The technology of dynastic Egypt was the end product of a development spanning many thousands of years. I suspect that ideas in the creation of sacred and monumental architecture entering the country via the Levant. Just look at Jericho with its tower, wall and rock-cut ditch which is at least 10,000-11,000 years old. All this was done with simple stone tools. No copper involved.

These ideas was brought into Egypt and were collected at sites like Helwan, immediately south of Cairo and the Tura Mountains. I show in The Cygnus Key that a Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement had been established here by 8000 BCE. Moreover, that the same stone tool technology found here also existed as far north as Gobekli Tepe and Nevali Cori. Here asset Helwan it lingered, with links back to the Levant, through till the age of the Maadi culture circa 3500 BCE. Shortly thereafter cemeteries started to be built at Helwan using massive cut and dressed Tura limestone.

It was the highly advanced nature of the tombs at Helwan that prompted Egyptologist Michael Rice to comment:

It is frequently asserted that the earliest use of stone [in ancient Egypt] was in the late Second Dynasty but quite apart from the revetment of Hierakonpolis [in the south of the country], the First Dynasty tombs at Helwan (as well as some of the larger, contemporary tombs at Saqqara) demonstrate that this is not so. Some of the blocks used for the wall and floor of the burial chambers are huge, suggesting that they are already the products of a long-established and assured tradition.38

This “long-established and assured tradition” had begun in the vicinity of Helwan and Ma’sarah at the time of the El Omari culture, circa 5500–4500 BCE, where it had most likely lingered in some form since the earliest days of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period. As we have seen, it was at this time that a highly advanced stone-tool-making society had thrived in the area—one with links all the way back to the culture responsible for cult centers like Göbekli Tepe in far off Anatolia. Yet it is what Rice goes on to say that is of the greatest importance here:

A study of the architecture of the Helwan tombs has concluded that the use of stone in their construction indicates a high level of building skills available in this region of northern Upper Egypt in the First and Second Dynasties. The ability to manipulate stone, it is suggested, may have contributed to the remarkable achievements of the builders of the monuments at Giza.

We can begin now to understand why the monuments of Giza are of such sophistication for their age, and where exactly the knowledge and technological skills that went toward their creation actually came from—Helwan.