The fifth king of the 4th Dynasty
King Menkaure was Khufu's grandson and the son of King Khafre. He built the third of the pyramids on the Giza Plateau, and with a small base area, the original pyramid is 65 meters high, making King Mankhaura's pyramid the smallest on a square base.
This small size is due to several factors, including the small area remaining on the Giza plateau and the material used for the outer shell of the pyramid of King Menkaure; his predecessors used limestone to clad their pyramids, while King Menkaure used granite brought from Aswan, until the sixteenth pillar. Granite brought from Aswan, more than 800 km from Giza, up to the sixteenth pillar, was much more difficult than limestone to ship and transport, yet only the lower quarter of the pyramid is covered with granite, while the rest of the pyramid was clad in limestone.
Unfinished projects help archaeologists understand the methods used to build pyramids and temples, and south of Mankhaura's pyramid are three satellite pyramids, each of which is accompanied by a temple and infrastructure, and as next to the largest pyramid, three smaller pyramids can be seen next to the pyramid of Molt Mankhaura, and these pyramids were used to bury the queens of his reign, and the first pyramid belonged to King Mankhaura's wife, Queen Khar Merar Nabti II.
However, his harem has not been discovered, but it is believed that the largest pyramid of the Three Queens was the harem, and King Menkaure died before the completion of his pyramid group; many of the granite blocks of the pyramid had not been polished.
The funerary temple and the private valley temple were supposed to be made of huge blocks of limestone clad in granite, but they were actually built using white adobe bricks. Despite these poor capabilities, the veneration of King Menkaure continued for another 300 years after his death, and due to the king's death, his son King Shepseskaf completed the cladding and the rest of the pyramid group.
The Valley Temple of King Menkaure was excavated between 1908 and 1910 AD by Georg Reisner, who found a large number of statues, mostly of King Menkaure alone, or as a member of group statues, all carved in the Old Kingdom artistic style, with a high degree of detail, and in the funerary temple, the foundations and the inner core were made of limestone. The floors began with granite.
An inscription in the funerary temple reads, “He made it (the temple) a memorial to his father, the king of Upper and Lower Egypt.” For the Valley Temple of Mankaura, the king's architects planned to build a massive building with limestone and granite architecture, which dominated the funerary complex's receiving harbor, and for the Valley Temple of Mankaura, the king's architects planned a monumental building with limestone and granite architecture.
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