The Great Pyramid Temple
Era
4th Dynasty, Old Kingdom
Location
Giza Plateau
Project Dates
2019-present
Previous Excavators
Flinders Petrie, Hakim Abou-Seif, Selim Hassan, Jean Phillip Lauer
The Great Pyramid Temple, reconstructed walls in brown.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the largest pyramid ever built and the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world still standing. Though it is one of the most popular tourist sites in the world, until our recent work here few of its visitors realized that a magnificent stone temple rose on its east side and was once the central focus of the Great Pyramid Complex. As tourists, horses, camels, and carriages traversed across the remnants of this once grand monument, they threatened to eventually obliterate its scant remains.
In fall 2020, thanks to a grant from the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), we began work with Zahi Hawass and the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities to protect, conserve, and fully document the remains of the Great Pyramid Temple. Since the temple lies mostly in ruins, we are also working to make the site more comprehensible to visitors with new signage explaining the site’s history and a walkway that follows the outline of the temple’s original monumental outer walls.
While conserving the remnants of Khufu’s pyramid temple, we found new evidence of the how the temple was built and uncovered fragments of courtyard wall reliefs. These fragments were decorated with relief-carved and painted scenes of the king’s 30-year jubilee and suggest that the temple was used as part of a rejuvenation festival for the king. Find out more about this discovery in the AERAGRAM article Khufu’s 30-Year Jubilee: Newly Discovered Pieces of a Puzzle.
In the fall of 2022, we returned to the Great Pyramid Temple. In this second phase of work, our primary focus was documenting, conserving, and replacing parts of the 1940’s restoration of the temple’s black basalt pavement floor. This helps to protect the temple’s ruins, while still allowing people to walk onto and appreciate the complex geometrical jigsaw joins of the original giant pavement tiles―just as Khufu’s masons set them 4,600 years ago!
Find out more about the project on the ARCE website.
Great Pyramid Temple Photogallery
The Great Pyramid Temple site showing all the features recorded and our proposed reconstruction (brown) of the temple walls.
Mark Lehner maps on the southern side of the Great Pyramid Temple. He first began mapping the temple in 1995. In 2020 as part of the GPTP, features not previously recorded were surveyed or hand-drawn to scale.
At work installing the new walkway. It follows the temple’s original outer walls to give tourists an idea of the temple’s size and how it functioned with the Pyramid of Khufu and its enclosure walls.
The new walkway not only protects the Temple’s ruins from further damage, but also provides safe and accessible viewing of the Temple’s remaining features.
Workers removing a displaced pavement block using ropes, much like ancient Egyptians may have done.
AERA archaeologist Daniel Jones maps the 1940s pavement restoration while camels, horses, buggies, and their drivers await visitors coming around the northeast corner of the Pyramid.
Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities conservator Hagag Khamese Mostafa consolidating and conserving the basalt pavement of the Great Pyramid Temple.
In 2022 we cleaned and mapped Khufu’s Northern boat pit, which lies just to the north of the Great Pyramid Temple. In 2023 we will also replace the metal fence.
Our surveyor (the small figure in the upper part of the photo) stands on the temple’s black basalt pavement, surrounded by the newly installed walkway.
Tourists enjoying the new walkway as they practice their dance moves.
Archaeologists and conservators take a well-deserved rest on one of the newly installed benches at the Great Pyramid Temple.
When we removed the 1940s restoration that covered three of the Temple’s pillar sockets, we found limestone pieces that came from the inner walls around the Temple court including this fragment of painted, carved relief.
Selected Bibliography
2023. “Great Pyramid Temple Project – Finished!” AERA Annual Report 2022–2023, pages 10–11.
2022. Friedman, Florence Dunn. “Art and Accounting of the Heb Sed.” AERAGRAM vol 23 no 1-2, pages 18-26.
2021. Lehner, Mark. “Sculpting Bedrock on the Scale of Acres.” AERAGRAM vol 22 no 1-2, pages 11-19.
2021. “Great Pyramid Temple Project 2020.” AERA Annual Report 2020–2021, pages 4–7.
2021. Lehner, Mark. “Giza Plateau Mapping Project.” Oriental Institute 2020-2021 Annual Report, ed. Theo van den Hou. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, pages 51–54.
2021. Hawass, Zahi, Mark Lehner, and Daniel Jones. “The Great Pyramid Temple Project.” AERAGRAM vol 21 no 1&2, pages 10–15.
2021. Lehner, Mark. “Khufu’s 30-Year Jubilee: Newly Discovered Pieces of a Puzzle.” AERAGRAM vol 21 no 1&2, pages 16–17.
2020. “Great Pyramid Temple Conservation Project.” American Research Center in Egypt website.