Historical Facts From The Bible God's Word: Ancient Egypt: Were the Pyramids Built Before the Flood?

Were the Pyramids Built Before the Flood? How should we understand Egyptian chronology? by Bodie Hodge

I’m surprised how often I am asked about the age of the ziggurats and pyramids, in particular the Great Pyramid of Giza, located in modern-day Egypt. One of the main reasons for this question is that secular literature commonly dates the Great Pyramid around 2550 BC.1 If this date is correct, then the Great Pyramid existed before the Flood of Noah’s day, which occurred around 2350 BC and destroyed everything on earth (2 Peter 3:5–6)! Obviously, something is askew. Were the pyramids built before the Flood? Did the pyramids survive the Flood? Consider three points: First, the Great Pyramid of Giza lacks significant water damage. The Flood was incredibly destructive. Researchers point out that the entire surface of the earth was radically changed. The surface of every continent was destroyed and new mountains formed. Thousands of feet of mud and sand were dumped on every continent, burying and fossilizing creatures and plants. Nothing manmade could survive such a catastrophe. (By the way, that means that the location of the Garden of Eden is also lost.)

Second, the pyramid is built on the fossil-bearing rock layers from the Flood of Noah’s day. Clearly, the Flood had to predate a pyramid built on top of the Flood layers. Third, the Hebrew word translated “Egypt” is Mizraim. Mizraim was Noah’s grandson, born to Ham after the Flood. So Mizraim’s descendants could not have built the Great Pyramid of Egypt (Mizraim) until after the Flood, and for that matter, after the events at the Tower of Babel that caused Mizraim’s family to move to the region of the Nile River. With all this evidence, the Great Pyramid is clearly post-Flood.

So, why the older date for the Great Pyramid in secular literature? Many of the accepted dates for events in ancient Egypt came from an ancient list of pharaohs and the lengths of their reigns recorded by the historian Manetho, who lived in Egypt about 200 BC. Although there is much more to this, Manetho assumed the pharaohs’ reigns had been consecutive and so tallied them up sequentially to arrive at a very long Egyptian chronology. The problem, it appears, is that some of these pharaohs were reigning at the same time in different Egyptian kingdoms—the Upper Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, or Lower Kingdom. Sometimes fathers and sons seem to have reigned together for a long time, too.

So the dates for the pharaohs are grossly inflated. As an analogy, if we took all the past state governors of the United States and stacked their terms sequentially, the nation would appear to be much, much older than it is! The problem should be obvious. In brief, the secular date for the Great Pyramid is incorrect, and all the pyramids and ziggurats across the world today are post-Flood construction.