Herodotus, the Pyramids. Hello, this is Bertie. In this series, I'm taking you on a tour of the histories of Herodotus, the ancient Greek who loved to travel and to explore the world and different cultures. He wrote around the year 450 BC. His second book is all about the fabulous, weird and wonderful land of Egypt, ancient

Egypt as we would call it now. And of course, one of the things that everybody knows about the

ancient Egyptians is that they built the pyramids. The pyramids are some of the most impressive structures built at any time in history.

For example, the great pyramid of Giza stands 138 metres tall.

It held the record for being the tallest building in the world for three and a half thousand

years until the Eiffel Tower was erected in Paris as the entrance to the World Fair in 1889.

Its engineer Gustav Eiffel compared his tall, pointy creation to the grandeur of the pyramids.

And the Egyptian pyramids were a true marvel of ancient engineering.

Each side of the great pyramid of Giza rises at an angle of 51.3 degrees

and is aligned almost exactly with true north, south, east and west.

The Great Pyramid was just as famous in ancient times as it is now, and is the only wonder

of the seven wonders of the ancient world to survive to the present day.

All the others, including the hanging gardens of Babylon,

the temple of the goddess Artemis at Ephesus,

and the lighthouse of Alexandria are now turned to dust.

The word pyramid actually comes from the Greek word pyramis, which means a wheat cake.

The pyramids reminded the Greeks of their own pointy-topped wheat cakes, which they love to eat.

Herodotus writes about the pyramids in a way that assumes his audience already knew what they

were.

But of course few Greeks had actually seen them with their own eyes as he had done.

Any visitor who gazes upon the pyramids must wonder how they could possibly have been made by a civilization without hydraulic cranes, bulldozers and steel girders,

and all the rest of technology that goes into erecting, say, skyscrapers.

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