We get both "pyramid" and "obelisk" from Greek, in which obelisk also means skewer, and pyramid can be a kind of bun or cake, probably made of wheat flour and honey.
So it is sometimes said that Greek visitors named these grand Egyptian monuments in fun, like London's Gherkin and Cheese-grater, after familiar little items .
This is certainly true for obelisk. It has an excellent pedigree as a Greek word quite independent of Egypt .
Obelos ("roasting-spit") is in Homer's Iliad, and both it and obeliskos ("little spit") were used as names for money.
The historian Herodotus wrote of Egypt's monumental obeloi lithinoi (stone spits) in the 5th century BC.
The playwright Aristophanes wrote of thrushes roasted on obeliskoi, and the historian Diodorus used the term obeliskos for Egyptian monuments in the first century BC.
For "pyramid" it is the other way roundreenex .
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