How old are the Egyptian pyramids?

The most famous pyramids, the great ones at Giza, are roughly 4,500 years old. The Great Pyramid of Giza, built for the pharaoh Khufu, dates to around 2560 BC, with its neighbors built shortly after. Earlier pyramids are older still: the Step Pyramid of Djoser, considered Egypt's first pyramid, dates to about 2670 BC, meaning the Egyptian pyramid-building tradition stretches back more than 4,600 years. These structures were built during Egypt's Old Kingdom, a period of astonishing organization and engineering, and the Great Pyramid remained the tallest human-made structure on Earth for nearly four thousand years afterward.

The staggering way to grasp this age is through Cleopatra, Egypt's famous last pharaoh, who lived around 30 BC. She lived closer in time to the present day, to the era of smartphones and space travel, than she did to the construction of the Great Pyramid, which was already some 2,500 years old in her lifetime. The pyramids were ancient ruins, objects of wonder and tourism, to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and Romans themselves. When you stand before the Great Pyramid, you are looking at something that was already impossibly old when Rome was founded, when Greece built the Parthenon, when the events of the Hebrew Bible unfolded. That depth of time is genuinely hard for the human mind to hold, which is part of why the pyramids remain so awe-inspiring: they are among the oldest and largest human-made monuments still standing, built by a civilization at the dawn of recorded history and enduring, essentially intact, across nearly five millennia.