any help is appreciated. also i’m on mobile so sorry for any errors
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If you want a more detailed answer this might be a question for /r/askhistorians.
Most human cultures (and some non-human animal groups) have some sort of process for dealing with their dead.
Early Ancient Egyptians buried their dead in the ground.
Around 3,000 BCE the rich, powerful Egyptians got a big stone slab-like-thing, [now called a mastaba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastaba), built over their grave, to mark it and help secure/preserve it.
At some point in the next few hundred years the really important people started to get extra layers added on top of their mastabas. In particular, around the 2660s BCE there was an Old Kingdom ruler called Djoser and his mastaba ended up with 6 steps to it, and is [the oldest complete stone building complex known in history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Djoser). There are debates as to why Djoser (or his heirs) decided to build a multi-tiered mastaba – some suggestions about wanting to see it from Memphis (his capital), or maybe as a giant stairway to heaven – and questions as to whether it was always intended to be stepped, or if they started out with a normal mastaba and later decided to build up.
Whatever their motivation it isn’t hard to see how you could get from building a giant stone slab on top of people’s tombs to building a series of giant stone slabs, each on top of the other, making the higher ones smaller so they don’t fall down.
Egyptian rulers and builders seem to have experimented a bit with the designs. A few generations after Djoser the pharaoh Sneferu seems to have developed smoothed-sided pyramids, having three different pyramids constructed, the most interesting of which is the “[Bent Pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid)” at Dahshur (built around 2600 BCE). As the name implies, this pyramid is bent. About halfway up the slope gets quite a bit shallower. The thinking at the moment is that this was due to it being experimental; they got part of the way up before realising it wasn’t stable enough to keep going, so they made it less steep from then up. The next pyramid Sneferu built started at the shallower angle.
Sneferu’s son and heir, Khufu, took pyramid-building to the next level, building what is now known as the [Great Pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza) (in the 2570s BCE), the largest of the ancient pyramids, and the tallest building for nearly 4,000 years (until Lincoln Cathedral was completed in 1311 – fun fact, had Lincoln Cathedral’s spire not been knocked down in 1549 it would have remained the tallest man-made structure until the Washington Monument in 1884).
Two other large pyramids were build alongside Khufu’s, one for his son Khafre, and one for Khafre’s son Menkaure (in the 2530s BCE). These three pyramids are [the famous ones at the Giza pyramid complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pyramids_of_the_Giza_Necropolis.jpg) (although as that photo shows, there are smaller ones as well).
For some reason Menkaure’s successor, Shepseskaf, didn’t get a pyramid. It isn’t clear if he never wanted one, or if one was started by abandoned. And at that point pyramids started to fall out of fashion in Ancient Egypt. A few were build in the 25th century BCE, and then there were some local pyramid revivals over the next couple of thousand years, but nothing close to the scale of Khufu’s or Khafre’s. In total there are around 120 Egyptian pyramids.
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To answer your questions, then, they built them to mark their burial sites, as a form of prestige and legacy. They learnt how to build them with practice (experiment and failure), starting with single-layered things, then step-pyramids, then smooth-sided pyramids.
Who knows how they got the idea for them… there are plenty of options. A pyramid is a pretty simple and stable design when you are working with basic materials.
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