The pyramid of Khafre or of Chephren is the second-tallest and second-largest of the 3 Ancient Egyptian Pyramids of Giza and the tomb of the Fourth-Dynasty pharaoh Khafre, who ruled c. 2558−2532 BC.
The pyramid was likely opened and robbed during the First Intermediate Period. During the Nineteenth Dynasty, the overseer of temple construction took casing stones to build a temple in Heliopolis on Ramesses II’s orders.
Arab historian Ibn Abd al-Salam recorded that the pyramid was opened in 1372 AD. On the wall of the burial chamber, there is an Arabic graffito that probably dates from the same time.
It is not known when the rest of the casing stones were robbed; they were presumably still in place by 1646, when John Greaves, professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford in his Pyramidographia, wrote that, while its stones were not as large or as regularly laid as in Khufu’s, the surface was smooth and even free of breaches or inequalities, except on the south.
