A post by archae on Usenet:
All I have seen of this so far is a 57 mb 36 page PDF slide show by
one of the authors of ths new paper.... it resorts to the "copper
chisels, the only tool the AE ever had" strawman at various places. A
ridiculously common fringe archeology ploy that I have seen so many
others use in the past. Not a very good sign at all. It also seems to
suggest that clearly weathered limestone masonry is cast because it
looks different from the somewhat freshly exposed and less weathered
blocks nearby. I hope that their "strange" chemical analysis is not
based on detritus from salt weathered rock surfaces... I like the
section on the granite blocks as well... since they are natural rock
the AE clearly had the ability to move heavy weights to great heights
and carve hardrocks with the tools and technology attributed to them
during the OK. Invalidates all those "how would they/you carve this"?
proclamations on the previous slides with strange shaped limestone
blocks. Instead the slide show resorts to "true and incomprehensible
mystery" innuendo in an apparent attempt to sidstep that fact... why
because the ancient Egyptians only had "soft copper" to cave the
granite, etc. I always get a good laugh from these people.... never
ever fails It's good to know the poured-rock crowd has finally
started to realize that the granite in the GP cannot be claimed to be
synthetic without them looking like complete fools.

Quite remarkable just how susceptible the rocks of Member II are to
agglomeration in water considering the solution widened joints and
colour bands present in them (El Aref & Refai 1987, Gauri &
Bandyopadhyay 1999). I guess none of these people realize that during
the Pliocene the Mediterranean Sea transgressed into the Nile valley
causing the Giza Plateau to become a peninsula. There are 2 levels of
30 m high shoreline eroded cliffs on the north and west Mokattam
escarpments just a short distance (the closest a few hundred meters or
so) from the Pyramids (Aigner 1983). That is, most of these rocks
around the Sphinx were below sea level for a very long time during
this period. It's remarkable that that completely non-existent 12 foot
thick bed of "kaolin-rich" limestone that Morris (1994) asserts exists
in Member II didn't turn in to mud and squirt away under the weight of
the overlying rock.... truly remarkable!!! I don't know what's more
remarkable that lack of squirting agglomeration mud or that someone
would think that a piece of weathered detritus sitting on the surface
is a representative sample of in-situ unweathered rock on the Giza
Plateau.

Aigner, T. (1983) A Pliocene cliff-line around the Giza Pyramids
Plateau, Egypt. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 42,
313-322.

El Aref, M. M., & Refai, E. (1987) Paleokarst processes in the Eocene
limestones of the Pyramids Plateau, Giza. Egypt. J. Afr. Earth Sci.,
6, 367-377.

Gauri, K.L. & Bandyopadhyay, J.K. (1999) Carbonate stone: chemical
behavior, durability, and conservation. Wiley, New York, 284 p.

Morris, M. (1994) Response (to Harrell in letters to the Editor).
Journal of Geological Education, 42, 198-203.

57 mb PDF file
[www.drexel.edu]

Archae Solenhofen

Doug Weller

Director The Hall of Ma'at
Doug's Skeptical Archaeology site::
[www.ramtops.co.uk]