The age of the Egyptian pyramids has long been a contentious subject and dating evidence is minimal, subjective and speculative at best.
Is the Khufu graffiti in the reliving chambers of the Great Pyramid real or a hoax by Howard Vyse? Can we take the radiocarbon dates of organic particles found between the stones of the pyramids as evidence for when the stones were put into place? Is the Diary of Merer, the papyrus fragment from the time of Khufu actually talking about transporting stone to build the Great Pyramid, or some other structure at Giza?
This is the type of evidence we have to work with when proving the age of the Great Pyramid, but to say the pyramids are far older than the 4th dynasty is no different than saying the Great Pyramid was created by Khufu. Where is the evidence? In fact there is even less evidence to say they’re older than the Old Kingdom.
I am open to all interpretations, even the mainstream view, but we need to gather the evidence, however circumstantial, if we wish to find out the true age of the pyramids. I’m not trying to disprove the mainstream narrative; in fact I am wholly willing to accept it; I just need to see the evidence either way.
And this brings me to some relatively recent scientific work that was carried out, not on the Great Pyramid, but on the Pyramid of Menkaure, the smallest of the three large Giza pyramids, a pyramid that has an internal structure that screams of being re-built and enlarged at some point in history. It is also a pyramid that I’m sure was worked on in the later Saite period as well, due to an eyewitness account of orphic gold tablets inside the stone sarcophagus, and a wooden coffin that radiocarbon dates to this later period.
In 2013, a paper was published regarding scientific tests, known as surface luminescence dating on the Pyramid of Menkaure and also The Osirion in Abydos. In a nutshell, such tests measure the light energy stored in stone. From this we can get a date of when the stone was last worked.
Watch this video to find out the results, the problems with the results and what this means in our search for the true origins of the Giza Pyramids and the Osirion.
Source: I. Liritzis, A. Vafiadou, Surface luminescence dating of some Egyptian monuments, Journal of Cultural Heritage (2014)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1296207414000776?via%3Dihub
All images are taken from the above paper and from Google Images for educational purposes only.