The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (3 page)

That Maspero should have felt compelled to recant his heretical views on the Sphinx tells us more about the power of peer pressure within Egyptology than it does about the quality of evidence concerning the antiquity and attribution of the monument itself. Indeed, the evidence underpinning the prevailing consensus is extremely slim, resting not so much on ‘facts’ as on the
interpretation
that certain authorities have chosen at one time or another to give to particular and usually highly ambiguous data—in this case the solitary syllable of Khafre’s name on the Thutmosis stela.

Very few senior members of the profession have been as honest about such matters as Selim Hassan. In his classic 1949 study of the Sphinx, from which we have already quoted, he issued this pertinent warning:

Excepting for the mutilated line on the granite stela of Thothmosis IV, which proves nothing, there is not a single ancient inscription which connects the Sphinx with Khafre. So sound as it may appear, we must treat this evidence as circumstantial until such a time as a lucky turn of the spade will reveal to the world definite reference to the erection of this statue ...
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Context

Since Hassan wrote there has been no such ‘lucky turn of the spade’. Nevertheless the conventional wisdom that the Sphinx was built by Khafre,
circa
2500 BC, remains so strong and so all-pervasive that one assumes there must be something else behind it other than the disputed resemblance to the statue of Khafre in the Cairo Museum and the contradictory opinions of scholars concerning a half-ruined stela.

According to Mark Lehner, there is indeed something else—a kind of magic bullet which he clearly regards as powerful enough to kill any niggling doubts and questions. Today the Director of the Koch-Ludwig Giza Plateau Project, and former Director of the now completed Giza Mapping Project, Lehner is recognized as a world expert on the Sphinx. Whenever he fires his magic bullet at the occasional ‘heretics’ who have suggested that the monument might be a lot older than 2500 BC, therefore, he does so from a position of great influence and authority.

The name of his magic bullet is context and, at the 1992 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he was selected as the official spokesman of Egyptology to put the orthodox point of view in a debate on the true age of the Sphinx, he made extensive use of this ‘bullet’:

The Sphinx does not sit out alone in the desert totally up for grabs as to ‘how old is the Sphinx?’. The Sphinx is surrounded by a vast architectural context which includes the Pyramid of Khufu [better known as the Great Pyramid], the Pyramid of Khafre [‘the second Pyramid’] and the Pyramid of Menkaure,
[34]
pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty. Each pyramid has a long causeway running from a Mortuary Temple on its eastern side, down to the level of the Nile flood-plain, where a Valley Temple served as an entrance to the pyramid complex ...

Officials and relatives of the pharaohs built their tombs in cemeteries east and west of the Khufu Pyramid, and southeast of the pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure respectively. Digging at Giza for nearly two centuries, archaeologists have retrieved an abundance of material [dating to the Fourth Dynasty]. Hundreds of tombs have yielded the mortal remains and artifacts of people who composed the state administration of the Pyramid Age ... We are discovering evidence of the working class and everyday life of the society that built the Sphinx and pyramids ... We have evidence of the ruins of an ancient city spread out along the valley for the entire length of the Giza Plateau. All this is part of the archaeological context of the Sphinx ...
[35]

Lehner goes on to say that there are several specific reasons why this context persuades him that ‘the Sphinx belongs to Khafre’s Pyramid complex’:

The south side of the Sphinx ditch forms the northern edge of the Khafre causeway as it runs past the Sphinx and enters Khafre’s Valley Temple. A drainage channel runs along the northern side of the causeway and opens into the upper south-west corner of the Sphinx ditch, suggesting the ancient quarrymen formed the ditch after the Khafre causeway was built. Otherwise they would not have had the drain empty into the ditch. Khafre’s Valley Temple sits on the same terrace as the Sphinx Temple. The fronts and backs of the Temples are nearly aligned, and the walls of both are built in the same style ...
[36]

The evidence for the two Temples, the causeway and the second Pyramid all being part of one architectural unit with the Sphinx is indeed compelling. But using this evidence to support the conclusion that Khafre built the Sphinx is rather less so. What it ignores is the possibility that the entire ‘unit’ could have been built long before Khafre’s time by as yet unidentified predecessors and then
reused—
perhaps even extensively restored—during the Fourth Dynasty.

