The Prince of Wales Visit to Egypt: the Great Pyramid - from a drawing by Frank Dillon, 1862. The future King Edward VII in Africa. Herodotus was informed by the priests of Memphis that the great pyramid...was built by Cheops, King of Egypt, about 900 B.C., or about 450 years before Herodotus visited Egypt. He says that 100,000 men were employed twenty years in building it, and that the body of Cheops was placed in a room beneath the bottom of the pyramid, surrounded by a vault to which the waters of the Nile were conveyed through a subterraneous tunnel: a chamber under the centre of the pyramid has indeed been discovered; it is about fifty-six feet above the low-water level of the Nile...The pyramid of Cheops consists of a series of platforms, each of which is smaller than the one on which it rests, and consequently presents the appearance of steps, which diminish in length from the bottom to the top. Of these steps there are 203, and the height of them decreases, but not regularly, from the bottom to the top...The horizontal lines of the platforms are perfectly straight, and the stones are cut and fitted to each other with the greatest nicety, and joined by a cement of lime with little or no sand in it. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.