Four and a half thousand years ago, the largest of the wonders of the ancient world was built. The Great Pyramid at Giza has fascinated and intrigued scholars ever since and it the only one of the wonders listed by the Greeks to have survived intact to this day. By the time Tutenkhamen ruled Egypt it was already 1500 years old; to Cleopatra it was an antiquity. But how was it built? Why and by whom? The Great Pyramid, thought to be evidence of a slave-culture on a truly despotic scale, has fascinated travellers and archaeologists since the 19th-century revival of interest in antiquities. And with it a fascination with the pharaoh who built it: Cheops. Christine El Mahdy has turned her detective approach to Egyptology into a look at the man behind the monument - the life and times of Cheops, the greatest pyramid builder of them all.