The Great Pyramid Rises: Giza, Egypt
2560 BC · event
For 3,800 years, longer than the whole history that followed it, the Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest structure humans had ever built. 2.3 million blocks of stone, some weighing eighty tonnes, aligned to true north with an error smaller than a modern surveyor would forgive.
It was built not by slaves, as legend long claimed, but by paid crews of farmers in the flood season, teams with names like "Friends of Khufu," who scratched their graffiti into hidden chambers like workers signing a beam.
It is the only survivor of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and it still keeps most of its secrets: sealed voids that scanners can see and no one has ever entered. Four and a half thousand years on, humanity's oldest monument to memory still stands its watch over the desert.