Something is off about one of Egypt's oldest and largest pyramids

Mohamed Abd El Ghany

The Great Pyramid of Giza, which was built for an Egyptian Pharaoh some 4,500 years ago, has been called a wonder of the ancient world. Standing 455 feet tall with a 756-foot-wide base, it is the largest of Egypt's three pyramids on the Giza Plateau.

But recently, scientist have discovered something a little off about the colossal structure.

The base, it turns out, isn't perfectly square — the west side is ever so slightly longer than the east side, making it just a little lopsided. And this discovery may reveal some of the methods used by the ancient Egyptians to construct these awesome pyramids.

When the Great Pyramid of Giza was first built, the Egyptians encased it in white limestone. As time passed, they stripped this stone shell away to use it on other structures. This left us with the naked pyramid we have today.

But without this shell, scientists have had a tough time figuring out the original measurements of the pyramid.

A team of researchers from the Glen Dash Research Foundation and the Ancient Egypt Research Associates began taking their own measurements, hoping to understand what the pyramid was like before it was stripped of its outer shell.

They looked for markings around the base of the pyramid that showed where the original edges were. Then they plotted these points on a grid and calculated the lengths of each side.

They found that the west side was 5.55 inches longer than the east side, making the structure lean just a tiny bit to one side. The difference is so small that it went undetected for nearly five millennia.

"The data show that the Egyptians possessed quite remarkable skills for their time," Glen Dash, the head of the Glen Dash Research Foundation, said in a recent survey report. "We can only speculate as to how the Egyptians could have laid out these lines with such precision using only the tools they had."

This means that builders probably laid the pyramid's design on some sort of grid and applied it to the ground during construction, ScienceAlert reports.

"We hope to eventually figure out how the Egyptians laid out the pyramid with such precision and, in doing so, hope to learn much about the tools and technology they had at their disposal," Dash said.

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