Old Kingdom Egypt, in the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, made a remarkable leap in the scale of royal tomb architecture. The Great Pyramid, built for Pharaoh Khufu, originally stood 146.6 metres tall — it would remain the tallest structure on Earth until Lincoln Cathedral was completed in 1311. It comprises some 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite, averaging 2.5 tonnes each, with some reaching 80 tonnes.

The long-held narrative of slave labour has been steadily revised by recent archaeology. Excavations at the Giza site have uncovered workers' cemeteries, storage facilities, and bakeries, suggesting that much of the construction was carried out by seasonal farm labourers — fed and organised by the state during the months when Nile flooding interrupted agriculture. The pyramid is now estimated to have been completed in roughly 20–25 years by some 20,000 people.

It was at once a religious monument to the pharaoh's immortality and a vast engineering project managed by a centralised state: resource control, logistics, written record-keeping, astronomical observation, and standardised measurement. The pyramid's north-south axis is aligned to true north within four arc minutes — a precision reached without modern instruments.