History of the world's tallest buildings to be tall, but its true height is not known. For thousands of years, the Great Pyramid in Egypt was the tallest "structure" in the world, but the Great Pyramid is not considered a building since it is not habitable. The earliest structures now known to be the tallest in the world were the Egyptian pyramids, with the Great Pyramid of Giza, at an original height of , being the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years, until the construction of Lincoln Cathedral in 1300. From then until the completion of the Washington Monument (capped in 1884)
History of the world's tallest buildings was destroyed by a 1953 tornado and rebuilt. If the original spire was as tall as is claimed, then the Mole Antonelliana was the world's tallest building from 1889 to 1908, surpassing Philadelphia City Hall by . The buildings that were the tallest secular skyscrapers, which excludes religious buildings, were: The list of tallest buildings is based on the default metric of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), that of measuring to the highest architectural element. Other criteria would generate a different list. Shanghai World Financial Center is not on the above list, but it surpassed Taipei