Episode Details

Khufu built the Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest and most precisely engineered structure of the ancient world. Yet almost nothing is known about him. The only surviving image of the man who commissioned history's most famous monument is a three-inch ivory figurine.

This episode explores the paradox of a pharaoh whose achievement dwarfs everything around it while his personal history has almost entirely vanished.

• How the Great Pyramid was built and what we still do not know
• The three-inch ivory statue and why it is the only confirmed likeness
• Greek accounts that called him a tyrant and whether they were accurate
• What the pyramid's construction reveals about Old Kingdom Egypt