In recent weeks, news has been circulating of an incredible new dating for the Great Pyramid of Giza, Egypt, which is based on a study published by Eng. Alberto Donini on Zenodoa platform Open Access for various types of items. According to Donini, the construction of the Pyramid of Cheops (located about 18 km from Cairo and officially dated around 2,600 BC) would have occurred much earlier, between 37,000 and 9,000 BC. C.
But is it really like that? Let’s clarify for a moment the method used and the reliability of the study.
Let’s start by saying that the publication of the engineer. Donini has not undergone any review and verification process (peer review), specific to specialized magazines, and was published only on a free platform, therefore it cannot be considered a scientific article. The new dating method used for the pyramid, developed by Donini himself, is called “Relative Erosion Method” (“REM”). This method should determine the relationship between the erosion of the same type of rock, starting from the assumption that it progressively deteriorates at the same speed under the same conditions.
The dating proposed by Donini was estimated using the “Relative Erosion Method” which, in reality, immediately presents problems: it does not consider how the climatic conditions that generate the erosion of the stone – such as wind and rain, but also the sedimentation of debris and dust – are extremely variable over time, even more so over a period of more than 4,500 years. Today’s climate is not the same as it was 150 years ago, let alone 4,500.
A criticism made by Donini of the current datings – which, let us remember, are the result of at least two centuries of rigorous studies, based on archaeological, historical and epigraphic sources, also aided by methods such as radiocarbon – concerns the fact that the radiocarbon datings used recently – carried out starting from some organic samples present in the mortar used to build the pyramid – are unreliable because, at the time of Pharaoh Cheops, it was simply restored using the mortar, which the elusive original builders, thousands of years earlier, did not possess.
Archaeological and architectural studies on the pyramid have instead highlighted how it has never been restored, but rather that it is a single construction effort carried out over the course of several decades. Donini then questions the fact that the pyramids were tombs, although the architectural evolution of these explicitly funerary structures is well known, lasting half a millennium, from the mastabas (earlier truncated cone tombs, dated from 3100 BC) to the stepped pyramids and finally to those of Giza.
