Egypt Built the Great Pyramid White. 2,300,000 Blocks.

Egypt builds the Great Pyramid of Giza block by block: a counter to about 2.3 million, the white limestone casing, the capstone. Then the white goes.
The smooth white casing of Tura limestone was stripped over the centuries and reused as building stone (an earthquake in 1303 is reported to have loosened much of it). A few casing stones still sit at the base.

🇪🇬 Built for the pharaoh Khufu about 4,500 years ago, in roughly 20 years (Herodotus; modern estimates place it within Khufu's reign)
🧱 About 2.3 million blocks averaging about 2.5 tonnes; about 340 a day, one every ~2 minutes over a 10-hour working day
📏 146.6 m tall when finished, about 138 m today
💧 Water poured on the sand in front of a sledge roughly halves the force needed to pull it (Physical Review Letters, 2014), as a tomb painting of Djehutihotep shows
👷 The builders were paid Egyptian workers housed in a town beside the site, not slaves

The counter runs at one block rate, so the courses climb slowly at first and the top rises fastest: most of the stone is in the bottom. The spiral ramp is one of several theories; no single method is proven. The pyramid is drawn in 60 courses (the real one has about 210), and the capstone is plain limestone, as every known capstone of its age was.

Which wonder should Egypt build next? 👇