In 1908, George Reisner found eight “triads” representing Pharaoh Menkaure, the goddess Hathor, and various provinces of Egypt.
In 1902 an Egyptological “summit” was held on the terrace of the Mena House hotel in Cairo. It had been invited by Gaston Maspero, director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and some of the great archaeologists of the time were invited:
The German Ludwig Borchardt (who in 1912 discovered the bust of Nefertiti) on behalf of the German archaeologist George Steindorff, the Italian Ernesto Schiaparelli (who in 1904 would locate Nefertari’s tomb), and the North American George Andrew Reisner, known as the “American Flinders Petrie” for the precision and meticulousness of his methods.
The purpose of the meeting was to distribute the excavation areas on the Giza plateau.
Thus, the Germans were given the sector of the pyramid of Khafre; the Italians, part of the cemetery located to the north of the pyramid of Khafre, and the North Americans were lucky enough to have the entire funerary complex of Pharaoh Menkaure, the architect of the smallest pyramid of the three that stand in Giza.
The pyramid of Menkaure had already been explored in 1834 by the British Richard Vyse, so Reisner focused on investigating other elements of the complex.
His inquiries soon bore fruit. Along the east face of the pyramid, Reisner located the upper temple – where fragments of a colossal seated alabaster statue of the pharaoh appeared – and the remains of the road that joined this building with the lower temple or the valley (which has not been found yet), where the purification rites of the king’s mummy took place.
