How Likely is it that Colonel Howard Vyse Forged the Khufu Inscription in The Great Pyramid ?

Anyone coming across the new video by Scott Creighton referred to above and wanted to check out the background can do a bit of Googling ("Googledebunking"), just a mouse-click away. There is a lot of information that can set these arguments in contexct.  Within about forty seconds into this, one can find an excellent, though pseudonymous, post made 4 years ago in the r/AskHistorians substack on Reddit that I think is a pretty good answer, and I reproduce it below (I have been unable to contact the author of this "in-depth and comprehensive" post).

It is written by a person or persons writing under the pseudonym 'mikedash' answers a question by user ParsleyLion 4 years ago "How likely is it that Colonel Howard Vyse forged the Khufu inscription in The Great Pyramid ? One wonders why in "researching the topic" Scott Creighton did not find this text, and head off some of the criticisms of the model he'd already presenetd in 2016, because as we shall see, 'mikedash's comments from 2021 are just as applicable to this fresh attempt to create an alternative picture. The post reads:

"Not remotely likely. The idea that the marks were forgeries was suggested by Zecharia Sitchin, in his pseudoscientific The Stairway to Heaven (1980), a book proposing that the pyramids were built by “ancient astronauts”, and it has recently been reiterated by Scott Creighton in his The Great Pyramid Hoax (2016). But, to be able to forge the quarry marks that Vyse discovered in the chambers he forced open above the Kings Chamber, he would have had to be able to read and write in hieroglyphics with a high degree of fluency – which he wasn't. The marks he found were carefully copied and sent back to the British Museum, where an Egyptologist named Samuel Birch actually made the translations. Creighton actually concedes this point, and admits that Sitchin's evidence was "eventually discredited...as a result his controversial allegation was soon dismissed, and many of those who had hitherto supported him quickly distanced themselves from the controversy."

Creighton has his own bit of skin in this game, let's not forget – his book offers as his qualification to write on this topic the fact that he is "the host of the Alternative Egyptology forum on AboveTopSecret.com". And while he attempts to resurrect Sitchin's claim, even he admits the need for special pleading – conceding that Vyse would have needed both "elementary knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language – and a little bit of luck." Given the general lack of evidence that Vyse was a forger, or under financial pressure in any way in 1836, that's just a terrible bit of argumentation.

I suppose that we ought to begin by asking just what it is that Creighton is saying here with his comment about a little luck. What he's actually suggesting is something very implausible, but which is fundamental to his argument. Pharaohs took five different names when they became ruler – the common name that we know them by today is only one of them, and Khufu's five regnal names were not actually all known or tabulated when Vyse was working at the pyramid. Yet several different names for him, some of them unknown at the time, but accurately given, are referenced in the graffiti he discovered. To explain this, Creighton posits that Vyse stumbled across some other inscriptions dating to Khufu's reign, written in hieratic script, which no other Egyptologist before or since has ever identified. He was able to read these inscriptions, and he used them to "lift" Khufu's other names for the purposes of his hoax – realising, with really quite remarkable foresight, that mere mention of the known name, Khufu, would not be sufficient to impress his future detractors, writing nearly two centuries hence. This unprecedented bit of supposed good fortune is the "little bit of luck" that Creighton refers to.

Next, it is worth remarking on a couple of complicating factors that further reduce the possibility of forgery. First, several of the marks that Vyse found are partially obscured – they were painted onto blocks that were then fitted in place, with other blocks positioned over them. Second, the marks discovered by Vyse, and reported by him, went well beyond hieroglyphics that can be used to establish who built the pyramid – as Lehner and Hawass note, they included elements such a "levelling lines, marks defining the axis of the chambers, directional notations and cubit measurements." There are dozens of them. Creighton and Stitchin don't actually allege that these marks were hoaxed by Vyse – they say he added his own marks, in the same sort of red ochre paint used 4,000 years earlier, in such a way that they were indistinguishable from the older lines. But this adds considerable complications which neither author properly addresses. How did Vyse contrive to make his marks look old, not fresh? If it's accepted that the builders did make some marks on the stones they used in the pyramid, why suggest they did not make the sort of quarry marks Vyse said he found, which, after all, have been pretty commonly found in other places since?

Third, as noted above, the "forgery", if that is what it was, would have been remarkably subtle for a man who had, after all, just physically blasted his way into the relieving chambers using gunpowder – only a single tiny cartouche mentioning the pharaoh Khufu's name was found, amidst a much larger number of work-gang names which used other variations of Khufu's royal names, rather than the name he is known by to us today. Fourth, Sitchin is the only person to suggest Vyse was under financial pressure to produce results at the time the discovery was made – actually, he did not have a patron to satisfy, and he self-funded the work he undertook. Fifth, the suggestion that the discovery of a few painted marks would actually have constituted astounding news to the people interested in the pyramid in the 1830s is false – the marks simply did not make much of an impact at the time, and were a long way short of what Vyse had actually been hoping to find when he started his blasting operations inside the pyramid: dramatic new hidden chambers packed with artefacts from Khufu's time. As a matter of fact, the marks that nowadays attract so much debate are barely mentioned in Vyse's own three-volume work on his "operations at Gizeh" – they appear, without real comment, in an engraving positioned in an appendix to the second volume! This was because they were not even properly translated until some years after Vyse published – the idea that the marks were a sensational discovery designed to generate immediate funding for further work at Giza, then, is an utter red herring.

Finally, Vyse's discoveries, which were made in 1836, are also totally consistent with the general style of quarry marks, made by the Egyptian labour gangs responsible for construction, that have been discovered in the nearly two centuries since he was at Giza. It's wildly implausible, in my view, that a man who was barely even an Egyptologist, in the modern sense of the term, could have been so subtle, so prescient, and so plain interested in such things as to forge a set of quarry marks so accurately in the middle 1830s.

Broadly, then, the argument followed here looks like something constructed in a manner precisely the opposite of the way any historical controversy ought really to be discussed. Sitchin and Creighton don't start with Vyse and a clear reason to presume there are problems with his evidence. Rather, they begin from the presumption that the pyramids were not built by the people the Egyptologists tell us they were. For their thinking to be correct, it is imperative to discredit the marks that he found – which rather clearly do show that the Great Pyramid was built by Khufu's men. Therefore they devote huge efforts to trying to find reasons to doubt Vyse's testimony.

Sources

Howard Vyse, Operations Carried On at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837 (3 vols, Cambridge, 2015)

Mark Lehner and Zawi Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids (2017)"

I think that is a very clear, well-argued and supported explanation for why the idea that Colonel Vyse forged the Khufu inscriptions is extremely unlikely. It shows that the forgery hypothesis depends on a series of implausible assumptions: Vyse would have had to read and write hieroglyphs he demonstrably did not understand and imitate Old Kingdom quarry marks so convincingly that later Egyptologists found them entirely consistent with hundreds of similar marks discovered since. The writer also notes that Vyse had no evident motive. The pyramid had long been associated with Khufu anyway, Vyse was self-funded, not under pressure to produce sensational results. A crowning argument is that the marks themselves were not treated as a major discovery at the time.

In contrast, the mundane explanation that these were genuine work-gang inscriptions fits both the archaeological evidence and the historical record. Overall, the response shows that Sitchin and Creighton begin with the assumption that Egyptology must be wrong and then work backwards, stretching speculation far beyond what the evidence can reasonably bear.