Inventory Stela

from "Riddles of the Sphinx" by Paul Jordan:

"The Inventory Stela is an anachronistic invention, a pious fraud in which a latter day king borrows the name of Khufu to cloak his own operations at Giza in glory, and to promote the antiquity of the cult of Isis at Giza. (It also indicates, of course, that we should expect some of the repair work at the Sphinx to belong to Saite times.) The nineteenth-century scholars quickly saw through the general archaizing of the Inventory Stela, but some of them were inclined to regard it all the same as a late copy of a genuine Old Kingdom work. You can still hear this argument put forward today, but not by scholars. The evidence is all against it: the cult of Isis was little known in Dyn. IV times; the title Mistress of the Pyramid wouild make no sense when Khufu was to be the first to build a pyramid at Giza; the temple in which the stela was found had clearly been extended into, and was built in part out of Henutsen's own temple, probably in New Kingdom times to judge by some of the other finds later made in it; Henut means Mistress and memory of Henutsen's name would have inspired the the title later attributed to Isis. The Saite period saw a great revival at Giza of the cults of Khufu, Djedefre, Khafre and Menkaure and the 'temple of Isis' was found after Mariette's time to have contained various pieces of statuory taken from local Old Kingdom tombs to deck it in appropriately traditional style. The stela offers various anachronistic titles for the gods whose statues it lists and the names Hwran and Horemakhet for the Sphinx were unknown before Dyn. 18. So the Inventory Stela is no evidence at all for the age of the Sphinx, though it planted in people's minds the notion that it might be older than the pyramids, a view which continues to this day among non-scholars."