Rediscovering Sculptures of King Menkaure at the Giza Pyramids

Speaker: Mark Lehner, Director and President, Ancient Egypt Research Associates, Inc.

Between 1908–1910, Harvard’s George Reisner found some of the most iconic pieces of ancient Egyptian art at the Menkaure Valley Temple at Giza—including four magnificent triad statues and the larger pair statue now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Over a century later, Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) reinvestigated the temple. Join AERA President Mark Lehner to learn about new findings that span 300 years—from the time of Menkaure to the end of the Old Kingdom (2447–2153 BCE). Lehner also revisits the site where Reisner found the famous pair statue of the king and an unidentified woman–possibly his queen, mother, or a goddess–with surprising new results.

About the Speaker: Mark Lehner is Director and President of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, Inc. (AERA). His forty years of archaeological research in Egypt includes mapping the Great Sphinx and discovering a major part of the Lost City of the Pyramids at Giza. Lehner directs the Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP), which conducts annual excavations of Old Kingdom settlements near the Sphinx and Pyramids with an interdisciplinary and international team of archaeologists, geochronologists, botanists, and faunal specialists. From 1990–1995 Lehner was Assistant Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Chicago. He is now Associate at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago.

Lehner was born, raised, and began his college education in North Dakota. He went to Cairo in 1973 as a Year Abroad Student at the American University in Cairo where he received his BA in Anthropology. He lived in Egypt for thirteen years, working for American, Egyptian, British, French, and German archaeological projects. From 1979 until 1983, he was the Field Director and then Director of the Sphinx Project sponsored by the American Research Center in Egypt. In 1984, he began the Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP), sponsored by ARCE and Yale University where Lehner received his PhD in Egyptology in 1990. In 1985 he founded AERA with Matthew McCauley.

In 1988, the GPMP began to excavate in search of the settlement and infrastructure that supported the pyramid workforce. In 1995 AERA assumed financial and administrative responsibility for the GPMP. AERA’s interdisciplinary team has been discovering more of the Giza pyramid builders’ urban administrative center including workshops, storage buildings, bakeries, and barracks. In 2011 AERA became an NGO registered with the Egyptian government.

Lehner has appeared on television in the National Geographic Explorer program, and on NOVA’s Riddles of the Sphinx and Secrets of Lost Empires series on ancient technology, including This Old Pyramid and Obelisk. He is author of The Complete Pyramids (Thames and Hudson, 1997). His work has appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Discover, and Archaeology Magazine.