The first step toward discovering the age of the ancient Egyptian pyramids is to determine for whom they were built. Each pyramid was erected to mark the burial of a particular king (pharaoh), and fortunately the builders left inscriptions that attest to the ownership of many of these monuments. The three great pyramids at Giza were built for rulers named Khufu. Khafre, and Menkaure. Other pyramids were built for kings named Snofru, Sahure, and Neferirkare. Even more fortunately, the ancient Egyptians maintained detailed records of the dynasties (lines of hereditary rulers of a country) and the hundreds of kings who ruled Egypt over the centuries. These lists provide the basis for modern reconstructions of ancient Egyptian chronology and are an essential tool in any estimate of the age of the pyramids.

The most famous of these king lists was produced by an Egyptian priest named Manetho, who lived during the third century B.C.E. His work includes a list of over 200 kings who had ruled Egypt since the beginning of recorded history. These kings are grouped together into some 30 dynasties, but it is not always clear what all the kings in any given dynasty had in common, since sometimes the kings belonging to a particular dynasty seem to belong to a single family, while in other cases rulers from different families are grouped together. In spite of such uncertainties, Manetho's dynasties still provide the basic terminology for organizing Egyptian kings and Egyptian history.

Manetho's records indicate how long each dynasty lasted and suggest that the total length of time covered by all the dynasties extends over thousands of years. Given such a vast amount of time, there are bound to be issues of accuracy. Furthermore, Manetho's work is preserved only in a few secondhand copies created hundreds of years after he died, and even these are not entirely consistent Thus while the Manetho tradition is a valuable resource, earlier lists of kings are still needed in order to construct a more accurate chronology.

Luckily for Egyptologists, there are a number of other king lists that are thousands of years older than Manetho's. Some were created to decorate the walls of temples and include only rulers considered important at the time the stone was carved, omitting a number of short-lived or heretical kings known from other historical records. Other texts, preserved only in fragments, appear to have originally contained a more or less complete account of Egyptian rulers. The Palermo Stone, for example, gives a year-by-year record of events in Egyptian history up through the Fifth Dynasty. There is also the Turin Papyrus, likely created in the Nineteenth Dynasty, which contains a list of kings together with the lengths of their reigns. Here, even kings who ruled for only a year are included. Such resources, while regrettably incomplete, still preserve invaluable information that has allowed scholars to come to a clearer understanding of a complex story spanning three millennia.

Based on these and other historical documents, Egyptologists have constructed an outline of ancient Egyptian history. The outline is still divided into 31 dynasties, which are now grouped together into an Archaic Period, Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, the Late Period, and three intermediate periods. The kingdoms are, in general, times when the central government of Egypt was strong, while the intermediate periods were times when the authority of the pharaoh was weak. During the intermediate periods, multiple rulers and even foreign powers could exercise control over different parts of Egypt.

The kings associated with the Great Pyramids at Giza belong to the Fourth Dynasty in the Old Kingdom, which places them in a very early period in Egypt's long history. Their pyramids are consequently among the older monuments in Egypt. However, the information from the king lists cannot provide us with a very precise estimate of when these kings lived or when the pyramids were built. These records may indicate how long each king ruled, but there are gaps in the records and, to complicate matters further, some kings may have had overlapping reigns. Uncertainties of this sort tend to accumulate as we go backward in time, so the timing of very early events, such as the construction of the pyramids, is quite difficult to pinpoint.