The first true pyramid is built by Sneferu, the first king of the Fourth Dynasty.

His son and successor, Khufu, builds the Great Pyramid at Giza (Al Jizah); this, with its two companions on the same site, is considered one of the wonders of the ancient world.

It contains well over two million blocks of limestone, some weighing fifteen tons apiece.

The casing stones of the Great Pyramid will be stripped off to build medieval Cairo (Al Qahirah).

The building and equipping of funerary monuments represents the single largest industry through the Old Kingdom and, after a break, the Middle Kingdom as well.

The channeling of so much of the country's resources into building and equipping funerary monuments may seem unproductive by modern standards, but pyramid building seems to have been essential for the growth of pharaonic civilization.

As Egyptologists have pointed out, in ancient societies innovations in technology arose not so much from deliberate research as from the consequences of developing lavish court projects.

Equally important, the continued consumption of so great a quantity of wealth and of the products of artisanship sustains the machinery that produces them by creating fresh demand as reign succeeds reign.

The pyramids of the pharaohs, the tombs of the elite, and the burial practices of the poorer classes are related to ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, particularly belief in the afterlife.

The Egyptian belief that life will continue after death in a form similar to that experienced on earth is an important element in the development of art and architecture that is not present in other cultures.

Thus, in Egypt, a dwelling place is provided for the dead in the form of a pyramid or a rock tomb.

Life is magically recreated in pictures on the walls of the tombs, and a substitute in stone is provided for the perishable body of the deceased.

Khaba, generally considered to have reigned near the end of the Third Dynasty, and thought to be the successor to Sekhemkhet, is believed to have reigned a relatively brief four years, dying anywhere from 2637 to 2599 BCE, although these dates are highly conjectural.

He is commonly associated with the Layer Pyramid, located at Zawiyet el'Aryan, about four kilometers south of Giza.

It is an unfinished pyramid whose construction is typical of Third Dynasty masonry and would have originally risen about forty-two to forty-five meters in height (it is now about twenty meters).

While there are no inscriptions directly relating the pyramid to this king, a number of alabaster vessels inscribed with this king’s name were discovered nearby in Mastaba Z-500 located just north of the pyramid.

This king is mentioned in the Turin King List as "erased", which may imply that there were dynastic problems during his reign, or that the scribe working on this list was unable to fully decipher the name from the more ancient records being copied from.

It has also been suggested that Khaba may be the Horus name of the last king of the Third Dynasty, Huni, and that the two kings are the same person.

Khufu (in Greek known as Cheops), the second pharaoh of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty, reigned from around 2589 BCE to 2566 BCE and is generally accepted as being the builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing.

The son of King Sneferu and Queen Hetepheres, Khufu, unlike his father, will be remembered in later folklore as a cruel and ruthless pharaoh.

Khufu has several sons, one of which, Djedefra, would be his immediate successor, and a daughter named Queen Hetepheres II. (It is generally thought that Khufu came to the throne in his twenties, and reigned for about twenty-three years, which is the number ascribed to him by the Turin Papyrus. Other sources from much later periods suggest a significantly longer reign: Manetho gives him a reign of sixty-five years, and Herodotus states that he reigned fifty years.)

Khufu starts building his pyramid at Giza, the first to be built in this area.

Based on inscriptional evidence, it is also likely that he led military expeditions into the Sinai, Nubia and Libya.

While pyramid construction had been solely for the reigning pharaoh prior to Khufu, his reign sees the construction of several minor pyramid structures that are believed to have been intended for other members of his royal household, amounting to a royal cemetery.

Three small pyramids to the east of Khufu's pyramid are tentatively thought to belong to two of his wives, and the third has been ascribed to Khufu's mother Hetepheres I, whose funerary equipment was found relatively intact in a shaft tomb nearby.

A series of mastabas were created adjacent to the small pyramids, and tombs have been found in this "cemetery."

Construction begins on the Great Pyramid attributed to Khufu (Cheops), according to conventional wisdom, around 2560 BCE.

This pyramid (the largest ever built) covers five hectares, measures seven hundred and fifty-six feet (two hundred and thirty meters) on each side of its base and is four hundred and eighty-two feet (one hundred and forty-seven meters) high.

The successor of Khafra (Chephren) is Menkaura (or Men-Kau-Re; Mycerinus in Latin; Mykerinos in Greek), the pharaoh of the Fourth dynasty (around 2620 BCE–2480 BCE) who orders the construction of the third and smallest of the Pyramids of Giza.

His main queen is Khamerernebty II.

Some authors date his rule between 2532 BCE–2504 BCE or twenty-eight years but the Turin King List data of eighteen years for him is regarded as being closer to the truth since several of his statues were unfinished upon his death (suggesting a much shorter reign) while his pyramid is the smallest of all the three royal pyramids at Giza.

His name means "Last long (Men) the vital forces (Kau) of Ra."

Menkaura, according to Herodotus, is the son of Khufu (Greek Cheops), and alleviated the suffering his father's reign had caused the inhabitants of ancient Egypt.

Herodotus adds that he suffered much misfortune: his only daughter died before him, whose corpse was interred in a wooden bull (which Herodotus claims survived to his lifetime); and that the oracle at Buto predicted he would only rule six years, but through his shrewdness, Menkaura was able to rule a total of twelve years and foil the prophecy (Herodotus, Histories, 2.129-133).

Other conflicting sources state that Menkaura was not the son of Khufu, but of Khafra, who in turn is the son of Khufu.

The third and smallest of the three large Giza pyramids, that of Menkaure, is completed by 2494 BCE, at which point the Fifth Dynasty succeeds the Fourth.

The Ikhshidid dynasty of Egypt had been founded in 935 by Muhammad bin Tughj, a Sogdian commander who began as governor and was later given the title Ikhshid (Persian for "prince") by the 'Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad.

While Ibn Tughj's sons Unujur and 'Ali remain the nominal Ikhshidid rulers, real governmental power had since 946 rested in the hands of Kafur, originally an enslaved black man from either Ethiopia or the Sudan, who had successfully restrained Fatimid and Hamdanid intrusions into his territories; he had also patronized learning and the arts, briefly boasting the presence of the eminent poet al-Mutanabbi in his court.

At Kafur's death in 968, the Fatimids, having spent a half-century consolidating power in North Africa, had moved eastward to seize from the Ikhshidids not only Egypt but also Palestine and Syria and to threaten Baghdad itself.

Fatimid troops under Jawhar conquer the Nile Valley in 969 after a siege at Giza and overthrow the last of the Ikhshidid rulers, a boy named Abu al-Fawaris Ahmad, grandson of the founder.

The conquest had been prepared by a treaty with the Vizir of the Ikhshidids, by which Sunnis would be guaranteed freedom of religion, so the Fatimids have encountered little resistance.

Jawhar’s troops now advance across Sinai into ...

Islamic terrorists aiming to destroy Egypt's tourist industry gun down eighteen Greek tourists near the historic Pyramids on April 19, 199.