The Great Sphinx: Neolithic or Dynastic?
Mainstream archeology’s view has long been that the Sphinx dates to the Fourth Dynasty reign of Khafre (c. 2558–2532 BCE).
However in the early 1990s, Dr Robert Schoch and writer John Anthony West analyzed the weathering of the Sphinx and its enclosure, and determined that it must be much older, that is it must have been created in pre-historical times.
West and Schoch’s work was immediately and severely criticized by mainstream archeologists, but it wasn’t until the 1993 broadcast of the “Mystery of the Sphinx” documentary, in which the two proposed and defended their pre-historic Sphinx theory, that mainstream archeology realized it had a major problem: Egyptologists could no longer ignore the fact that their credibility had taken a big hit.
If Egyptologists are mistaken about the Sphinx’s age then what else are they wrong about? A fair and comprehensive blow-by-blow summary of the slugfest that followed can be found on David Billington’s website.
The Great Sphinx is part of the Giza necropolis that sits on a plateau to the west of modern Cairo. The necropolis also includes:
- the Pyramids of Khufu, Khafre (pictured above), and Menkaure to the west of the Sphinx. Note that some academics prefer “Great”, “Second” and “Third” pyramid as they are less interpretive.
- a Causeway (left in picture), the stone avenue immediately to the south of the Sphinx that leads to the Khafre pyramid, also attributed to Khafre.
- the Sphinx Temple (in front of the Sphinx) and the Valley Temple, immediately to the south of the Sphinx Temple, also attributed to Khafre.
- the ruins of a Mortuary Temple (at the base of the pyramid, to the left of the Sphinx’s head), also attributed to Khafre.
The head of the Sphinx is anthropomorphic and rises above the Giza plateau, while its body is zoomorphic, carved/quarried from the underlying bedrock and therefore largely sits below ground level. Dating the Sphinx has been highly problematic, largely due its multiple periods of neglect and restoration during ancient Egyptian times through Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, French and British times to the modern day.
Mainstream Egyptologists date the Sphinx to the reign of Khafre (c. 2558–2532 BCE) based on its archaeology and architecture [1]: Egyptologists argue that the Sphinx’s association with other
Khafre-age necropolis monuments, for example the Valley Temple and Causeway, indicates it likely does not pre-date them, and that its head clearly represents a face in a pharaonic headdress.
Schoch and other critics counter [2] that the Sphinx’ head is out of proportion with its torso, that its face is not that of Khafre and that the current pharaonic head is a re-carving that dates back to early dynastic times.
They make a good point as the Egyptians were notoriously fastidious in the proportions of their artworks, so a Khafre-age Sphinx would be atypical both in design and execution. In addition, Schoch refers to numerous inscriptions [2] that suggest that
a) the Sphinx was already so eroded in Khafre’s time that Khafre needed to restore it, and
b) that a Sphinx with a lion(ess) head existed by the Early Dynastic Period (c.3150–2686 BCE). Other workers [3] argue the body resembles a canine, due to its long forepaws and flat back.
The strongest argument for a pre-historic Sphinx however is the weathering and erosion of the Sphinx and its enclosure. A geophysical survey has established that large parts of the enclosure floor were weathered to a depth of over 1.8 meters.
If the Sphinx dates to Khafre then this extensive weathering must have occurred before the current arid climate set in, which is generally believed to have been in 2350 BCE [2]. Schoch’s analysis indicates the weathering must have occurred over a much longer period, that is over several millennia.
“[The weathered upper layer is] primarily due to subsurface dissolution, chemical weathering, and karstic development under subaerial conditions since the time that different portions of the floor of the Sphinx Enclosure were first excavated and exposed” Schoch’s current best estimate dates the Sphinx to 10,000 BCE [2], which is in the same ballpark as the dates of Göbekli Tepe (GT) and Karahan Tepe (KT).
The similarities between the Sphinx and GT and KT are striking:
- All have high-relief anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures whereby the stone around the ornamentation is removed. In the case of the Sphinx however there’s only one huge hybrid figure.
- All monuments exhibit severely weathered and eroded limestone quarry walls
- Both the Taş Tepeler (Amorous Fox) and ancient Egypt (Osiris) cultures likely revered Orion’s belt as a fertility and re-birth symbol.
