THE GREAT STONE TENT
Cheops was the name of a king in ancient Egypt who wanted a place to
stay when he died. So, he ordered his men to build a huge stone house in
the shape of a pyramid. A pyramid looks somewhat like an enormous tent.
The base of this pyramid is almost large enough to fill ten football
fields. Its peak is as high as a stairway with more than eight hundred
stairs.
How did the men build the pyramid? They didn’t have trucks, cranes, or
bulldozers to help them. Each stone weighed as much as four cows. How
did the men lift these giant stones to the top of the pyramid? Maybe the
men pulled the giant stones up a ramp on sleds as you see in the
picture. Nobody really knows. But we do know that the pyramid took
twenty years to build.
Today, we could build the Great Pyramid in less than a year.
The Great Pyramid still stands in Egypt, and people come from all over
the world to see the great wonder that was built more than four thousand
years ago—the only ancient wonder of the world still standing.