It is this possibility—not precluded by any inscriptions and not ruled out by any objective dating techniques—that has made the Sphinx the subject of an increasingly virulent controversy during the 1990s ...

Water erosion

The origins of this controversy go back to the late 1970s when John Anthony West, an independent American researcher, was studying the obscure and difficult writings of the brilliant French mathematician and symbolist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller is best known for his works on the Luxor Temple, but in his more general text,
Sacred Science
(first published in 1961), he commented on the archaeological implications of certain climatic conditions and floods that last afflicted Egypt more than 12,000 years ago:

A great civilization must have preceded the vast movements of water that passed over Egypt, which leads us to assume that the Sphinx already existed, sculptured in the rock of the west cliff at Giza that Sphinx whose leonine body, except for the head shows indisputable signs of aquatic erosion.
[37]

Schwaller’s simple observation, which nobody appeared to have taken any notice of before, obviously challenged the Egyptological consensus attributing the Sphinx to Khafre and to the epoch of 2500 BC. What West immediately realized on reading this passage, however, was that, through geology, Schwaller had also offered a way ‘virtually to prove the existence of another, and perhaps greater civilization antedating dynastic Egypt—and all other known civilizations—by millennia’:
[38]

If the single fact of the water erosion of the Sphinx could be confirmed, it would in itself overthrow all accepted chronologies of the history of civilization; it would force a drastic re-evaluation of the assumptions of ‘progress’—the assumption upon which the whole of modern education is based. It would be difficult to find a single, simple question with graver implications ...
[39]

Not floodwaters

West is right about the implications. If the weathering patterns on the Sphinx can be proved to have been caused by water—and not by wind or sand as Egyptologists maintain—then there is indeed a very serious problem with established chronologies. In order to understand why, we need only remind ourselves that Egypt’s climate has not always been as bone dry as it is today and that the erosion patterns to which West and Schwaller are drawing our attention are unique to the ‘architectural unit’ that Lehner and others define as the ‘context’ of the Sphinx. From their common weathering features—which are not shared by the other monuments of the Giza necropolis—it is obvious that the structures making up this unit were all built in the same epoch.

But when was that epoch?

West’s initial opinion was that:

There can be no objection in principle to the water-erosion of the Sphinx, since it is agreed that in the past, Egypt suffered radical climatic changes and periodic inundations—by the sea and (in the not so remote past) by tremendous Nile floods. The latter are thought to correspond to the melting of the ice from the last Ice Age. Current thinking puts this date at around 15,000 BC, but periodic great Nile floods are believed to have taken place subsequent to this date. The last of these floods is dated around 10,000 BC. It follows, therefore, that if the great Sphinx has been eroded by water, it must have been constructed prior to the flood or floods responsible for the erosion ...
[40]

The logic is indeed sound ‘in principle’. In practice, however, as West was later to admit, ‘flood or floods’ could not have been responsible for the peculiar kind of erosion seen on the Sphinx:

The problem is that the Sphinx is deeply weathered up to its neck. This necessitates 60-foot floods (at a minimum) over the whole of the Nile Valley. It was difficult to imagine floods of this magnitude. Worse, if the theory was correct, the inner limestone core-blocks of the so-called Mortuary Temple at the end of the causeway leading from the Sphinx had also been weathered by water, and this meant floods reaching to the base of the Pyramids—another hundred feet or so of flood waters ...
[41]

Floodwaters, then, could not have eroded the Sphinx. So what had?

