Menkaure - part 1
Jan 14th, 2007 by admin
King Menkaure was a relatively older man when he became Pharaoh, following the death of his father, Khafre. With this fact obviously on his mind, he did not wish to repeat the mistakes of some of his forefathers by initiating work on a big tomb and then not living to see it’s completion.
He thus built a pyramid beside his father’s and grandfather’s (Khafre and Khufu, respectively) on the Giza plateau and named it “The Divine Pyramid”. Though it was considerably smaller than the other two pyramids, Menkaure still had the misfortune of dying before it was completed.
His tomb is the most technically advanced of the Giza group and it’s interior is more elaborate than the other two. The casing stones were of granite rather than limestone, and some of them are still in place. It’s not known if only the lowest part of the building was intended to be cased by granite, as today, only seven layers remain.
Around the entrance on the north side some are cut in the right angle and are smooth, whilst the others are in their original crude state. On the west side Menkaure’s large Mortuary Temple was erected and it too was also planned to be cased in granite. Some of it is still in place but the construction was incomplete when his reign ended, and so it was finished in a rather hasty manner by his successor.
From here a straight causeway leads down to the Valley Temple of which almost nothing is left today. In the first decade of the 20th century a group of statues were found in a trench of the temple ruins and they are amongst the most perfectly made sculptures ever seen in world art. They are now on display in Egypt and the USA