Khufu was born into the Fourth Dynasty, the golden age of pyramid building, around 2589 BCE. His father was Sneferu, the pharaoh who built four pyramids - at Seila, Meidum, Dahshur, and possibly another - and who learned from each mistake how to perfect the form. His mother was Hetepheres I, the Great Royal Wife whose secret burial chamber, discovered in 1925 near the Great Pyramid, contained gilded furniture, silver jewellery, and an empty alabaster sarcophagus, the queen's body apparently moved to a safer location after her original tomb was robbed. Khufu inherited a kingdom that was already the most powerful and prosperous in the ancient world, with trade networks stretching to Lebanon for cedar, to the Sinai for turquoise and copper, and to Nubia for gold and incense. He ascended the throne in his twenties and began work on his pyramid almost immediately.

The Great Pyramid was not merely a tomb. It was a machine for resurrection, a stone mountain designed to launch the king into the heavens to join the sun god Re, whose barque crossed the sky each day. The pyramid was built from approximately two point three million limestone blocks, each weighing between two and a half and fifteen tons, quarried from the Giza plateau itself and from Tura across the Nile for the fine white casing stones that once covered the structure and made it gleam like a second sun. The base covers thirteen acres and is levelled to within two point one centimetres of perfect, a precision that challenges modern engineering. Granite blocks from Aswan, more than a thousand kilometres to the south, were hauled to Giza to line the King's Chamber and the relieving chambers above it. The workforce numbered between twenty and thirty thousand, organised into competing gangs who left their marks on the stones - names like "The Vigorous Gang" and "The Enduring Gang" - and who were provided with food, housing, and medical care in the pyramid towns that sprang up on the plateau. Herodotus claimed one hundred thousand slaves built the pyramid in twenty years, but the graffiti of the workmen prove he was wrong.

The interior of the pyramid is as mysterious as its exterior is imposing. Three chambers lie within: the unfinished Subterranean Chamber, cut into the bedrock far below ground; the Queen's Chamber, misnamed because it was probably never intended for a queen; and the King's Chamber, lined with red granite and roofed with nine massive granite slabs that weigh up to four hundred tons each. Above the King's Chamber, five relieving chambers distribute the weight of the pyramid's mass, and in the lowest of these, the workmen left graffiti that included Khufu's cartouche, the oval frame that enclosed the royal name, proving that the pyramid was indeed his. Two narrow shafts ascend from the King's Chamber at precise angles, one pointing toward the north polar region and the other toward the constellation Orion, though whether this was intentional astronomical alignment or merely ventilation remains debated.

The most spectacular discovery associated with Khufu came in 1954, when the Egyptian archaeologist Kamal el-Mallakh, acting on a hunch, dug beneath a stone wall on the south side of the Great Pyramid and found a sealed pit. Inside lay the disassembled pieces of a full-size wooden ship, one thousand two hundred and twenty-four cedar fragments carefully arranged in a logical order that allowed restorers to reassemble the vessel over more than a decade. The ship is forty-three point four metres long and five point nine metres wide, built without nails using mortise-and-tenon joints and rope lashings of halfa grass, and it is constructed of Lebanese cedar imported from the eastern Mediterranean. Some scholars believe it was a solar barque, intended to carry the resurrected king across the heavens with the sun god Re. Others suggest it was a funerary craft for transporting Khufu's body on the Nile to the Giza necropolis, or even a pilgrimage ship that the king used in life and that was buried for him to use in the afterlife. A second boat pit remains unexcavated, its secrets still sealed beneath the sand.

The Westcar Papyrus, a collection of tales probably composed in the Middle Kingdom though set in the Fourth Dynasty, casts Khufu in a complex light. In the fourth story, his son Prince Hardedef tells him of a magician named Djedi who lives at Djed-Sneferu, a man of one hundred and ten years who eats five hundred loaves of bread and a shoulder of beef each day and drinks one hundred jugs of beer. Djedi can reattach severed heads, tame lions on a leash, and knows the number of secret chambers in the sanctuary of Thoth. Khufu summons him to court and asks him to demonstrate his magic on a prisoner, but Djedi refuses, saying it is not permitted to do such things on the noble flock. Instead he decapitates a goose, a waterfowl, and an ox, and reattaches their heads with a secret spell. Then Khufu asks about the chambers of Thoth, but Djedi says he does not know their number, only where the records are kept, and that only the eldest son of a woman named Rededjet will be able to bring them. Rededjet, the wife of a priest of Ra, is pregnant with triplets who will become the first three kings of the Fifth Dynasty: Userkaf, Sahure, and Neferirkare Kakai. The story is a political allegory, composed centuries after Khufu's death to legitimise the Fifth Dynasty by contrasting its divine origins with Khufu's impious quest for hidden knowledge.

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, was even harsher. In Book II of his Histories he describes Khufu - whom he calls Cheops - as a wicked tyrant who closed the temples, forced the Egyptians to work as labourers, and prostituted his own daughter to raise money for the pyramid. He claims the daughter built a small pyramid of her own from the fees she charged, a tale for which there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever. Herodotus also says Khufu ruled for fifty years, while the Royal Canon of Turin gives him twenty-three years and Manetho gives him sixty-three. Modern Egyptology generally accepts a reign of about twenty-three years, based on the evidence of the Turin Canon and the archaeological record of the pyramid's construction.

Yet Khufu's reputation in Egypt itself was far more positive than the Greek slander suggests. New Kingdom scribes, visiting the Giza plateau a thousand years after his death, left graffiti praising the king and his monuments. The Inventory Stela, carved in the Twenty-sixth Dynasty around 570 BCE, claims that Khufu discovered an ancient temple of Isis near the Sphinx, restored its statues, and repaired the worn and damaged Great Sphinx according to records of its prior image. Though modern Egyptologists consider the stela a pious fraud designed to give the Isis temple a false antiquity, the fact that the priests chose Khufu as their protagonist testifies to his enduring prestige. The Westcar Papyrus, for all its satire, still portrays him as a king who seeks wisdom and is impressed by genuine magic.

Khufu died around 2566 BCE and was buried in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, though his mummy and sarcophagus have never been found. The pyramid was robbed in antiquity, probably within a few centuries of his death, and the only objects recovered from the interior are a few fragments of burial equipment and the workmen's graffiti in the relieving chambers. His mortuary temple, which once stood on the east side of the pyramid, has largely disappeared, quarried away by later builders. But the pyramid itself endures, its core structure still intact though the white casing stones were stripped away in the medieval period to build the mosques and palaces of Cairo. It remains the only surviving wonder of the ancient world, and it still draws millions of visitors each year who come to stand in the shadow of a king whose name they may not know but whose monument they will never forget.