*Nobody *expects the Egyptian Inquisition…!
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But seriously…
Consensus as I recall was that they used a mud brick spiral ramp built up around the pyramid. If they’d used a straight regular ramp it would require as much or more material in gravel and such than the pyramid. There is no evidence of such rubble. The unfinished pyramid was a nice neat set of steps (blocks about 4 feet across) so it was easy to build the ramp on those using mud bricks and would not take anywhere near as much material and could be easily removed as they worked their way back down…
Incidentally, as they worked their way back down from the top, the ramp before removal would give a working base from which they would be putting on the final layer of limestone sheathing cut to a perfect smooth pyramid. (Most of this finish has fallen off, but on the middle pyramid at the top you can still see this finish). A straight ramp would have made finishing the back side fairly awkward.
Yes, as hinted at - the evolutionary path of pyramids is quite obvious. Early Egyptians (the first dynasties) built rectangular tombs (mastabas). Imhotep (allegedly the earliest non-ruler whose name we know) started by building his Pharoah’s mastaba of stone. Then expanded it and built successive squares on top producing the first stone “step pyramid”. From there they went to smooth edge pyramids, bigger and bigger until they realized with the “bent pyramid” that they were building it too steep. As cracks appeared in the construction they changed their minds and about halfway up may it a less steep angle.
The original step pyramid at Saqqarra was made with smaller construction stones, about a foot to two feet on a side. By the time the Great Pyramid was being built, they had realized that 4x4x6 foot blocks made construction go faster and were feasible to move. (As the empire declined, they took to cheap measures. The “Black pyramid” was a block stone shell and tomb core that was filled with rubble as it rose, rather than solid blocks. Today, all that’s left is the middle core an a pile of that rubble.)
So the question is - build with today’s tech, or as it was built in 2400BC? With today’s tech, piece of cake. The old way? What do you have to pay people to do drudge work for a decade in the Egyptian sun? No be cheap. One statistic I saw said that working 20 years, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, to build the great pyramid meant they laid a stone every 90 seconds. The important task is coordination.
The blocks would have been quarried with stone and copper chisels, and using wood wedges that swelled when wet to split the rock. Remember, this was over 1000 years before the iron age. Today, we have carbide power saws.
Arkon has it right. When the fields flooded, as they did every year, there was an entire country of those who had nothing else to do but haul stones for food - but not slaves. Meanwhile, the stone stockpiled during those two months could be finished and installed at leisure by a much smaller full time group of stoneworkers, who would be skilled paid craftsmen, not slaves.
There’s a giant “cave church” (Google it) from the cliffs across the river in Cairo where it is believed many of the stones were quarried. So another task was to float the blocks across the river when the fields were flooded and transport is easy since the entire route was navigable right up to the worksite.