Rainfall

In 1989 John West approached Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University. A highly respected geologist, stratigrapher and paleontologist, Schoch’s speciality is the weathering of soft rocks very much like the limestone of the Giza plateau. Clearly, says West, he was a man who ‘had exactly the kind of expertise needed to confirm or rebut the theory once and for all’.
[42]

Schoch was at first sceptical of the idea of a much older Sphinx but changed his mind after making an initial visit to the site in 1990. Although he was unable to gain access to the Sphinx enclosure he could see enough from the tourist viewing platform to confirm that the monument did indeed appear to have been weathered by water. It was also obvious to him that the agency of this weathering had not been floods but ‘precipitation’.

‘In other words’, West explains, ‘rainwater was responsible for weathering the Sphinx, not floods ... Precipitation-induced weathering took care of the problem in a single stroke. The sources I was using for reference talked about these floods in conjunction with long periods of rains, but it hadn’t occurred to me, as a non-geologist, that the rains, rather than the periodic floods, were the actual weathering agent ...’
[43]

As we have noted, Schoch got no closer to the Sphinx on his 1990 visit than the tourist viewing platform. At this stage, therefore, his endorsement of West’s theory could only be provisional.

Why had the geologist from Boston not been allowed inside the Sphinx enclosure?

The reason was that since 1978 only a handful of Egyptologists had been granted that privilege, with all public access closed off by the Egyptian authorities and a high fence built around the site.

With the support of the Dean of Boston University, Schoch now submitted a formal proposal to the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, requesting permission to carry out a proper geological study of the erosion of the Sphinx.

A rude interruption

It took a long time, but because of his eminent institutional backing, Schoch’s proposal was eventually approved by the EAO, creating a brilliant opportunity to get to the bottom of the Sphinx controversy once and for all. John West immediately set about putting together a broadly based scientific team, including a professional geophysicist, Dr. Thomas L. Dobecki, from the highly respected Houston consulting firm of McBride-Ratcliff & Associates.
[44]
There were also to be others who joined ‘unofficially’: an architect and photographer; two further geologists; an oceanographer and a personal friend of John West’s, film-producer Boris Said.
[45]
Through Said, West had arranged to ‘record the ongoing work in a video documentary which would have wide public appeal’:
[46]

Since we could expect nothing but opposition from academic Egyptologists and archaeologists a way had to be found to get the theory to the public, if and when Schoch decided the evidence warranted full geological support. Otherwise it would simply be buried, possibly for good ...
[47]

As a way of getting the theory of an ancient rainfall-eroded Sphinx to the public, West’s film could hardly have been more successful. When it was first screened on NBC television in the United States in the autumn of 1993 it was watched by 33 million people.

But that is another story. Back in the Sphinx enclosure the first interesting result came from Dobecki, who had conducted seismographic tests around the Sphinx. The sophisticated equipment that he had brought with him picked up numerous indications of ‘anomalies and cavities in the bedrock between the paws and along the sides of the Sphinx’.
[48]
One of these cavities he described as:

a fairly large feature; it’s about nine metres by twelve metres in dimension, and buried less than five metres in depth. Now the regular shape of this—rectangular—is inconsistent with naturally occurring cavities ... So there’s some suggestion that this could be man-made.
[49]

With legal access to the enclosure, West recalls, Schoch, too:

was swiftly dropping conditionals ... The deeply weathered Sphinx and its ditch wall, and the relatively unweathered or clearly wind-weathered Old Kingdom tombs to the south (dating from around Khafre’s period) were cut from the same member of rock. In Schoch’s view it was therefore geologically impossible to ascribe these structures to the same time period. Our scientists were agreed. Only water, specifically precipitation, could produce the weathering we were observing ...
[50]

It was at this crucial moment, while the members of the team were putting together the first independent geological profile of the Sphinx, that Dr. Zahi Hawass; the Egyptian Antiquities Organization’s Director-General of the Giza Pyramids, fell upon them, suddenly and unexpectedly, like the proverbial ton of bricks.

The team had obtained their permission from Dr. Ibrahim Bakr, then the President of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization. What they had not known, however, was that relations between Bakr and Hawass were frosty. Neither had they reckoned with Hawass’s energy and ego. Fuming that he had been bypassed by his superior, he accused the Americans of tampering with the monuments: