The two limestone-cored buildings in front of the Great Sphinx. Auguste Mariette uncovered the southern one in 1853; the diorite statue of Khafre that anchors the whole attribution came out of a pit in its floor in 1860, and George Reisner renamed it the Valley Temple of Khafre in 1908.
The evidence in the masonry
Their limestone cores were quarried out of the Sphinx enclosure, which ties them to the monument’s excavation. The granite ashlars fitted over those cores were cut with irregular backs to sit against faces that had already weathered, which makes no sense if the cores were fresh when the granite went on. Schoch adds the caveat himself: “the attribution of the granite ashlars to the time of Khafre is itself circumstantial.”
Under and beside them
Mark Lehner’s model of the plateau treats the ground east of the temples as a harbour. The 2019 ground-penetrating radar in front of the south-east corner found what the team read as quarried levelling blocks a metre down and a buried second course to about four metres, and Zahi Hawass’s 1980 cores east of the buildings hit a twelve-metre drop in the bedrock with Aswan granite fragments at the bottom.
Connections
Great Sphinx · Khafre · George Reisner · Mark Lehner · Zahi Hawass · 1991 Sphinx Seismic Survey · Origins of the Sphinx