- Both GT’s Lion Pillar Temple and the Great Sphinx are facing directly eastwards, in the direction of Leo at the Summer Solstice 10,000 years BCE.
- GT’s main enclosures and the Great Sphinx are similarly oriented in the direction of Orion at 10,000 years and 2500 years BCE resp. at the Summer Solstice
- All monuments lack significant tool marks. As Lehner et al. [4] wrote for the Sphinx:
- “Except for the prominent boss on the chest, we have nowhere observed any kind of working marks on the core-body, either in the way of tool marks or of surfaces that would seem to have been left by rough quarrying activity. … [The evidence] would seem to indicate that the core-body of the Sphinx was already severely eroded when the earliest level of large-block masonry was added to it.”
Other than the observed weathering, the main argument against either date – Neolithic or Dynastic – is that the quarrying of the Sphinx would require significant resources. Khafre’s builders would likely have had their hands full with the building of his main how-did-they-do-that monument, his pyramid.
A Neolithic age would have required significant manpower and food resources from the stone-age Egyptian hunter-gatherer community. Note that resources are a much bigger issue than technology: if hunter-gatherers had the wherewithal to build and decorate KT and GT then the could very likely sculpt what is in essence a huge high-relief feline / canine, though its order-of-magnitude larger size would require order-of-magnitude more resources.
Could acid-quarrying techniques similar to those employed at GT and KT have been used to create the Sphinx? If so, then such information – as is typical for the controversy – helps both the mainstream and Schoch hypotheses:
- it reduces the number of years of weathering required to match the observed “weathering and erosion” of the Sphinx and its enclosure to effectively zero, as acid corrosion is virtually indistinguishable from severe weathering and erosion on a macroscopic scale.
- it dramatically reduces the resource requirements.
The purpose of this post is not to judge the merits of either hypothesis, but rather to propose “What if?” stories on how acid-quarrying technology could impact the Sphinx’s age estimation. A starting assumption is that the Sphinx’s head was carved or etched from a yardang [2], a wind-erodedhard limestone outcrop that protruded from the Giza plateau. Such a yardang would likely be have been elongated in an east-west direction [5], and might plausibly have had the shape of a (human or animal) head.
Two stories illustrate how acid-quarrying both helps and hurts the two theories.
If Khafre had wanted to build a Sphinx, he likely would have wanted to build it above ground, in a fashion similar to his pyramid and temples. He was likely resource-constrained due to the building of his enormous pyramid, and was probably irked that a rock outcrop – the yardang – was partially obstructing the view from the Nile/west to his pyramid-in-construction.
He could have it removed by quarrying, but his workforce likely had their hands full building his 136 m tall pyramid. His building supervisor therefore might have had a brilliant epiphany that a “B” team use a 7000 year old acid-quarrying technique to etch the head of Anubis, the traditional guardian of necropolises, from the yardang.
Anubis was the Old Kingdom protector of graves and the guide to the underworld, and traditionally sat in the west, in the viewing direction of the pyramids. But a jackal/fox/dog head sticking out of the plateau would be like a gopher peeping out of its hole: visually unsatisfying.
So Khafre would have likely decided to go the full monty and quarry out a canine body as well, while using some of the quarried limestone blocks for his temples. Such an acid-quarried Sphinx
would show a lightly “weathered” body, as the workers would take great care to deliver quality work on the main sculpture. The quarry walls and floor however would require no such special care and would likely be heavily corroded by the acid.
Such a scenario could even be consistent with Khafre himself re-sculpting the head and/or restoring the Sphinx. Suppose he tasked his crew to build an Anubis Sphinx, but that he developed buyer’s regret: the “weathered” canine head already looked timeworn and tatty – maybe an ear fell off – and some of the Sphinx’s features were weathering and eroding away quicker than expected.
He therefore might have had some restoration works performed during his lifetime whereby the large canine head was recarved as a smaller pharaoh’s head, and new casing stones were added to the body to prevent further erosion.
The main argument against this scenario is that Khafre’s builders would be using an ancient technique possibly for the first time in several millennia on a massive scale.
