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A few pyramid ramps have been discovered in situ, so most discussion on the subject is hypothetical. Ramps have been found at small, 3rd-dynasty pyramids. For example, a surviving ramp makes a perpendicular approach over the enclosure wall from quarries to the west of Sekhemkhet’s pyramid at Saqqara, abandoned very early in construction. And at Sinki, South Abydos, Gunter Dreyer and Nabil Swelim discovered a frozen moment in the construction of a tiny pyramid with ramps still in place, perpendicular to its sides over the lower steps. And, as we have seen, evidence of the roadbeds that ran along the top of embankments and ramps survives at the sites of later pyramids, such as that of Senwosret I at Lisht.

At Meidum there is what appears to be a hauling track or possibly the remains of a ramp approaching from the southwest. This trackway seems to lead directly over the satellite pyramid and, if projected, reaches the higher courses of the pyramid’s western side. Another so-called ramp approaches from the east, though this is more likely an earlier causeway than a construction ramp. However, it does align with a recess in the face of the fifth and sixth steps of the second step pyramid, E2, which led Borchardt to reconstruct it as a very thin and startlingly high straight-on or sloping ramp up to the pyramid face at that point.

At the North Pyramid of Dahshur remains of two transport roads approach from southwesterly quarries. Composed of compact chips and marly sand, they come in very close to the pyramid, implying that the core stone was hauled right up to its base – and so lending support to the theory that the ramp clung to the pyramid. Two other tracks composed of white limestone chips approach from the east, marking the delivery, perhaps, of the casing stones.

East of Khufu’s pyramid and south of the queen’s pyramids and the mastabas in the Eastern Field, archaeologist from Cairo University excavated two parallel walls, formed, like so many other secondary walls at Giza, of small broken stone set in tafla clay. One of the walls is thicker and made of segments c. 10 cubits (5.25 m or 17 ft 3 in) long. Because the excavators cleared the debris between them they now describe a corridor, but we suspect that they were retaining walls – the debris fill being the body of a ramp or construction embankment. Similar structures have been found, for example and embankment which still leans against the incomplete southern wall of the mastaba field to the west of Khufu’s pyramid. And George Reisner found construction embankments filling an unfinished room in Menkaure’s mortuary temple.

Much of pyramid construction, including ramps and embankments, was simply the engineering of huge amounts of limestone chip, tafla and gypsum. One advantage of this material was that once structures were no longer needed, it easily disintegrated into its constituent parts when struck with a pick.