Uh… Do you think it looked like that ~2500 BCE when the pyramids where built? Cairo didn’t even exist at the time.

The closest „city“ was Giza (duh), which is miles away and looked like this around 1800 CE (!)

Of course they had a worker’s village next to the location, but that was it.

using ships

People knew how to build canals.

transporting all the stones would have been difficult

Yeah, that’s why people still haven’t found out exactly how they were able to built these things in the first place.

Edit: ugh, link is broken. 🙄 Scroll down to history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giza