It is 2480 BC, and there is nothing to be seen in this part of the Sahara Desert... nothing but the shifting sand. But that is all about to change... when thousands of men are shipped here from all the provinces of ancient Egypt... when they quarry millions of tons of stone and drag it to this desert plateau... to construct a tomb for Khufu, their king... built, as they believe, according to a secret code, with the power to perform a miracle. For more than 4,000 years, humans have considered this - the oldest and only one of the Seven Ancient Wonders to survive intact - as one of the greatest mysteries on Earth. Now we can unravel that mystery in a way never attempted before. By combining the latest historical research with the most up-to-date visual technology, we can travel back in time and see the Great Pyramid of Giza through the eyes of the men who built it... and one man in particular. He's not a real historical figure, but the events in his life are based on real evidence - from the journey he travels and the clothes that he wears to the enormity of the work that he's given. His name is Nakht.

This is his story... and the story of the monument to which he devoted his life. since the King's men came for us. They brought me here to labor on a task that mystified me. My life's work has been an attempt to understand it. And now my life's work is complete. They came for me one evening late in summer in the village where I was born, the only world I had ever known. They'd always used those words when they'd come for my father and my grandfather before. Now they had come for my brother Deba... and for me. I remember my sister cried when we left. You're the oldest, she said. Take care of Deba. They'd have arrived every summer in the early years of Khufu's reign. Royal officials, dispatched the length and breadth of the Nile, selecting able-bodied men for the service of the King. We worried how the family would cope until we came back. I wonder what I'd have felt if I'd known the truth - that I was never coming back?

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As we sat there, I had this sudden memory of stories Grandfather had told me about great stone steps he'd built into the sky. I tried to imagine those steps and I couldn't. The official a man called Kaem-ah, went to the neighboring village for the others. Everyone chattered about where we were going and what we'd have to do, but no one really knew, and Kaem-ah said nothing to explain, just that we owed everything to the King and that now we would have the chance to repay him. Young conscripts like Nakht and Deba had no reason to approach the start of their journey with dread. Contrary to popular myth, not one of the people who built the Great Pyramid was a slave. Egypt had no need of slaves, and all because of the Nile. We joined in the familiar prayer. "Hail to you, O Nile, sprung from the ground, who produces the barley" and makes the wheat to grow. "You rise, and the lands exult, and in everyone there is joy.""" The river's annual flood, covering the land in fertile silt, made Egypt's farmlands uniquely rich - one of the first countries in history where the workforce didn't have to spend all its time growing food, but could labor on other things instead, such as building pyramids. Days passed, and the boat became like home, but it was strange to have no work to do.

The landscape still looked like it did near our village - cliffs, fields... and there was always the river, a ruled line of blue. You could almost believe we had come no distance at all. Until one afternoon... It was the hottest part of the day. Set back in the desert, high on the cliff, was a great triangle of stone like a mountain, but a mountain made by men. Of course, I immediately thought of my grandfather. So he had built his great stone steps. I thought, "It's the same for Deba and me. That's what we're being sent to do. That evening we moored nearby. I couldn't sleep. The stone steps Nakht had seen stand at Sakkara. This is the oldest intact stone monument in the world and the first key to unlocking the mystery of the pyramids. 60 years before King Khufu, the Egyptians first constructed this now-familiar shape by laying six great rectangles of stone one on top of the other. This had enabled them to create a monument that they believed possessed immense secret power. At the beginning of time, according to Egyptian myth, there was nothing but watery chaos. From that chaos had emerged the first mound of dry land in the shape of a pyramid.

It was a shape that symbolized life, but some impulse had made the Egyptians choose that shape for a tomb - the tomb of their king. 60 years later, in 2480 BC, the same impulse had brought the new king, Khufu, out to the desert with a carefully chosen retinue. He was here to witness the first and most important ceremony of his entire reign. Contrary to some recent theories, the pyramids weren't built by people from outer space, but they were built by people obsessed with outer space. The Egyptians measured everything by the stars - their calendar, the Nile's flood - and they did so by noticing that the stars all moved. Everything in the night sky was in motion. Everything but for one dark, still point. Round that dark, still point, two especially bright stars turned in a constant circle. When one star was directly above the other, a plumb line could be held up against them. It now passed through the dark, still point with perfect accuracy. The single most important act in the building of the Great Pyramid had taken place before a stone of it was laid. But of this, Nakht and his fellow builders knew nothing. Seeing the stone steps had made me feel that we were nearing our destination, and, suddenly, the river was busy. There were boats loaded with everything you can imagine - cattle, goats, pots, produce, timber, stone...

