<HTML>Michael,
I said I'd return to thr issue of granite on the temples and lack of weathering etc.
I assume by temples you're refering to the Khafre Valley Temple (KVT) and Sphinx Temple (ST). My views (for what they're worth) are as follows:
A review of the fossil assemblages within the limestones undertaken on behalf of Mark Lehner established that the stone for the ST was carved from within the Sphinx enclosure - the same could not be established for the KVT. I see that, in its original form, the ST is contemporaneous with the Sphinx (i.e. Early Dynastic) anf the KVT is IV Dyn (Khafre).
OK these temples both include the use of megalithic masonry. But this can be the result of other factors. For instance the thickness of the limestone beds can control the size of the resulting quarried masonry. The Member II beds are alternating softer and harder bands - when using hammer stones for quarrying, its more straightforward to quarry away the softer beds (which are poorer building stones anyway) and use the harder limestones thus liberated in the construction. Hence the size of the masonry is governed by the natural thickness of the limestone beds. There comes a point when the masons had to decide which involved most work - breaking down these blocks into smaller units using hand-held hammer stones, or hauling these giant blocks into position in the temple walls.
I also looked into the use of sand or other fill ramps in the construction of temples - the principle being that they would lay ther first course of masonry - bury it in a sloping sand or other fill, which served as a ramp for the construction of the subsequent courses - the sand fill ramp increasing in height with each course (I think this is posted on the G:TT website).
The obvious criticism of this technique is that it uses a lot of sand in the ramps, but calculations showed that if blocks above a certain weight/ thickness were used, the dead weight of the masonry would overcome the pressure of the fill inside the temple. The implication of this is that although there is a lot more effort involved in building with huge masonry blocks, there are spin-offs including the fact that you can fill the interior of the temple with sand, as a working platform/ramp for use in construction, and don't need to bury all four walls externally in the sand fill as well (of course you do need one external ramp to haul the masonry along). Use smaller masonry and after 2 or 3 courses walls, which were not externally butressed with sand, would topple.
Anyway I digress....
Apart for the use of large blocks in their construction, architecturally, there are a few significant differences between the KVT and ST - the limetone walls of the ST are slender, by contrast the walls of the KVT are thick - so thick as to even include rooms and passages. The ST is even in a more ruinous state than the KVT, but whether this is a result of the more slender construction or the greater age of the ST is hard to be sure.
The ST was built in 2 stages (Ricke in Lehner) the last of which has been dated to the IV Dyn (Lehner and Hawass). I've presented the evidence why I think the first or original phase of construction was earlier - it's contemporary with the Sphinx and there are abrupt changes in the weathered state of an adjacent Member I limestone exposure - the relatively unweathered cutting is (according to Lehner) associated with the IV dyn construction activity.
I believe that the addition of granite casing is a IV Dyn feature - the SST originally was built entirely from local limestone. (note that even the slender columns in the central court of the ST were built in limestone unlike the granite columns in the KVT).
So the fact that the limestone masonry under the columns is not weathered is (for the KVT) because the structure was entirely built in l/stone and granite in the IV dyn and (for the ST) the structure had any granite casing added in the IV Dyn, after the extension undertaken in the reign of Khafre. Inevitably to fit the granite casing to the ST required the original limestone to be cut to fit the granite blocks.
So there you go - my 'take' on the situation.
Colin</HTML>
