The pyramid of Menkaure (Arabic: هرم منقرع, romanized: Haram Manqaraʿ or Arabic: هرم منكاورع, romanized: Haram Minkāwraʿ) is the smallest of the three main pyramids of the Giza pyramid complex, located on the Giza Plateau in the southwestern outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. It is thought to have been built to serve as the tomb of the Fourth Dynasty King Menkaure. With roughly one tenth of the volume of the pyramid of Khufu, it is a part of a Egyptian pyramid complex comprising a mortuary temple and a valley temple linked by a causeway, together with three subsidiary pyramids on its southern side. Numerous signs of unfinished work indicate that the king died while the monument was still under construction, leaving its completion to his successor Shepseskaf.
Size and construction
Menkaure's pyramid had an original height of 65.5 meters (215 ft), and was the smallest of the three major pyramids at the Giza Necropolis. It now stands at 61 m (200 ft) tall with a base of 108.5 m (356 ft). Its angle of incline is approximately 51°20′25″. It was constructed of limestone and Aswan granite.
As with the pyramid of Khafre, the ground chosen for the monument was uneven, and the builders compensated for this irregularity. Quarrymen cut into the western part of the limestone plateau, extracting large monoliths in a regular, systematic fashion; these were hauled to the eastern and southern sides of the perimeter, close to their point of extraction, where they were dressed and fitted to raise the ground to the level of the pyramid's foundations. The same procedure served for the platform of the mortuary temple and for the corridor leading to the causeway.
The body of the pyramid consists of large blocks of local limestone quarried nearby, laid in regular courses that form steps against which the casing blocks were set. The lowest sixteen courses of the casing, rising to a height of more than 20 metres (66 ft), were of red granite from Aswan; above this the casing was of fine limestone up to the pyramidion, which has disappeared and whose material (limestone or granite) is unknown. The construction of the granite casing was halted at sixteen to eighteen layers following Menkaure's death, only seven of which remain today due to vandalism and erosion. Part of the granite was left in the rough. Medieval quarrying of the pharaonic monuments concentrated on the fine limestone, which explains the loss of the upper casing; in the nineteenth century, part of the granite casing was in turn dismantled on the orders of Muhammad Ali, who reused it for the construction of the arsenal of Alexandria.
The great breach that scars the northern face (cf. below) of the pyramid exposes the internal structure of the monument. It shows that the pyramid was first conceived as a stepped structure, built in great steps of seven to eight courses each, three of which are currently visible, and was then converted into a true pyramid by filling in the steps with successive courses and applying the smooth casing.
A boat hieroglyph was found painted on a limestone block near the pyramid, which may indicate the presence of a boat pit for a solar barque.
Age and location
The pyramid's date of construction is unknown, because Menkaure's reign has not been accurately defined, but it was probably completed in the 26th century BC. It is a few hundred meters southwest of the pyramid of Khafre and the Great Pyramid of Khufu in the Giza necropolis.
Authors Bob Brier and Hoyt Hobbs argue that the pyramid was likely robbed as early as the First Intermediate Period. They claim that "all the pyramids were robbed" by the New Kingdom, when the construction of royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings began.
Substructure
The entrance to the pyramid is located in the center of its northern face in the thickness of the casing's fifth course, sitting about 4.2 meters above the average base of the pyramid and almost directly below the great breach. it was finally located in 1837 by Howard Vyse.
A descending passage, faced with granite where it crosses the body of the monument, cuts down into the bedrock and opens into a first antechamber. Rectangular in plan, its walls carry carved panelling imitating a palace façade consisting of eleven niches on each of the longer walls, cut in the carefully dressed rock and finished with plaster; this is the first appearance of decoration of any kind in the internal rooms of a pyramid, the monuments of Menkaure's predecessors being entirely plain (the only earlier pyramid with decorated internal chambers is that of Djoser at Saqqara).
Immediately beyond lies the portcullis chamber, fitted with a sliding arrangement of three granite portcullises barring access to the rest of the apartments. A gently sloping corridor then leads to a large rectangular room, oriented east–west and opening at its western end onto a broad niche, separated from the room by two buttresses beneath a decorated architrave; a rectangular depression in the floor of the niche appears to have been cut to receive an embedded sarcophagus of which only the lid would have projected, and Maragioglio and Rinaldi concluded that the niche served as the provisional burial place of an earlier scheme, abandoned when the definitive burial chamber was begun. High in the northern wall of this room opens a second corridor, first nearly horizontal and then rising back through the rock into the masonry of the core, where it terminates without any external exit; it was excavated from the outside inwards and later plugged with limestone blocks. It is interpreted as the access corridor of the initial project, made obsolete when the pyramid was enlarged, and is now a blind alley.
