Nine years ago, Jean-Pierre Houdin, a successful French architect, became obsessed by the centuries-old mystery of how the Great Pyramid was built. For 10 hours a day he labored at his computer to create exquisitely detailed 3-D models of the interior of the Great Pyramid. After five years of effort, the images rotating on his computer screen provided evidence of an astonishing secret. Corkscrewing up the inside of the Great Pyramid is a mile-long ramp, unseen for 4,500 years. The pyramid was built from the inside. This revelation casts a fresh light on the minds that conceived one of the wonders of the ancient world.

The Secret of the Great Pyramid moves between the ancient and the modern, following step-by-step the original 20-year building process, which involved 25,000 people and the construction of an entire worker city, and Houdin's forensic architectural investigation, which leads him to incredible discoveries about the massive stone building.