British Egyptologist who surveyed Giza in 1880 to 1882 and published The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (1883). His measured tolerances and his descriptions of toolmarks are the bedrock every later precision argument stands on: casing stones flat to about .010 inch over 75 inches of face, joints averaging .020 inch, the Descending Passage straight within a quarter inch over 350 feet. Christopher Dunn reprints his chapter on mechanical methods as Appendix A of The Giza Power Plant, which hands the reader the means to check the author, worth doing, because Petrie drew a different conclusion from the same toolmarks, reasoning to bronze saws and drills charged with jewelled cutting points rather than to machine power. Core No. 7 is his, and Glen Dash’s 2015 resurvey confirmed rather than overturned his figures.
On the temple beside the Sphinx
His History of Egypt of 1894 was already calling the granite building next to the Great Sphinx “often misnamed the temple of the Sphinx”, fourteen years before George Reisner renamed it the Valley Temple of Khafre. The line matters to the dating argument because it shows the attribution by proximity was contested inside the field long before the revisionists took it up.
Connections
Core No. 7 · Great Pyramid of Giza · Christopher Dunn · Ancient Machining · King’s Chamber · Giza Iron Plate · Great Sphinx · Khafre · George Reisner · Valley Temple and Sphinx Temple · Origins of the Sphinx · Piazzi Smyth