The oldest securely dated example is Assyrian. A carved stone threshold from the palace of Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE, carries the pattern as a floor design; it is now in the Louvre. From the Roman period the seven-circle and larger grids appear on mosaic floors around the Mediterranean and on late Roman silver, including pieces from the Kaiseraugst hoard found in 1961. The pattern was then taken up extensively in Islamic geometric design, where a compass-built circle grid is the standard underlying construction for a large family of star and girih patterns. Leonardo da Vinci studied overlapping circle grids and their proportions in the Codex Atlanticus, between roughly 1478 and 1519.
The famous case is Abydos in Egypt, where five patterns of nineteen overlapping circles appear in red ochre on granite columns in the Osirion, the subterranean structure behind the temple of Seti I. The markings are real. They can be seen and photographed, and they are the single most cited piece of evidence for the pattern's antiquity.
What has not been established is that they are contemporary with the building. The pigment sits on the surface rather than being cut into the granite. The markings are placed high on the columns, at a height reachable only when the structure had filled with sand. And they occur alongside Greek graffiti, including a legible inscription reading Theos Nilos, the god of the Nile. The prevailing view among those who have examined them is that they are visitors' graffiti of the Greek or Roman period, plausibly around the first century BCE, and not Egyptian work of the thirteenth century BCE when the Osirion was built. Reference accounts add that still later origins cannot be entirely ruled out.
The dating is therefore genuinely contested, but the weight of it runs one way. Anyone citing Abydos as proof of pharaonic sacred geometry is citing something that has not been shown.