A third arrangement was discovered beneath the rectangular room: a corridor cut into its floor descends to a large chamber, more than six metres long and 2.6 metres wide. Oriented north–south, it is lined with red Aswan granite and roofed with nine pairs of great granite beams set as chevrons, whose soffits were recut into a curve, giving the room the appearance of a slightly pointed barrel vault (the same roofing device was later adopted by Shepseskaf for the tomb he built for himself at Saqqara). Shortly before the granite burial chamber, a doorway in the northern wall of the access corridor leads by a stairway of seven steps to a room set at an angle of about 25° to the north, off which open six storerooms cut into the rock, four on the east side and two on the north; their use has been interpreted as chambers for the canopic jars and the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.
Maragioglio and Rinaldi reconstructed the sequence of works as follows: the upper corridor and a chamber a fraction of the size of the present rectangular room were first excavated from the north, in accordance with an original project whose details are unknown; a single radical change of plan, made when the apartments were only just begun, then enlarged the chamber to its present dimensions, cut the niche as a provisional burial place, and drove the lower system of corridors and the cave in which the granite burial chamber was built, the chamber of the storerooms being added shortly after; the later modifications are of no great importance and cannot be considered a third plan. The holes found in the floor and walls of the large rectangular room are thought to have held the beams of a scaffolding used to assist the introduction of the sarcophagus and the handling of the granite blocks of the burial chamber, the room thus serving as a working space during construction.
This is the first time the funerary apartments of a royal pyramid were developed to such an extent. Later royal tombs took up and elaborated the internal plan of Menkaure's pyramid; the tombs of Khentkaus I and Shepseskaf, and the royal pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty, retained its governing elements (the antechamber preceding the portcullis chamber, the vault divided into an antechamber and a sarcophagus chamber, and the storeroom chambers, whose role has not yet been established). The decoration of the first antechamber and of Menkaure's sarcophagus, by contrast, remained without parallel: decorative schemes of comparable elaboration do not reappear in royal pyramids before the Sixth Dynasty, more than a century and a half later.
Sarcophagus and coffin
In 1837, Howard Vyse and John Shae Perring discovered the basalt sarcophagus of Menkaure in the granite burial chamber, displaced from its original position against the west wall. It was decorated in the palace-façade style: its long sides carried four recessed bastions framing three false doors, its short sides repeated the same scheme reduced to two bastions and a single false door, and the whole was framed by a band and crowned with an Egyptian cavetto cornice, the lid being fitted with the same rounded-dovetail-and-peg system as the sarcophagi of Khufu and Khafre. The piece was unique and exceptional for this period of Egyptian art.
Its extraction required considerable effort. Perring dismantled the granite blocks facing the north wall of the burial chamber, and the damage to the doorway of the portcullis chamber, of which only parts of the lintel and one jamb survive, is likewise attributed to his removal work. Hauled out through the descending passage, the sarcophagus was crated, transported to Alexandria and shipped for England. The Beatrice, the vessel carrying it to London together with other antiquities, went down with all its cargo in a violent storm in 1838; the only surviving records of the sarcophagus are the drawings published by Vyse and a watercolour by the French Egyptologist Émile Prisse d'Avennes.
In the rubble filling the upper rectangular room, Vyse found the lid of a wooden anthropoid coffin inscribed with Menkaure's name and some of his titles, together with the remains of a human body wrapped in a coarse cloth; both were later transferred to the British Museum. The coffin was radiocarbon-dated to 1212–846 BC, from the late New Kingdom to the Third Intermediate Period, showing that it was fabricated long after the king's death, presumably in the course of a restoration of the plundered tomb. The male body and its shroud were carbon-dated to the early Islamic Period.
Pyramid complex
The funerary complex of Menkaure is the third and last of the great royal building projects erected at Giza under the Fourth Dynasty. The ensemble follows a regular plan, aligning the constituent elements of an Egyptian pyramid complex: the temple for the cult of the dead king stands against the eastern face of the pyramid, linked to a valley temple by a causeway more than six hundred metres long. This causeway, once roofed, runs perfectly straight, unlike those of the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre, which deviate from the principal axes of their monumental complexes. The causeway of large limestone blocks is a continuation of the foundation platform of the mortuary temple, running eastward down the slope to join the foundations of the valley temple.
All around the royal monument lie necropolises and further tombs of princes and queens, complementing the king's tomb, whose cult was maintained throughout the Old Kingdom. Besides the three queens' pyramids built on the southern flank of the king's pyramid, a necropolis of the priests of the royal cult was installed southeast of the mortuary temple, in the quarry that had served for the construction of the monuments. A second necropolis lies north of the causeway, dominated by the tomb of Queen Khentkaus I, a relative of Menkaure, which is sometimes described as the "Fourth Pyramid of Giza"; in front of this tomb, a causeway adjoins a priests' town connected to the landing stage below the valley temple.
Recent archaeological findings from the Giza plateau show that pyramid construction relied on a Nile-connected harbor system to move large stones. Sediment cores and reconstructed waterways suggest that ports close to Giza operated through the Fourth Dynasty, allowing limestone blocks and materials to effectively reach the plateau. This harbor system supported not only Khufu's and Khafre's projects but also later construction at Menkaure's pyramid complex.