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It is thought that Khufu was assigned to repairing the pyramid at one time and therefore was allowed to put his stamp (name engraved) upon it or that it was a forgery placed there by Richard Howard-Vyse. Here is an article, with interesting facts, but I do not subscribe to many of it's conclusions, but it is certainly a fun read and I would be interested in how some of you react to it:

http://www.s8int.com/greatpyramid.html

The Great Pyramid by Martin Gray

The Great Pyramid is the most substantial ancient structure in the world - and the most mysterious. According to prevailing archaeological theory - and there is absolutely no evidence to confirm this idea - the three pyramids on the Giza plateau are funerary structures of three kings of the fourth dynasty (2575 to 2465 BC).

The Great Pyramid, attributed to Khufu (Cheops) is on the right of the photograph, the pyramid attributed to Khafra (Chephren) next to it, and that of Menkaura (Mycerinus) the smallest of the three.

The Great Pyramid was originally 481 feet, five inches tall (146.7 meters) and measured 755 feet (230 meters) along its sides. Covering an area of 13 acres, or 53,000 square meters, it is large enough to contain the European cathedrals of Florence, Milan, St. Peters, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's.

Constructed from approximately 2.5 million limestone blocks weighing on average 2.6 tons each, its total mass is more than 6.3 million tons (representing more building material than is to be found in all the churches and cathedrals built in England since the time of Christ).

The Great Pyramid was originally encased in highly polished, smooth white limestone and capped, according to legend, by a perfect pyramid of black stone, probably onyx. Covering an area of 22 acres the white limestone casing was removed by an Arab sultan in AD 1356 in order to build mosques and fortresses in nearby Cairo.

Herodotus, the great Greek geographer, visited in the fifth century BC. Strabo, a Greco / Roman historian, came in the first century AD. Abdullah Al Mamun, son of the Caliph of Baghdad, forced the first historically recorded entrance in AD 820, and Napoleon was spellbound when he beheld the fantastic structure in 1798.

According to our present knowledge the Great Pyramid is mostly solid mass, its only known interior spaces being the Descending passage (the original entrance), the Ascending passage, the Grand Gallery, a mysterious grotto, an equally mysterious subterranean chamber, and the two main chambers. These two chambers, called the King's Chamber and the Queen's Chamber, have unfortunately retained the misleading names given to them by early Arab visitors to the pyramid.

It is an Arab custom to bury men in tombs with a flat roof and women in rooms with a gabled roof; therefore, in the Great Pyramid, the flat-roofed granite chamber became the King's Chamber, while the gabled, limestone chamber below became the Queen's.

Even those archaeologists who still stubbornly subscribe to the tomb theory of the pyramid do not believe that a queen or anyone else was ever buried in the limestone chamber. The King's Chamber is 10.46 meters east to west by 5.23 meters north to south by 5.81 meters high (a series of measurements that precisely expresses the mathematical proportion known as the Golden Mean, or Phi).

It is built of enormous blocks of solid red granite (weighing as much as 50 tons) that were transported by a still-unknown means from the quarries of Aswan 600 miles to the south. Within the chamber, in the western end, sits a large, lidless coffer (7.5 feet by 3.25 feet, with sides averaging 6.5 inches thick) of dark black granite estimated to weigh more than three tons.

When the Arab Abdullah Al Mamoun finally forced his entry into the chamber in AD 820 - the first entry since the chamber was sealed in some long ago time - he found the coffer entirely empty. Egyptologists assume that this was the final resting place of Khufu, yet not the slightest evidence suggests that a corpse had ever been in this coffer or chamber. Nor have any embalming materials, any fragments of any article, or any clues whatsoever been found in the chamber or anywhere else in the entire pyramid that in any way indicates that Khufu (or anyone else) was ever buried there..............

Egyptologist Petrie expressed his astonishment of this feat by writing, "Merely to place such stones in exact contact would be careful work, but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible; it is to be compared to the finest opticians' work on the scale of acres."
Herodotus, visiting in the fifth century BC, reported that inscriptions of strange characters were to be found on the pyramid's casing stones.
In AD 1179 the Arab historian Abd el Latif recorded that these inscriptions were so numerous that they could have filled "more than ten thousand written pages."
William of Baldensal, a European visitor of the early fourteenth century, tells how the stones were covered with strange symbols arranged in careful rows.
Sadly, in 1356, following an earthquake that leveled Cairo, the Arabs robbed the pyramid of its beautiful casing of stones to rebuild mosques and fortresses in the city. As the stones were cut into smaller pieces and reshaped, all traces of the ancient inscriptions were removed from them. A great library of ageless wisdom was forever lost.

Allu akhbar. Remind me again of the contributions of islam to the world?

Thanks Bellflower. The only people who think that the graffito is a forgery are people who think "Stargate" is a documentary. :')

Even those archaeologists who still stubbornly subscribe to the tomb theory of the pyramid...

That would be a list of every actual Egyptologist. Not just most, every single one. I'm not sure of the number of people who stubbornly cling to the idea that the pyramids weren't constructed as pharaonic tombs.

...do not believe that a queen or anyone else was ever buried in the limestone chamber.

The smaller, lower chamber probably held grave goods, and canopic jars. It, along with the burial chamber, were probably robbed in antiquity. During construction, there was a serious structural problem of some kind. Houdin et al attribute this to a settling of one side of the pyramid due to the immense weight of the structure. The corbels at the top of the Grand Gallery were found (by Petrie I think) to be holding on by less than an inch on one end, due to the shift (whatever its cause; used to be attributed to an earthquate). The pyramid was nearing completion -- the top half of the pyramid contains, hmm, about 1/9th of the mass, uh, I'd better get someone else to look at that -- and the chief architect had an inspection shaft dug from the top of the Grand Gallery to the first of the upper relieving chambers. In modern times the other relieving chambers were tunnelled into from the lowest one.

During the New Kingdom at least one of the Giza pyramids was reused, and other construction carried out, such as Campbell's Tomb w of the Sphinx. Carved and inscribed stones of Old Kingdom date were carted off, perhaps from Giza, and incorporated into Middle Kingdom-era construction in the Fayyum and elsewhere.

Khufu's mom died during the construction of the Great Pyramid, and was buried close to the base, but her tomb was broken into and robbed (including the mummy) not long after burial; one of the jobs that had to be done, and of which the account survives, is the investigation of the robbery, and a final report to Khufu. That must have been a fun job.

Khufu's father Sneferu built three large pyramids, which have a total mass exceeding that of the Great Pyramid, although I'm not sure if any of these has ever been attributed by anyone to the last of the Ice Ages. Same goes for the Khafre and Menkaure pyramids at Giza, as well as the various queens' pyramids there -- afaik, not one has ever been given a date in the tens of thousands of years.