The satellites of Menkaure

Why this is extraordinary

South of Menkaure's pyramid, which is the smallest of the three great ones at Giza, three little pyramids stand in a row, numbered from the east as III-a, III-b, and III-c in the publication of the Harvard dig, and today more often G3-a, G3-b, and G3-c. Howard Vyse had already emptied their underground rooms in the nineteenth century and found almost nothing that named an owner. In the burial chamber of the middle one he did record red-painted signs on the roof, and the only signs he could read spelled Menkaure. When the temples in front of the three were cleared in the early twentieth century, the eastern pyramid turned out to be the large and careful one, a true pyramid cased at least in part with granite, while the middle and western ones were step pyramids of four stages, left without that casing, and nearly twins.

The digger expected queens, because small pyramids beside a king's tomb had, where anyone could tell, belonged to queens. He also wrote that the clearing produced no material that actually identified them. Fragments of a finely finished alabaster statue of a queen came out of the debris of the eastern temple, without her name. Under a plastered floor in that same temple sat a little pot of five model alabaster cups, each inscribed for "the king's son, Kay," and the way they had been tucked under the floor looked like a later offering, not the burial itself. On prominence alone, the eastern pyramid was then assigned to the chief woman of Menkaure's family. That is an argument from size and finish, which the publication is frank about, and it is not an inscription in the chamber.

A later reading notices that the eastern pyramid's burial room is a T cut in the bedrock, the sort of plan used for a ka pyramid, a satellite attached to the king's own cult, and that a pink granite sarcophagus was nevertheless there, which pulls the other way, toward a real burial or a place where a body was prepared. The western chamber was never even finished, and Vyse thought nobody had been laid in it. So the row is not three identical queens' tombs. It is one elaborate pyramid, two stepped ones, and a set of empty name-plates.

People have also wanted the row to be a diagram, as if the builders had lined up a lesson in how pyramids evolved, from steps to a smooth true pyramid. The catch is that the three belong to one king's complex and were built as a group. A step face can be a pyramid whose casing was never added, which is what the publication says of the middle and western ones, rather than a memory of an older age. Beside Giza's third great pyramid there is a small, precise argument about who a subsidiary pyramid is for, which changes that argument into an open question, and the stones do not say the name.

The three small pyramids stand south of Menkaure, in a row from east to west. They have no shafts, and no published star slope of their own is in the sources used here. The cardinal north of the large pyramids, and the channels inside Khufu's, are other rooms. A step face on the middle and western pyramids can be casing that was never added, which is the reading already given, rather than a model of an older sky. South of the king's pyramid is a place in a complex. Place is not a sunrise.