Thanos5150 wrote:

> Origyptian wrote:
>
> > But that's my question. Do you know why it is considered to
> > have been used during the 3rd millennium BC?
>
> Yes, I do. I have already said why in previous posts and
> provided a source.

Well, I read the chapter you marked at pg 448 in that 589 pg book that you cited, and it was very interesting. In truth, while the site is reported to be "100 km sq", in reality it is only a very spotty set of small sub-fields totally a few square km within a larger 10km x 10km circumscribed area. But the vast majority of that area has not been excavated or designated as a quarry. And the quarry itself simply looks like a flat field of rough boulders and not much evidence of systematic quarries of bulk blocks of stone.

Shaw makes it clear that the quarry was not used that much at all (e.g. evidence of only a small number of workers on very short expedtitions) and that it was relatively difficult to date since dating a site is attempted by exrapolation by dating artifacts found there, but very few artifiacts have been found there, and the few that have been found span many centuries throughout the entire dynastic era, and so dating the site is not reliable.

For example, the first excavation revealed a few artifacts that dated to the Middle Kingdom. However, subsequent excavations revealed a few more artifacts from the New Kingdom, then Old Kingdom and Early Dynastic. The number of artifacts retrieved from that 100 km sq area is simply not enough to definitively assign accurate provenance to the quarry or the stones thought to be from it.

While the gneiss that was used to make that Khafre statue may have arisen from Gebel el-Asr, it is not known whether it was actually carved during the 3rd millennium BC. And as I said, the carving of "Khafre" appears to be grafitti that may have been applied long after the original statue was created.

In fact, since artifacts have been found in that quarry that have been dated over many centuries, it's clear that untold generations have traversed and/or occupied that same site, and so it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that it may have been used far earlier but no artifacts have been retrieved from that earlier time (as a general observation, the older the site, the fewer the number of artifacts associated with it from that period).

LIkewise, it's not clear when the Khufu Stela was engraved. It's only clear that the stone is gneiss and could have originated from that area, and was likely not standing in the position Engelbach found it for the past 4500 years.

From what I've gleaned from posts in this discussion, there is not enough data to reliably assign provenance to the quarry, the Khafre statue, or the Khufu Stela. If anything, the scarcity of artifacts in the quarry dating it at least across a several millennia of the dynastic period, and the out of character engraving on the Khafre gneiss, and the unlikely positioning of the Khufu Stela, all cast a strong doubt on their alleged provenance.