Currently one of the main problems with a Neolithic age is that a huge team of hunter-gatherers would have had to excavate the quarry around the Sphinx using stone axes, an undertaking that is an order of magnitude larger than GT or KT in terms of manpower and food requirements.
Once again, acid-quarrying could severely reduce these requirements, and would produce an impressive but “weathered and eroded”-looking Sphinx and enclosure. The Egyptian Neolithic hunter-gatherers would have noticed the east-west elongation of the yardang, in the direction of Leo at the summer solstice (Note: Schoch’s software claims this occurred during the vernal/spring solstice), and decided – similar to the Lion Pillar temple in Göbekli Tepe – to create the head of a Lion facing his cosmic counterpart. (below).
Afterwards, the body of a Lion could have been carved out when food and manpower resources allowed the hunter-gatherers – or by that time possibly farmers – to fulfil their ambition of creating a truly great monument. Before undertaking such an enormous task they must have surely experimented with smaller projects.
If the builders were in contact with Taş Tepeler culture – and that’s a strong possibility as Göbekli Tepe was in contact with other eastern Mediterranean cultures [6] – then they could have known of Karahan Tepe, whose “Chamber of Phalluses” with its snake god head and its standing pillars, was either carved or more likely acid-quarried out of the bedrock.
The similarities with the Sphinx and its enclosure are striking:
- An anthropomorphic head carved out of a hard, resistant layer at top
- Heavily weathered/eroded/corroded quarry walls (green box) with no tool marks
- Corroded/weathered monuments (pillars) without tool marks (yellow box) quarried out of the bedrock. Both the KT pillars and the Sphinx’s body could not have been eroded (much) by surface water runoff.
In summary: the acid-quarrying technology likely employed by the Taş Tepeler builders could plausibly have also been used in the construction of the Great Sphinx, and therefore has the potential to disrupt the Sphinx age status quo.
This however does not help to fix a creation date, even when taking into account possible stellar alignments.
A suggested next step in determining the Sphinx’s age is to drill a core hole through the quarry floor to characterise the floor’s lithology, weathering and corrosion, and to calibrate Schoch’s geophysical lines.
A chemical analysis of the core samples will likely show significant evidence of any acid used in the quarrying process. If the acid was organic, then C14 age analysis might fix the date of quarrying.
A more entertaining version can be found on the Think and Hammer substack
References:
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Howdy
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Why the preoccupation ‘hunter-gatherers’? You think perhaps current society has something the past didn’t?
For the sphinx, perhaps research the age of Leo might throw some light?
https://masteringthezodiac.com/astrological-ages
“A New Interpretation and Dating of the Sphinx based on the Moon”
https://beforeatlantis.com/2021/08/31/a-new-interpretation-and-dating-of-the-sphinx-based-on-the-moon/
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Howdy,
You surprise me with your interest in this article. I read this article because of your comment and then considered the links you shared. And I read: “West later went on to propose an even earlier date of 36,000 BCE during the time of the legendary predynastic rules of Egypt.”
This and any thing older is too old in my opinion. I grew up in eastern South Dakota where I now know there is abundant evidence of its glacial history. However, I was never taught about this glacial history. And as soon as I learned of John P. Buemie’s 2016 book titled North Dakota’s Geologic Legacy, I bought it. It is a great because John spent his professional career as field geologist during late spring, summer, and the fall (weather permitting). And I was nearly was familiar with its land as I was of South Dakota’s. And in Appendix A John briefly describes The Earth’s majot glacial periods and it is generally speculated that the last ended about 15,000, plus or minus a few thousand, years ago. And I have yet to read there is any evidence of humans in North of South Dakota who actually observed any glaciers in either state.
Hence I consider the historical evidence of glaciers provides evidence for when humans first walked the land of the Dakotas.
Have a good day
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Howdy
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Jerry, my interest comes from astrology, the Egyptian deities, the pyramid/star alignment, as well as the Egyptian knowledge regarding the brain. The eye of Horus as depicting the brain centre and such.
https://ophthalmologybreakingnews.com/ophthalmologynews-the-pineal-gland-the-eye-of-horus
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