Some time around 2550 BCE, master sculptors at Giza shaped slabs of grey-green schist into a set of standing triads for King Menkaure’s valley temple. Each composition follows the same quiet drama: the young pharaoh strides forward in his white Hedjet crown, torso taught and fists closed around short ceremonial cylinders, while the goddess Hathor, identified by her sun-disk and cow horns, steadies him at one shoulder. On his other side stands a local deity—the jackal-crested lady of Cynopolis, the falcon-standard bearer of Hu, or another nome spirit—her emblem carved above her wig to announce the region she guards. Together the three figures outline a political map in flesh and stone: the king at the centre, Hathor granting divine sanction, and Egypt’s provinces pledging allegiance.The valley temple’s eight niches suggest a full set of eight statues, one for each corridor, but by the late Old Kingdom they had slipped into darkness, buried under Nile silt and later masonry. In the winter of 1908 the Harvard-Boston Expedition cleared Menkaure’s temple ruins and George Reisner’s team lifted five triads, three nearly intact and two reduced to fragments. The clean cuts, polished surfaces and crisp inscriptions—Hathor, Lady of the Sycamore in all her places—still looked fresh after forty-five centuries, their scenes of cosmic harmony undimmed.Reisner divided the finds: three triads travelled to Cairo, catalogued today as JE 46499 and displayed beside Menkaure’s copper statues; two went to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where the pharaoh marches eternally between his goddess and province. The missing three niches remain empty, teasing archaeologists with the possibility of more hidden stone. Yet even the surviving group fulfils the original ritual plan: wherever they now stand, Hathor and the nomes continue to flank Menkaure, proclaiming a kingdom knit together under a single, striding ruler.

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Triad of Menkaure