| AIUI, IIRC, Khafre left a stele leaning against the Sphinx boasting of repair work he did on it. That seems wholly incompatible with making it. In general, we can almost always only establish a younger bound on age of any stone construction. Sky's the limit for how old something might be. Giza is absolutely perforated with tunnels, most carefully not inspected. Hawass used to insist ground penetrating radar was bunk, and would not look at results, never mind commission any. There is far more unknown about Egyptian prehistory than is known. Whoever built things there was very, very smart. They really did achieve things that seem to us impossible to people with their resources. We can anyway be certain they did not do it all with copper chisels. We have actual documents with good dates describing work done on facing stones on one of the pyramids. But I don't think we have any way to know if it was original construction or repair work. Egyptians were always very proud of their restoration work, often to the point of chiseling out the builder's cartouche and carving their own in its place. But the very oldest stonework had no identifying marks at all, and there must have been a serious taboo about tagging any Giza pyramid. They loved tagging everything else. So most things are identified with whoever tagged it last. This is often obviously absurd, as when the tagging is crude hackwork on an exquisite sculpture. There is absolutely no embarrassment about this, evident. |