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Hi.
I’m just answering some voicemails.
Let’s give one a listen.
“I had a question about the pyramid of Khufu.
What exactly ties that pyramid, the largest pyramid, to Khufu?
A lot of the alternative history guys talk about that it’s really tenuous, and they
found barely anything that ties it.
They found some document that talks about moving stones.
And you’ve helped disprove a lot of the ancient history things, but I feel like there’s
still, like, pieces that could help me understand better.
One of my challenges is just knowing where the provenance of when they say something
is X years old.
Like, how do they come to that figure?
I wish more things would have a way to easily, as a layperson, know, like, hey, there’s
these dating methods that made it, you know, known it was tied to this and it was X years
old.
Anyway, thank you.
Bye.”
Thank you for your question.
I am sure you are not the only one wondering about this.
How do we know when the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed, and what ties it to King
Khufu of the 4th dynasty?
Let’s talk about the scientific dating methods first.
The most well-known is, of course, carbon dating, which can tell us the date that a
living organism died.
But that means we can only date organic material.
Fortunately, there is organic material in the Great Pyramid.
The mortar that the builders put in between the stones of the pyramid was made by burning
gypsum and limestone with wood.
A large number of carbon samples were taken from the mortar in 1984 and 1995 and carbon
dated.
The trees that supplied the wood to make the mortar were determined to have died between
2871 and 2604 BCE.
Then we have the evidence from thermoluminescence dating, which calculates when the carved surface
of a stone was exposed to sunlight, which would be when the stone had been cut but not
yet put into place in a monument.
As far as I can tell, no samples from the Great Pyramid were examined, but several samples
in the vicinity were, including a granite block from Menkaure’s pyramid, a granite
sarcophagus in the Osiris shaft, and granite stones in the Sphinx temple.
Their dates came out, respectively, to 4400-2500 BCE, 3440-2300 BCE, 3640-2560 BCE, 3380-2100
BCE, and 1530-850 BCE.
That’s as far as they could be narrowed down.
Although these aren’t from the Great Pyramid itself, they do give a general indication
of when granite used on the Giza plateau was cut or carved.
As you know there is a granite sarcophagus and granite blocks within the Great Pyramid
too.
We also have some astronomical dating.
The square base of the Great Pyramid is only 3.4 arcminutes off of true north.
That's accurate to about 1 millimeter for every meter.
On the other hand, some of the later pyramids deviate more from true north, as if over time
their architects' method for aligning them became less accurate.
Karen Spence from the University of Cambridge tested a hypothesis that the two stars Kochab
and Mizar in the Big Dipper could have been used by the Egyptians to ascertain true north
when the north celestial pole lay exactly halfway between the two stars.
Using the known positions of the stars, she calculated that the calculation was made in
2478 BCE for the alignment of the Great Pyramid, give or take 5 years.
Mind you, this is not the only time stars could have been used to make this calculation.
Dennis Rawlins and Keith Pickering hypothesized that the stars Thuban and Draconis could have
been used to ascertain true north, and this would have been done for the pyramid in 2638
BCE.
But what makes Spence’s dating so compelling is that she matched the alignments of the
other pyramids constructed before and after the Great Pyramid to the movement of those
stars, and there appears to be a correlation.
In other words, it seems the Egyptians continued to calculate north in the same manner, but
as the stars moved, the alignment changed.
There are also markings in the Great Pyramid that provide some clues as to its date.
Stone masons left marks on limestone roof slabs in the saddle vault above the king’s
chamber.
The markings, which chiefly consist of numbers, are the types of markings typical of the Old
Kingdom.
For example, some of the same were found in the saddle vault above the king’s chamber
in the pyramid of Unas.
As you may know, Khufu was a king in the Old Kingdom.
How did he specifically become connected with the Great Pyramid, if his body was not found
in its sarcophagus?
Well, mostly from the testimony of Herodotus.
In his Histories, he tells us that, when he visited Egypt, the Egyptian priests told him
it was Cheops who had the Great Pyramid constructed, and we have been able to identify Cheops with
Khufu.
Mind you, Herodotus lived in the 5th century BCE, some 2,000 years after Khufu, so the
priests of his day simply could have been wrong, but Herodotus does say that they showed
him some writing on the pyramid itself, which stated how much it cost to feed all the laborers
who worked on the structure.
This inscription no longer exists, unfortunately.
However, in the 19th century Howard Vyse discovered graffiti painted in red ochre inside the pyramid
in the relieving chambers.
The graffiti identifies the writers as: “The gangs, companions of Khufu,” referring apparently
to the stone workers that were working on the pyramid.
Some internet personalities have made the accusation that Howard Vyse and his assistant
painted the graffiti themselves, there are 3 names of Khufu there, and one of them, his
Horus name, was not yet known by any Egyptologists of the time.
Vyse could not have known that name.
Moreover, some of the graffiti is set way back behind the masonry, which Vyse would
have found inaccessible.
Those stones were painted before they were put into place and other stones placed in
front of them.
So the graffiti must date back to the time of the pyramid’s construction.
Add to that a document from the time of Khufu, the Logbook of Merer, which refers to the
transport of limestone blocks to Giza and specifically to the Akhet Khufu, a name we
recognize from later times as referring to the Great Pyramid.
The Great Pyramid, as you may know, is made largely of quarried limestone blocks.
But how do we know when Khufu reigned?
Well, Egyptian chronology has been constructed from king lists, contemporary documents from
the king’s reigns, and synchronisms with the reign of kings from other countries, which
places the reign of Khufu in the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE, right where the carbon
dating of the mortar and the astronomical evidence points.
But also recently, a high-precision chronological sequence was developed by combining radiocarbon
measurements of short-lived plant samples with the historical information relating to
reign order and length.
A Bayesian modeling approach was employed using the OxCal calibration program, and a
new series of calibrations were achieved to ascertain the time of kings’ reigns from
the 3rd to the 21st dynasty.
The reign of Khufu was revised, with a 95% chance, to some time between 2629 and 2558
BCE, and with a 68% chance into the narrower range of between 2613 and 2577 BCE.
To summarize, we have the carbon dates from the mortar in the pyramid, the thermoluminescence
dates of associated monuments on the plateau, the astronomical evidence for the alignment
of the pyramid, the evidence that links the construction of the pyramid to Khufu, and
the carbon dates from plants that date Khufu’s reign to the same time as the carbon dates
of the mortar and the thermoluminescence dates of the associated granite work.
While the dates for the new calibration fit with those for the dating of the mortar and
plant samples, Spence’s astronomical evidence is about a century later than the new calibration.
I’m not sure how this will be reconciled, but the Rawlins-Pickering theory fits better.
Future studies will be able to achieve more accuracy with these dates.
But the case for a mid-3rd millennium BCE date generally for the construction of the
Great Pyramid during the reign of King Khufu is, as you can see, very strong.
For those who are interested in reading the studies and getting more detailed info on
this, I will leave the links below.
If you would like to leave me a question on my voicemail, you can do so at speakpipe.com/DavidMiano.
And if you like what this channel is doing and would like to support it, you can do so
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Catch you later!