The sculpture was crafted out of “a piece of graywacke, a metamorphic rock only quarried in the ancient Near East in Wadi Hammamat,” supporting the notion that the artifact came from Egypt.

One hundred and eighty kilometers between Qena’s city of Qeft and the Red Sea’s coastal city of Quseir stretches the historically significant Wadi Hammamat seabed, Ancient Egypt’s oldest trade route ...