[snip] The world's oldest known geological map is a nine-foot-long papyrus from the Egyptian village of Deir el-Medina, home to the New Kingdom craftsmen who worked in the Valley of the Kings. Created by Amennakhte, the chief scribe of the royal necropolis, the papyrus depicts a dry riverbed called the Wadi Hammamat in Egypt's eastern desert. The wadi had been used for quarrying and mining for centuries, and as a route connecting the Nile Valley to the Red Sea for millennia. No map would have been needed for general travel, according to Egyptologist Andreas Dorn of Uppsala University and linguist Stéphane Polis of the University of Liège. Instead, the papyrus was created as a commemorative record of a pharaonic expedition, perhaps during the reign of Ramesses IV (r. ca. 1153 -- 1147 B.C.), to a bekhen-stone quarry. Bekhen-stone, or greywacke, was prized for use in high-quality sculptures. To distinguish types of stone, Amennakhte employed dark brown to represent bekhen-stone, pink for deposits of granite and gold, and spots for alluvial deposits. [/snip]The Goldmine Papyrus | Jarrett A. Lobell | Archaeology Magazine | Mapping the Past | May/June 2019
For God’s sake, don’t tell the Hoffmans.
I wonder if this corresponds to the description of the headwaters of the Pishon River in Genesis 2:11-12.
My hypothesis is the mining is of latrines of the Jews after Moses lead them across the Red Sea.
The latrines would hold the gold that Arron made the Jews eat and drink of the golden calf that was ordered destroyed.