Limestone stela found by Auguste Mariette at Giza in 1858, beside the temple of Isis south of the Great Pyramid of Giza, recording that Khufu founded “the House of Isis, Mistress of the Pyramid, beside the House of the Sphinx” and listing statues and offerings. Read at face value it says that the pyramid and the Sphinx already stood when Khufu reigned, and it is cited on that basis across the alternative literature, Zecharia Sitchin among others, as documentary proof that Giza predates the Fourth Dynasty.
Egyptology dates the stela itself to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, the Saite period, around 670 B.C., roughly nineteen hundred years after Khufu, on the grounds of its language, its orthography, its titles and the deities it names, and reads it as a temple’s own account of its antiquity rather than as a Fourth Dynasty record. The object is real, catalogued and photographed, and its text is published in translation; the dispute is entirely about when it was carved, which is a question about the stela rather than about the pyramid.
It is the cleanest available test of the Giza-predates-the-pharaohs family of claims, and it points the same way as the Wadi al-Jarf Papyri and against the forgery reading of the red-paint cartouches Howard Vyse recorded in 1837.
Connections
Great Pyramid of Giza · Howard Vyse · Wadi al-Jarf Papyri · Zecharia Sitchin · Lost Civilization Hypothesis · Giza Power Plant Theory · The Wars of Gods and Men