documentary about the monument.

Both sit alongside two older, still-unsettled proposals.

None of the four has been checked against the actual masonry. Scans, papyrus fragments and math are the only evidence any of them can offer so far.

The Sheer Weight of the Problem

The math explains why the theories keep multiplying. Every proposal has to account for the same brutal numbers.

• 2.3 million blocks make up the Great Pyramid, most limestone cut from the Giza plateau itself.
• 1.5 to 5 tonnes was the weight of an average block, with granite roofing beams over the King’s Chamber running up to 80 tonnes.
• 146 meters tall at completion, a height no human structure surpassed for more than 3,700 years.
• 20 to 27 years is the construction window researchers place the project within, built between roughly 2580 and 2560 BCE.

Scheuring’s paper argues that finishing on that schedule meant placing a block roughly every minute, a pace he says only pulleys and counterweights can explain. Roig’s model instead proposes an adaptive system of up to 16 ramps at once, tapering to one as the pyramid narrowed, dispatching blocks every four to six minutes.

Why Won’t the Ramp Math Add Up?

A single straight ramp gentle enough to drag multi-tonne sledges would need to stretch roughly 1.5 kilometers, containing more rubble than the pyramid itself holds. No dig has ever found remains of a structure that size, which is exactly why alternatives keep appearing instead of the simplest option.

Roland Enmarch, a reader in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool and a former editor of The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, has read both the hydraulic-lift paper on Djoser’s pyramid and the newer edge-ramp model. He isn’t ready to declare either one solved.

On the hydraulic theory, he said the numbers simply don’t hold together physically, since the elevations involved aren’t different enough for the pressure to work as described. On the edge-ramp paper, his read is warmer but still guarded. He called the assumptions about labor and time plausible on paper.

With any kind of complex calculation, it only takes a few of the variables to be a bit different for the result to look massively different.

Enmarch made that point about the edge-ramp model specifically, but it applies to the whole field. Every one of these papers depends on assumptions about crew size, sledge friction, and daily working hours that nobody alive watched happen.

The Evidence Archaeologists Trust

Away from the competing computer models, there’s a smaller body of evidence Egyptologists treat as settled, because it came out of the ground rather than out of a spreadsheet.

• Quarry marks and copper tools found across Giza and Aswan show how blocks were cut and dressed before ever reaching a ramp.
• Workers’ villages near the pyramids held thousands of laborers, evidence that the crews were paid or working off tax obligations rather than enslaved.
• The Hatnub ramp, a quarry ramp cut into rock and discovered by Enmarch’s own team in 2018, showed a slope steeper than 20 percent, twice what earlier estimates assumed was possible.
• Papyrus logs uncovered at Wadi al-Jarf describe crews moving limestone blocks down the Nile, confirming river transport was part of the supply chain.

Enmarch has said much of the workforce was likely Egyptian peasants paying their tax in labor as part of their duties to the state, rather than the slave gangs of Greek legend. None of that evidence explains the final lift to 146 meters. It just narrows what any winning theory has to be consistent with.

What Would Hawass’s 2026 Reveal Change?

Zahi Hawass has promised a 2026 announcement about a newly located 30-meter corridor inside the Great Pyramid, sealed behind a stone door. Whatever sits behind it could add new detail to the internal engineering debate, but Hawass says a full scientific report will come before any public unveiling.

Egypt’s former antiquities minister described the find at the Sharjah International Book Fair in November 2025. He outlined ramp systems and quarry logistics while rejecting fringe theories about the pyramid’s origins.

What we know:

• The ScanPyramids project, led by Cairo University and the French Heritage Innovation Preservation Institute, used muon tomography to find the corridor behind the pyramid’s north face.
• Robots with cameras have reached and cleaned the passage down to a sealed stone door.

What’s unconfirmed:

• Whether anything lies beyond the door, and whether it connects to Khufu’s actual burial chamber.
• The exact date of the 2026 unveiling.

“No extraterrestrial beings or supernatural forces were involved,” Hawass said, according to Al Arabiya, dismissing the alien-builder theory that has circulated since Erich von Daniken’s 1968 bestseller made it famous.

One Question Physics Just Settled

While the ramp debate stays open, a separate study answered something else entirely: why the Great Pyramid is still standing after earthquakes in 1847 and 1992, plus millennia of seismic activity before anyone was recording it.

Mohamed ElGabry, a professor at Egypt’s National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, led a team that took field measurements inside the pyramid’s Relieving Chambers to calculate its natural frequency, the same kind of measurement engineers now run on modern buildings. The findings published in Scientific Reports in May 2026 point to internal pressure-relieving chambers and a limestone-plateau foundation as the reasons the structure never resonates dangerously with the ground beneath it.

ElGabry called the measurements important simply because nobody had taken them for the Great Pyramid before. He was careful about what the finding does and doesn’t prove.

“It doesn’t mean they knew, at that time, all the physics we know today. For sure they didn’t,” ElGabry said. He pointed instead to the Bent Pyramid at Dahshur and the stepped design at Saqqara as signs the builders were learning by doing, adapting through trial and error rather than working from a textbook.

That distinction matters for anyone reading the 2026 headlines. The earthquake study is genuinely new, peer-reviewed science. It explains survival, not assembly.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Many Blocks Make Up the Great Pyramid of Giza?

About 2.3 million blocks form the structure, most of them limestone quarried close to the site, with harder granite for internal chambers hauled from Aswan, roughly 800 kilometers to the south by river.

Did Enslaved People Build Egypt’s Pyramids?

No credible evidence supports that. Workers’ villages near Giza show laborers were housed, fed and organized in crews, consistent with paid work or labor owed as tax rather than slavery, a picture Enmarch and other Egyptologists say has replaced the old Greek-derived slave narrative.

What Is the Integrated Edge-Ramp Theory?

It’s the 2026 model proposing a spiral ramp built into the pyramid’s own edge and hidden inside the finished stone. One reason researchers take it seriously is testability: its predicted ramp angle, about 7.4 to 7.5 degrees, lines up with voids the ScanPyramids muon survey already mapped in 2016 and 2017, giving future scans a specific prediction to confirm or rule out.

Does the Earthquake Study Explain How the Pyramid Was Built?

No. The Scientific Reports paper explains why the structure has resisted earthquakes for roughly 4,600 years through its natural frequency and internal relieving chambers. It says nothing about how the blocks were lifted into place in the first place.

Why Don’t Archaeologists Just Drill In to Test These Theories?

Egypt’s antiquities protections rule out invasive testing on a monument this significant and fragile. That’s why the hydraulic-lift theory at Djoser and the newer edge-ramp model at Giza have only been tested through non-invasive scanning and computer modeling, never by cutting into the stone itself.

When Will Zahi Hawass Reveal His 2026 Discovery?

No firm date has been set. Hawass has said only that an international team will publish a scientific report after exhaustive analysis of the muon and 3D-mapping data, and that the report will come before any public unveiling of what lies behind the sealed door.

For now, no one is proposing to cut into the Great Pyramid to check any of it. Egypt’s antiquities rules won’t allow it, and the stone isn’t talking.