Construction of the Pyramid of Menkaure
The pyramid of Menkaure at Giza was built around 2510 BC and is the smallest of the three, at about 65 metres against Khufu's original 146. The reduction in scale is the interesting fact about it. Menkaure was Khafre's successor in the Fourth Dynasty, and the drop in size across a single generation has been explained as declining royal resources, as a shift of investment from the pyramid to the temple complexes, and as a change in religious emphasis. None of these is settled. What it lost in size it gained in materials. The lowest sixteen courses were cased in granite brought some 800 kilometres from Aswan rather than in Tura limestone, and much of that granite was left undressed, which suggests the king died before the work was finished — the mortuary temple was completed in mudbrick by his successor Shepseskaf. The complex included three subsidiary queens' pyramids and a valley temple in which the excavator George Reisner found several of the finest sculptures to survive from the Old Kingdom, including triads of the king with the goddess Hathor and personified nomes. Herodotus records a story that Menkaure was a just king who reopened the temples his predecessors had closed, and was told by an oracle that he had only six years to live — whereupon he had lamps lit and drank through every night, to turn six years into twelve. An attempt by a Kurdish sultan to demolish the pyramid in the twelfth century lasted eight months and produced a gash still visible on the north face. Its granite casing was quarried for Cairo over the centuries. One of its subsidiary pyramids still holds a sarcophagus.
- Year: 2510 BCE
- Category: Cultural
