The Great Pyramid is aligned to true north more precisely than plenty of modern buildings

The Great Pyramid at Giza, built more than 4,500 years ago, is aligned to the four cardinal directions with a deviation from true geographic north of only a fraction of a degree.

That's a level of precision that's hard to pull off even today without modern surveying equipment — and the ancient Egyptians didn't have a magnetic compass, which wouldn't be invented for thousands of years.

The best-documented hypothesis: the builders may have used observations of circumpolar stars, tracking the rising and setting angles of a specific star and marking the midpoint between them as true north — a method fully achievable with the tools of the era, though it would have demanded enormous patience and precision.

It remains just one of several competing hypotheses — the exact measuring method actually used has never been confirmed by any surviving written source from the period.