The oldest inscribed papyri yet found, excavated from 2013 by Pierre Tallet at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast and published with Mark Lehner as The Red Sea Scrolls (2021). They are the working records of a harbour crew in the twenty-seventh year of Khufu, including the logbook of an inspector named Merer whose gang ferried Tura limestone to the Giza works, and they name the monument Akhet-Khufu, the Horizon of Khufu.
Their weight in this argument comes from what they are rather than from what they say. They are administrative rather than commemorative, they sat sealed in their storage galleries until excavation, and they were unknown to every party to the older dispute. They attach Khufu’s name to the Great Pyramid of Giza independently of the red-paint cartouches Howard Vyse recorded in 1837, which is the one piece of evidence the forgery case is built to remove, and independently of the Inventory Stela, whose own date is contested.
They do not speak to how the pyramid was built. They are not evidence against the machining and acoustic claims of the Giza Power Plant Theory, which concern method rather than date. They bear on when and for whom, which is the question the ancient-astronaut and lost-civilisation readings both turn on.
Connections
Great Pyramid of Giza · Howard Vyse · Inventory Stela · Lost Civilization Hypothesis · Giza Power Plant Theory · Zecharia Sitchin