The Valley Temple, Giza: the building you walk through to reach the Sphinx

The Valley Temple, Giza: what it actually is

It is Khafre's valley temple, part of his pyramid complex. It stands immediately south of the ruined Sphinx Temple, which sits directly in front of the Sphinx to the east. Granite and alabaster, huge polished piers, no ornament: most accounts rate it the best preserved of the Old Kingdom valley temples.

The important correction is what it was for. It is not a monument to the Sphinx and it was not built to house it. It belongs to Khafre's pyramid, several hundred metres uphill, and the Sphinx sits alongside the route rather than at the end of it. Visitors read the plateau as a set of separate attractions, which is the commonest mistake made here.

Where it sits: landing, temple, causeway, pyramid

The Old Kingdom sequence runs river landing, valley temple, causeway, pyramid. From this building the causeway climbs west towards Khafre's pyramid. The Sphinx lies just north of that line, carved down into the bedrock beside it.

Taken in that order the plateau stops being three pyramids in a field and becomes a set of connected buildings with a route through them. You get the sequence whether you plan it or not, because the modern approach to the Sphinx normally begins in the valley temple. The difference is whether you notice.

What survives, and why it looks so plain

Massive granite piers, polished surfaces, alabaster underfoot in places. What holds a room like this together is stone, joint and proportion rather than anything carved on the walls. If you have arrived from Karnak or Abydos expecting registers of relief, the absence is not damage. This building predates those temples by more than a thousand years and belongs to a different kind of architecture.

The material is worth a thought too. The plateau is limestone; the granite is not from here. Egypt's granite comes from Aswan, the better part of a thousand kilometres upriver: the same quarries that supplied the sarcophagi inside the pyramids. Everything cut there travelled down the Nile before anyone could dress it and set it.

The core blocks are a different story again, and the best one on the site. Those of the Sphinx Temple and this temple appear to have come out of the Sphinx enclosure as it was quarried. Masons cut the pit, left the lion standing in the middle of it, and put the stone they removed into the buildings in front. The hole and the buildings are the same act of work.

Why almost nobody notices it

The route funnels visitors through the temple and out onto the terrace, where the Sphinx is and where everyone is taking the same photograph. Nobody stops in a corridor when the thing they came for is thirty seconds ahead. Guides know it, and most of them keep walking.

It does not help that Giza has almost no interpretation on the ground. Without a guide you are looking at very large stones with no context. A roofless granite hall does not explain itself the way a wall of painted relief does. That is exactly why it gets skipped, and exactly why it repays being told what it is first.

How to visit it properly

Go at opening. The Sphinx faces due east, so the light on its face is best in the first two hours. The same early start gets you through the temple before the crowd is pushing behind you. Give it ten minutes on the way in, and another five on the way out. By then the terrace has emptied you back through it and the room is quieter.

Look up rather than at the walls: the piers, the way the blocks meet, the sight lines down the hall. Look for where the alabaster survives against the granite and where it has gone. Then look back east, towards where the ground falls away and the Nile once came closer, and west along the causeway line towards Khafre's pyramid.

Then take the thirty seconds you saved and spend them on the Sphinx Temple ruins in front of the Sphinx. Most people walk past those entirely.

Is it worth it, and what else gets skipped for the same reason

Yes, and it costs ten minutes on a route you are already walking, which makes it the cheapest upgrade available at Giza. It is also the one building on the plateau where you get Old Kingdom construction at eye level. Out of the sun, and without a separate ticket queue.

The same logic applies to the mastaba tombs in the officials' cemetery, where you get carved and painted wall scenes and a fraction of the people. For most visitors those are better value than the interior of the Great Pyramid, which is a long stooped climb to a bare granite room.

What is open, roped off or ticketed separately on the plateau changes from year to year with no notice. Confirm on the day rather than planning around anything you read in advance, including here. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities lists what is currently open.