So much. More than any person could use in a lifetime. After 11 days drifting north on the Nile current, Nakht would have been a matter of hours from his journey's end - Giza. Today a busy suburb ten miles to the south of Cairo, it was then a loose, rapidly growing settlement on the river's west bank. There would have been boatloads of conscripts arriving there every day. In a room at his Giza palace, Khufu's architects had long planned to build the perfect pyramid, one that would dwarf all pyramids that had gone before or were to come after it, one that would remain the tallest structure on Earth until the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. But first, they had to go back to basics. The plan was to build upward from a level base, gradually laying over 200 horizontal courses of limestone blocks on top of one another, each course a little smaller than the last. The theory was simple. Putting it into practice must have seemed almost impossible. Preparations had begun in the first year of Khufu's reign. On the Giza plateau high above, the site had been leveled and swept. Then specialist masons had laid out the pyramid base, a perfect square of finished limestone blocks. Within that square was a natural limestone outcrop, which other masons had already cut into regular steps to form the pyramid core. The greatest of all building projects was ready to begin. All that was needed were the builders. None of us were singing now. We were close and we could sense it. Kaem-ah told us we had grown soft on the journey and that we must become hard now to survive in the service of the King. Late that morning, we arrived at Giza. I didn't understand what I was seeing.

How could I? We left the river behind us and started to climb to the desert plateau above. I was... I was uneasy. The desert was where the sun died each night. We all knew the stories of the ghosts that haunted it. We'd been told there was a place for us up on the plateau near the end of a row of huts. No one took any notice of us. It turned out we had to share a reed mat on the ground. We didn't know what were supposed to do or what would happen next. That day, there was one last thing that amazed me. I'll never forget it. Everyone around us was eating - fruit, bread, beer, you name it. And all brought to them. At home, everything we ate, we caught or grew ourselves, otherwise we went hungry. But here, if you worked, you got everything you wanted, even the firewood in the evening. We had traveled 11 days and 11 nights to get to Giza, but my real journey was just beginning. In the morning, we were roused just after sunrise. It was obvious we were going to have to earn our keep. I thought that Giza could hold no more surprises. I was wrong. The thing I remember most clearly was the noise. We were put to work at once, carrying water. It was backbreaking.

A quarry seems like chaos at first, but before long, I began to make it out. It's very highly controlled, the King's work. Everyone has a place and a purpose. Five million tons of stone would be needed for the Great Pyramid, the vast majority quarried on site at Giza. It's currently estimated that it took around 1,500 men to quarry it. Theirs was a skilled job, not one for raw conscripts like Nakht and Deba. Each quarryman was issued with a copper chisel. Copper was the hardest metal known to the Egyptians, but it still blunts easily - within about 100 blows or so - so there was a support group of men to sharpen the chisels - another specialist task. Each man would take a blunt chisel, soften it in fire, re-shape the tip, and then temper it in water, before getting it back into use. That meant another group was needed to bring the sharpeners tinder for their fires, and water, too. These would certainly have been suitable tasks for the untrained conscripts. Another specialist group in the quarry was the scribes. To ensure it reached its correct destination, every block was marked with a different symbol, ready to be transported to the pyramid itself.

The question - when a block weighed two and a half tons - was how. Within a few days, we went from bringing water to the sharpeners to serving a gang who called themselves "Khufu's Drunkards". They were a tough lot, and their job was to haul stones from the quarry face to the pyramid itself. Our foreman had singled us out as quick learners. Grandfather had always said, "If you want to get on, keep in with the boss.""" We soon worked out there was a real knack to this work. Without water, the sledge would stick fast. Add just enough and it slid easily. It's the taffla, the clay you get at Giza. Once it's wet, everything will slide on it. The best part of a working day was evening, when we washed and ate. We'd work nine days and rest on the tenth. We settled quickly to the work. Other conscripts went back to their villages after a few months, but we were kept on. I never felt lonely because of Deba. At night, we'd hear the lions out in the desert and we'd talk of our villages. We may have said we were homesick, but, in truth, we had become each other's family. We had all grown used to the rhythms of our barracks and our work - rhythms that never changed... until one morning. We'd been at Giza a little less than a year. It was nearly noon, and we had broken for something to eat when Yunu came to us.

