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Roman Mars Steve Burrows is a principal at an engineering consulting company called Erup.

I'm Steve Burrows, CBE, and I'm a professional engineer.

And when he saw the Great Pyramid in Egypt for the first time, he reacted pretty much the way I imagine most people react.

When you actually go and see something that's somewhere in the region of 40 stories high that was built 4,000 years ago. You know, you just have this incredible wow moment.

But then that structural engineer brain kicks in.

Every time you look at something you think first of all how did they do that?

Then I start thinking how would I do that?

And in a recent article in design intelligence he took those questions head on as if a client gave him a brief to build something like the Great Pyramid today.

We get these incredible challenges where you're doing something that's never been done before.

So one of the incredible facts for me was that the Great Pyramid stood as the tallest building in the world, for centuries.

And as someone who in the present day is hired to engineers seemingly impossible structures,

Seabros thinks that the engineers of 2,600 BC really knew what was possible and made most of the major decisions as a present-day engineer would.

So some of the things they knew were that if they built on the Giza Plateau,

they could put stones that to a certain pressure and the ground didn't collapse beneath it.

You can look at other pyramids and see the previous mistakes that were made.

And they got to know what the ground capacity was and I think that determined the size of the

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