Valley Temple of Khafre

Khafre's perfectly preserved granite mortuary temple at the base of the plateau

The Valley Temple of Khafre, at the eastern foot of the plateau near the Sphinx, is one of the best-preserved Old Kingdom temples in Egypt. Built around 2530 BC in massive blocks of red Aswan granite — some of the largest stones ever used in any Egyptian building — the temple served as the mortuary processing point where Khafre's body was received from the Nile before being moved up the causeway to the pyramid.

The interior is austere and powerful: a T-shaped hall with polished alabaster floors and sixteen massive granite pillars, walls lined with the faint traces of where the king's statues once stood. The causeway connecting the valley temple to the upper mortuary temple beside the pyramid runs for nearly half a kilometre and is one of the few causeways at Giza that is largely intact. The valley temple is included in the general Giza admission and is easily combined with a visit to the Sphinx, which stands immediately beside it.

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The valley temple's floor is polished alabaster, its walls are red Aswan granite, and its T-shaped hall was once lined with 23 life-size seated statues of Khafre in diorite — a stone harder than granite that had to be quarried in the Nubian Desert and hauled hundreds of kilometres north. When the site was excavated in 1860, Auguste Mariette found one of the statues upside down in a pit, perfectly preserved. It is now the prize of the Egyptian Museum's Old Kingdom gallery.