The Great Pyramid Of Giza Is 10,000 Years Older Than We Thought, Controversial Research Suggests
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The Great Pyramid Of Giza Is 10,000 Years Older Than We Thought, Controversial Research Suggests
Looking at erosion on the pyramid, the study suggests that it may have been built around 22,916 BCE. But you shouldn't believe an idea just because it's sufficiently fun.
James Felton
Senior Staff Writer
James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile
They're still old, just not as old as the new study suggests.
Image credit: ImAAm/Shutterstock.com
A controversial new study has suggested that the Great Pyramid of Giza may be a lot older than we think it is. While this will certainly prick people's ears up, there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical.
Getting your head around the timescales involved is already pretty difficult. For instance, it's often repeated that Cleopatra (born 69 BCE) lived closer to the invention of the iPhone (released 2007) than the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza (around 2600 BCE). The pyramids, and the tomb of pharaoh Khufu specifically, are undeniably old.
For some, the pyramid is not quite old enough. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there that claim that they are far older, and built by some ancient technological civilization, for example, if not by aliens.
In a new study, which has not been peer reviewed, one engineer from the University of Bologna believes he has found evidence that the Great Pyramid of Giza is older than presumed by analyzing erosion on the structure through weathering.
The pyramids as we see them today are not how they appeared when they were built. The huge blocks you see were once concealed underneath "casing stones" made of limestone, giving a smooth, shiny appearance. These were gradually taken away over the centuries and used for other building work, exposing the blocks underneath. Some are still there at the base of the pyramid, having been protected from being removed by the sand covering them, and the easier access to non-buried stones.
"I measured the surface erosion of the stones that had been covered by the casing and compared it with that of the adjacent stones, which have remained exposed to atmospheric agents since they were laid at the time of the construction of the monument," Alberto Donini writes in the study.
"The volume of disintegrated material should be proportional to the duration of exposure to erosive processes. From the ratio between these two types of erosion, it is therefore possible to calculate a plausible construction date for the structure."
Donini attempted to look at erosion on areas where we know that the underlying stone has been uncovered for a certain amount of time, comparing them to erosion on areas where we are unclear of the timescale involved. Helpfully, we do know when some of these casings were removed, with some of them being used to construct buildings in Cairo.
Looking at the weathering on the pyramid, and using a statistical model, Donini concluded that there was a 68.2 percent chance that the Great Pyramid of Giza was between 8,954 BCE and 36,878 BCE, with an average of 22,916 BCE.
"Although the resulting date ranges are wide, the conclusions indicate a low probability for the official archaeological dating of 2,560 [BCE] For these reasons, it is likely that the pyramids of Akhet Khufu date back to approximately 23,000 [BCE]," Donini writes.
"It is therefore plausible that the pharaoh Cheops merely renovated the Khufu pyramid, attributing its authorship to themselves. On the basis of this preliminary report on relative erosion measurements (REM) carried out on the Khufu pyramid, it can be concluded that around 20,000 years before Christ there existed a civilisation in Egypt capable of constructing at least the Khufu pyramid."
That sounds like a fun idea, but you shouldn't lose your skeptical mind just because the conclusions are sufficiently wacky. Donini himself stresses that these results are not intended to provide precise dating, more of a ballpark figure, and there are plenty of limitations to the study.
For a start, the study assumes weathering to be constant, when conditions around the pyramids have changed over the intervening centuries. Egypt was wetter in the past, and this would have effected erosion rates. As well as this, the surfaces can become covered in sand and hidden from various types of weathering, while the surge in tourism to the pyramids in recent centuries significantly contributes to their deterioration.
The findings are also very out of line with previous attempts to date the pyramids, using several reliable methods. Originally, the pyramids were dated through years of painstaking archaeological work.
"Primarily we date the pyramids by their position in the development of Egyptian architecture and material culture over the broad sweep of 3,000 years. So we're not dealing with any one foothold of factual knowledge at Giza itself. We're dealing with basically the entirety of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology," Egyptologist and archaeologist Mark Lehner explained to PBS.
"The pottery, for example. All the pottery you find at Giza looks like the pottery of the time of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, the kings who built these pyramids in what we call the Fourth Dynasty, the Old Kingdom. We study the pottery and how it changes over the broad sweep, some 3,000 years. There are people who are experts in all these different periods of pottery or Egyptian ceramics."
Then, when radiocarbon dating was developed, these ages were confirmed to be accurate by analyzing various materials found at the pyramids.
"For example, we used seeds and plant material from Tutankhamun's tomb, which is very precisely dated," Thomas Higham, then of the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, told the BBC. "We also used seeds from a room underneath the Saqqara step pyramid dated to a specific year of the reign of King Djoser."
These methods, which both come up with the same timeframe for the construction of the pyramids, are more reliable and less susceptible to outside factors (such as varying erosion rates) than the methods used by Donini. Unless peer review and further study comes to the same conclusions, overturning much more reliable methods, we wouldn't go learning any new dates for the construction of the pyramids. They remain impressively old, with the Great Pyramid of Giza being constructed around 2600 BCE.