We were to report for a new job, away from our designated corner of the quarry. The quarry at Giza was about half a mile to the south of the actual pyramid site. And because of strict demarcation, those working around the quarry face would not have set foot on the pyramid itself. The site could only be accessed by the means of two huge ramps, one running up directly from the quarry to the pyramid, the other running from the pyramid to the Nile. They met at the pyramid's south west corner. I'll never forget climbing the ramp for the first time. I had never been so high in my life. And it was the first time we had seen the pyramid from close up. It just took your breath away. The pyramid already towered above the desert floor. Without cranes or levers, the only way the pyramid builders could have raised stone to such a height was on ramps made of desert earth and compacted rubble and held together with gypsum mortar. On our way up, we passed different hauling teams - the Friends of Khufu, the Worshipers of Khufu. The foremen were getting them to compete for who could work fastest. As one gang was going up with a loaded sledge, they'd meet another coming down empty, and according to where they passed, they'd know who was winning. This rivalry fuelled a phenomenal work rate. Each and every working day for around 16 years, 1,000 tons of stone were quarried, cut, and dragged up onto the surface of this immense construction project. Constructing the outer part of the pyramid was not the whole task that confronted Khufu's builders. From outside, the pyramid looks like a solid structure, but as a tomb, it had to contain a burial chamber.

Uniquely, the Great Pyramid was to accommodate not one but three. One chamber was raised some 100 feet up in the actual masonry. Directly beneath it was another, dug into the rock of the desert floor. By 2474 BC, the third and most important chamber was under construction, and so was a huge internal gallery by which it would be reached. The top of the pyramid in progress was a plateau, roughly the size of ten football fields joined together. At its center was the internal gallery, where teams of specialists were preparing for the construction of the upper burial chamber. Yunu enrolled Deba and me in a work gang, hauling blocks in a great central passageway for a chamber that was being constructed at the very top. He explained that this would be the final resting place of the King. The steep slope of the passageway made the work exhausting. At the end of the day, we longed to return to our barracks. But Yunu had other ideas. Of course, we knew of the compound where all the full-time workers and the supervisors lived, but we'd never been there. And who was there but Kaem-ah. He was, as always, at the center of things.

He told us to sit, and we did. He tried to put us at our ease. Live life to the full he said. Live life to the full. And then he drank a toast in our honor. We couldn't understand it. He teased us, calling out, In the name of the Kingl We were all a little drunk by now, but gradually it dawned on me - Kaem-ah had something in mind. Even Yunu, old stone-face, seemed pleased about it. She is a fertile field, he shouted. A fertile field for her lord. She was Yunu's youngest daughter. Her name was Barasa. It was Deba who'd been chosen as her husband. Gerget Khufu, "the settlement of Khufu", was the compound for the King's permanent workforce. These people were part of his court. They were an elite, far fewer in number than the conscripts. They had special skills, and their children were apprenticed to masters to ensure those skills were passed on. Every aspect of their lives was taken care of, from fabric weaving for their clothes to the preparation of wheat and barley for their staples of beer and bread. A regular item on their diet was meat, normally a luxury in the ancient world. Khufu had established ranches all over Egypt to breed animals for his workforce.

This was centralized organization on a new scale. Khufu's workers were building a pyramid, but to do so they were also unifying their nation, consolidating a true state - the first in history. Deba and I were as happy that morning as we had been since arriving at Giza. I just felt so proud. Me, Nakht, from a little village, one of the King's men now. No more work in the quarry. Work on the pyramid. Responsibilities. We belonged. Pre-eminent among Khufu's master craftsmen were the masons, who worked up on the pyramid itself. It was their responsibility to finish the blocks that had been brought up from the quarry before they were set in the pyramid's outer wall. All the extraordinary precision of the Great Pyramid is down to the craftsmanship of its masons and was achieved with the simplest of tools, the most important of which was the setsquare, which enabled the all-important right angles to be checked. Simple plumb-bobs and wooden A-frames would also have been used to check that each block was laid level. Once the stone was finished to the masons' satisfaction, the setters could, at last, fit it in the pyramid's outer wall.

