Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is a structure built without mortar that has survived over four thousand years of wind and sand. This monumental achievement predates written history itself, relying entirely on the sheer weight of limestone and granite blocks to stabilize the structure against lateral movements.
Stonemasonry utilizing dressed stones is known as ashlar masonry, whereas masonry using irregularly shaped stones is known as rubble masonry. Both methods have shaped the skylines of the world, with natural stones from quarries around the world being sampled and recreated using molds, aggregate, and colorfast pigments to produce manufactured-stone veneers.
Blocks of cinder concrete, ordinary concrete, or hollow tile are generically known as Concrete Masonry Units, and they are much larger than ordinary bricks, allowing walls to be laid much faster for a given size. The primary structural advantage of concrete blocks is that a wall can be reinforced by filling the block voids with concrete with or without steel rebar, increasing wall strength and stability more economically than filling and reinforcing all voids.
Masonry walls rely mainly on their weight to keep them in place, and each block or brick is only loosely connected to the next via a thin layer of mortar, which is why they do not perform well in earthquakes. Many collapses during earthquakes occur in buildings that have load-bearing masonry walls, and heavier buildings having masonry suffer more damage when the ground shakes horizontally.
Gabions are baskets, usually now of zinc-protected steel, that are filled with fractured stone of medium size, and these will act as a single unit and are stacked with setbacks to form a revetment or retaining wall. Their expected useful life is only as long as the wire they are composed of, and if used in severe climates, such as shore-side in a salt water environment, they must be made of appropriate corrosion-resistant wire.