Menkaure (Mycerinus)
Menkaure built the smallest of the three pyramids at Giza and was remembered as the kindest of its builders. He ruled Egypt around 2530 to 2510 BC, the son of Khafre and grandson of Khufu, and reigned for perhaps eighteen or twenty-eight years — the sources disagree. His pyramid is about sixty-five metres high, roughly a tenth of the volume of his grandfather's. Why it is so much smaller is unresolved: a shorter reign, a change in religious emphasis towards sun temples, or simply the exhaustion of a labour system that had built two colossal monuments in two generations. Its lower courses were cased in red granite from Aswan rather than limestone, much of it left undressed, which suggests the work stopped before completion. The burial chamber was cut deep into the bedrock and vaulted. A basalt sarcophagus with a palace-façade design was removed in 1838 and lost at sea off Cartagena when the ship carrying it to England sank. The valley temple produced the finest sculpture of the Old Kingdom to survive: a series of greywacke triads showing the king with the goddess Hathor and a personification of a province, and a paired statue of Menkaure with a queen, her arm around him, both looking forward. The modelling of the bodies and the restraint of the poses have no equal in the period. Herodotus reports that he reopened the temples his predecessors had closed and judged cases justly, and tells a story of an oracle giving him six years to live, at which he lit lamps and stayed awake nightly to make twelve years of six.
- Lived: 2532 BCE – 2503 BCE
- Nationality: Egyptian
- Roles: pharaoh, builder