They probably started this process at the corner of each pyramid face and worked inwards. Hand-finishing over two million blocks was an immense task, even by the standards of the Great Pyramid. How the masons did so in the allotted time long remained a mystery. A clue, visible today on the Great Pyramid's south side, provides the answer. There is a gash about 30 feet high where a 19th-century explorer tried to blast his way in with dynamite. It's the only place where we can see beyond the pyramid's outer membrane, and it reveals that the core is much rougher, with blocks of different sizes jumbled together, and some pieces so small, they're little more than builders' rubble. This was the means by which the builders could keep up the pace. But working in the central gallery, accuracy was required, and so, too, was caution. All these years, I had been working on a tomb and until now I had never thought of death. When Deba died, a vision came back to me.

Once, when we were tiny, we had seen a great glittering boat sweep past our village. Our mother told us it must have been the King and that we should have bowed, because we owed him everything. But now, it seemed, everything that mattered to me had been taken away, and all "in the name of the King". It was then that I knew that I, too, would die at Giza. I had been entrusted with my brother's life. How could I return to my village without him? Losing Deba was the heaviest blow I'd ever felt. I still feel it even now. But it was also a beginning for me. Till Deba died, I'd never questioned the real purpose of what we were doing at Giza any more than I'd questioned my grandfather about the great stone steps that he had once built. Now I was determined to understand. I took Deba's widow into my own household and "in the name of the King", I went back to work. All this sacrifice for the sake of one man. It is certain that Khufu himself would have been brought up from his palace at Giza to observe the construction of the pyramid. It was certainly his greatest undertaking as a king. In the desert there is an outcrop of rock, the only place at Giza from which the entire pyramid landscape is visible.

The King would have been attended by his main architect, his cousin Hemiunu. Beneath them, the King could have seen some 25,000 workers - conscripts, quarrymen, stone-haulers, setters, masons - for whom he was responsible, whom he had brought to Giza to collaborate as humans never had before. What had driven him to do it? To answer that question long seemed only a distant possibility, until, just over a century ago, archaeologists working on the pyramid of a later king called Unas unearthed a chamber whose walls were covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Pyramid Texts provide a tantalizing glimpse into the minds of the men who built the pyramids. From these spells, incantations and riddles, a story emerges - the story of a journey. The King travels, and travels up. His journey is described in many ways - as a falcon or with the aid of natural storms of wind and hail and lightning. The Pyramid Texts always describe the end of this journey in the same mysterious way - that the King can now "go forth among the Indestructibles". To understand this mystery is to understand the very purpose of a pyramid.

But these mysterious beliefs were not widely understood. They were the preserve of an initiated few. Khufu's workers had more ordinary concerns - ensuring that 1,000 tons of stone were moved each day onto the pyramid's slowly rising surface. Five years passed after Deba's death. I was one of the most experienced men on site when Yunu accorded me a special honor. I had seen Hemiunu on the outcrop but had never imagined that I would be introduced to him. He had a special task for me, one that could only be understood with a special blessing... words that were to change my life. Some ten years after work began on the Great Pyramid, a barge approached Giza with a special cargo. It had come more than 500 miles, from the quarries at Aswan. On board was a single granite block. The block was one of nine that were being brought to Giza, the most vital nine blocks of all the millions that make up the Great Pyramid. Each one weighed upward of 50 tons and 200 men would be required to move it. King Khufu's upper burial chamber was ready to be completed and the nine granite blocks would form its roof.

Each block had to be dragged across the unfinished pyramid and put in place above the chamber beneath. I had the scribes draw a reference in red ocher down the exact center of each block and I seated myself on top of the first block at one end of the chamber. I held up a plumb-bob and I aligned it with both the red reference mark on the incoming block and the central marker post beyond. That way, I could keep the block exactly central as it passed over the chamber. Such a vast weight had to be perfectly distributed. The words of Hemiunu's blessing were ringing in my ears. So this holy chamber was the center, the purpose of the whole pyramid. It had to be protected. Khufu's architects were facing a structural problem never faced before in history. The mass of stone with which they were working and the width they were spanning presented difficulties that would tax any modern construction engineer. It appears that soon after it was fitted, one of the granite roof blocks started to crack.

