The Menkaure triads (also Triads of Menkaure) are a group of high reliefs in greywacke (a variety of sandstone; described as schist or slate in the older literature) depicting the pharaoh Menkaure standing, flanked by two figures. Menkaure, the fifth king of the Fourth Dynasty, reigned . Five triads are known, all discovered at the same location, along with a statue of the pharaoh accompanied by his wife Khamerernebty II (Menkaure dyad).
History The sculpted groups, conventionally called triads, were discovered during the excavation campaigns of 1908–1910 conducted by the American archaeologist George Andrew Reisner on behalf of Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at the site of the valley temple of Menkaure at Giza, below the pharaoh's pyramid. During this campaign Reisner uncovered four well-preserved triads, found together in the storerooms south of the temple's offering chamber, each representing Menkaure differently but of analogous workmanship, together with a fifth in poor condition, found shattered on the northern side of the temple court; in 1910 a final statuary group followed, a dyad of the pharaoh accompanied by his wife. A small fragment of a sixth triad shows a seated figure in the centre and a standing male on the left and was also found in a thieves' hole of the Muslim period in the corridor where the four intact triads lay, beneath the dyad; its present location is unknown. Almost all of these statues are in a remarkable state of preservation and rank among the greatest surviving masterpieces of Old Kingdom sculpture; the pristine condition of the four intact triads is owed to their seclusion in the south-western corridor of the temple.
The interpretation of the original number of the triads has evolved. Reisner and, after him, William Stevenson Smith supposed that there may originally have been statues representing all the nomes of Upper and Lower Egypt (which numbered more than thirty), through which the deceased king could draw nourishment from the whole country. In 1974 the art historian Wendy Wood rejected this reconstruction, arguing that a series of more than thirty triads could not be meaningfully accommodated within the architecture of the valley temple, and proposed instead that the series numbered exactly eight, one for each of the eight portico chapels, representing only those nomes in which the cult of the goddess Hathor had been established under royal patronage.
Three of the four intact triads are kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, displayed in gallery 47 on the ground floor. The fourth, likewise intact, together with the dyad and the fragmentary triad, are displayed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Description
The triads measure between in height and between in width. All are composed on the same model with a few variations: the pharaoh stands at the centre, wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt, with the goddess Hathor on his right; in one of the groups, however (the one in Boston), it is the seated goddess who occupies the centre. Hathor is recognisable by the cow's horns framing the solar disc worn on her head. Her facial features resemble those of Menkaure's queen, Khamerernebty II, who appears beside the king in the dyad. On Menkaure's left, always slightly smaller in scale, stands the nome of a region of the kingdom, personified by a woman or a man without any particular attribute; only a large hieroglyph carved above the figure's head identifies it. The king stands slightly forward but remains, like the two other figures, engaged in the back slab. Like the goddess, he advances his left leg, whereas the nome figure sometimes keeps both feet together. Hieroglyphic formulae are carved on the flat surface of the base; the back of the slab is smooth. Like other Egyptian statuary, the triads were originally painted in conventional colours, which damp has almost entirely removed except on the necklaces, bracelets and the girdle bearing the king's name. The triads, the dyad and the fragments are all probably carved of greywacke from the Wadi Hammamat, although the stone cannot be identified with complete certainty without petrographic examination.
Iconographic significance The pharaoh is accompanied in each case by the goddess Hathor, goddess of the sky, of life and of love, shown standing or seated, and by a third figure personifying one of the nomes of the country, among them those of Thebes, Hermopolis Magna, Diospolis Parva and Cynopolis. The fifth nome could not be identified owing to the fragmentary state of the statue. Menkaure is shown standing, dressed in a ceremonial kilt. Athletic and eternally young, he adopts the attitude of walking, protected or encouraged by the gesture of the goddess Hathor. The relative scale of the figures reflects a hierarchy of divinity: the king, regarded during the Old Kingdom as a god himself (the living Horus, who became Osiris at death), is carved on a larger scale than his companions, while Hathor, more important than the divinities of the nomes, is in turn taller than the local figures. In the funerary context, the sculptures have traditionally been read as provision for the king's afterlife; Wood argued that this reading must be viewed as subsidiary to the celebration of the joint rule of the divine sovereigns, Hathor and Menkaure.
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Sources
External links Dynamic 3D view of one of the sculptures 44 photographs of the triads at the time of their discovery, Giza.fas.harvard.edu Study of the triads, Ancient-egypt.co.uk