Le Chatelier Proof
The first man to posit a reasonable solution to how the Egyptians made their stone statues, was Henri Le Chatelier, a chemist, ceramist and metallurgist, born in France in 1850.
In the early twentieth century, he noticed that the famous statue of Pharaoh Khafra (or Khefren) revealed no sign of tool marks. Yet it had been made of diorite, the hardest type of stone, at a time when artisans possessed only simple stone or copper chisels. He concluded that with tools like these it would have been impossible to produce such a masterpiece.
Le Chatelier suspected that it had not been
carved at all, but made of agglomerated stone cast in molds, so he began to examine other statues. He looked at ones that were apparently enameled, and cut thin sections of them with a diamond-tipped saw, and found that the enamel was not an applied coating but part of the material from which the statue was made. He asserted that they were cast in some kind of synthetic material not sculpted in natural stone.