The architects' first reaction was to repeat the roofing process a further four times. But the decisive innovation was to add a triangular wedge at the top, which redistributed the weight outwards rather than downwards. The crawl spaces between the five roofs, just three and a half feet high, provide a unique glimpse into the lost world of the pyramid-makers. Graffiti left behind by the workers spell out the names of the gangs. This is the mark of "the Strong Boatmen of Khufu". Here, simply, "the Pure". It is even possible to see the red ocher reference marks - the means by which, 4,500 years ago, master stone-movers guided in the granite blocks with such phenomenal precision. The last third of the pyramid could not be reached by the main ramp. Instead, a spiral ramp was used, supported on the stepped sides of the pyramid and climbing up with it. Up this spiral ramp, the most expert stone-hauling gangs dragged the final blocks until the very top was reached. It fell to my gang to lay the capstone. It had been prepared by the masons more carefully than all the others. Its sides were perfectly smooth, but beneath there was a plug of rock left protruding.

We rotated the block until the plug fitted into a groove carved in the blocks beneath. All those years of labor seemed concentrated in these final moments. After the capstone was placed, the ramps were stripped away and the stepped outer stones were cut, so that they all continued downwards at one perfect angle. Each block was then highly polished and smoothed to create four glittering triangles of stone. The effect would have been blinding, quite different from the pyramid we see today. For today the pyramids have been stripped of their outer stones, re-used in the building of medieval Cairo. But we can still get an inkling of the effect from Khafre's pyramid, which is next to the Great Pyramid. Most of its outer stones have also been taken away, but at the very top, they still remain. They've darkened now with age, but they give a sense of how a newly-finished pyramid would have looked. In about 2463 BC, Khufu set out once again from his palace.

He crossed the desert along the very route he'd traveled with his astronomers some 17 years before to look on the tomb that would immortalize him. In the pyramid's shadow, there were also three smaller pyramids for his queens. To the east of the pyramid, a great stone causeway stretched down to a temple by the edge of the Nile. This was the place to which Khufu's body would be brought when the day of his death came at last. It was in the early morning of a spring day around 2457 BC that it finally did. A great barque had been specially constructed to transport the King's coffin down the Nile. Once its purpose had been served, it would be dismantled and it, too, would be buried at the foot of Khufu's pyramid. The King's coffin was of aromatic cedar - a rare and precious wood. It's likely that little else would have accompanied it. The extravagant gold and riches we associate with Tutankhamun belong to a much later age. The coffin was unloaded on the quayside before what the Pyramid Texts call the "Doors of Heaven". It was as if the last stone of the structure had been put in place - and the most important stone of all.

According to the ancient ritual, the coffin would almost certainly have been taken to the subterranean chamber first and then to the chamber above it. The final part of the journey would have been to take the coffin to the third chamber. It would have passed up this soaring gallery, once just a rough chasm of rock. At last, the coffin was brought into the upper chamber, the King's Chamber itself, and beneath Nakht's great granite roof, it was laid in the sarcophagus. The Great Pyramid was about to fulfill the purpose for which it had been built. The King had finally "gone forth among the Indestructibles". This was the reason for locating the dark, still point all those years before. Because it never moved, the Egyptians revered that point as eternal, the location of Heaven itself.

They also revered the stars that circled it. Today we call them the circumpolar stars, but the Egyptians, awed by their constancy, called them "the Indestructibles". The Egyptians believed they had not just located Heaven, but constructed the means to get there. And the proof of that fantastic ambition is built into the very fabric of the pyramid itself. In the north wall of the King's Chamber is a tiny vent, the beginning of a narrow shaft that penetrates through the mass of masonry to the pyramid's outer wall. It is trained, like a telescope, at just one part of the night sky, at the circumpolar stars, the Indestructibles. Khufu's builders believed they had constructed a resurrection machine, a machine that secured eternity... and not just for their king. So Hemiunu's blessing has proven to be true. The King will rise again, and any who shall cause his pyramid to be good and sturdy, they, too, will rise with him. They will share eternal possession of his crown. In the name of the King. It's clear now. In the name of the King.

Through us, he became indestructible, and we indestructible through him. Yunu... Kaem-ah... Deba, myself... All of us. Egypt. The King is gone, but remains with us, and we with him. As sure as the flooding of the Nile, the wheel continues to turn, and nothing and nobody can ever really be lost. In the 4,500 years that have followed, the Great Pyramid has been plundered and stripped of its outer stone. But it has endured, justifying, in a way, the faith of the men who built it. It's as close as anything on Earth to eternity. It has endured as a testament to what humans can achieve when they collaborate and as a testament to the questions that humans muse about most. What happens to us when we die? And what should that mean for us while we are alive? They are the greatest of all questions, and the Egyptians built the greatest of all monuments by way of an answer to them.