British army officer and antiquarian who excavated at Giza in 1837, using gunpowder to force entry and opening the four upper relieving chambers of the Great Pyramid of Giza. In them he recorded red-paint quarry marks including a cartouche read as Khufu, which remains the only inscription naming the builder found anywhere in the pyramid. The same season his assistant J. R. Hill recovered the Giza Iron Plate from the southern shaft, and Vyse reported coffin fragments and skeletal remains in the third pyramid which have since been dated far later than the Fourth Dynasty. The cartouches are a live dispute rather than a settled one. An independent literature, most fully Scott Creighton and Laird Scranton’s The Great Pyramid Hoax (Bear & Company, 2017), argues that Vyse or Hill painted them; Egyptologists answer that they are consistent with Old Kingdom quarry marks, that they sit in spaces sealed since construction and in positions awkward to reach, and that the misspelling argument rests on disputed premises. Zecharia Sitchin reports the forgery as established and adds a letter from Walter M. Allen of Pittsburgh, whose ancestor Humphries Brewer is said to have worked with Vyse and to have witnessed the painting. Two later documents bear on the same question from outside the dispute: the Inventory Stela, whose own date Egyptology puts in the Saite period, and the Wadi al-Jarf Papyri, excavated from 2013, which name the monument Akhet-Khufu in Khufu’s own reign.
Connections
Great Pyramid of Giza · Giza Iron Plate · Zecharia Sitchin · Flinders Petrie · King’s Chamber · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Inventory Stela · Wadi al-Jarf Papyri · Vyse Cartouche Forgery Claim