West reasons that the civilization responsible for the Sphinx and its neighbouring temples must have disappeared long before 7000-5000 bc

 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:

I have found out that their work is carried out by installing endoscopes in the Sphinx’s body and shooting films for all phases of the work in a propaganda ... but not in a scientific manner. I therefore suspended the work of this unscientific mission and made a report which was presented to the permanent commission who rejected the mission’s work in future ... [51]This was putting it mildly. Far from ‘suspending’ their work, Hawass had virtually thrown the American team off the site. His intervention had come too late, however, to prevent them from gathering the essential geological data that they needed.

When did it rain?

Back in Boston, Schoch got down to work at his laboratory. The results were conclusive and a few months later he was ready to stick his neck out. Indeed to John West’s delight he was now prepared fully to endorse the notion of a rain-eroded Sphinx—with all its immense historical implications.

Schoch’s case, in brief—which has the full support of palaeo-climatologists—rests on the fact that heavy rainfall of the kind required to cause the characteristic erosion patterns on the Sphinx had stopped falling on Egypt thousands of years before the epoch of 2500 bc in which Egyptologists say that the Sphinx was built. The geological evidence therefore suggests that a very conservative estimate of the true construction date of the Sphinx would be somewhere between ‘7000 to 5000 bc minimum’.[52]In 7000 to 5000 bc—according to Egyptologists—the Nile valley was populated only by primitive neolithic hunter-gatherers whose ‘toolkits’ were limited to sharpened flintstones and pieces of stick. If Schoch is right, therefore, then it follows that the Sphinx and its neighbouring temples (which are built out of hundreds of 200-ton limestone blocks) must be the work of an as yet unidentified advanced civilization of antiquity.

The Egyptological reaction?

‘That’s ridiculous’, scoffed Peter Lecovara, assistant curator of the Egyptian Department in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. ‘Thousands of scholars working for hundreds of years have studied this problem and the chronology is pretty much worked out. There are no big surprises in store for us ...’ [53]Other ‘experts’ were equally dismissive. According to Carol Redmont, for example, an archaeologist at the University of California’s Berkeley campus: ‘There is no way this could be true. The people of that region would not have had the technology, the governing institutions or even the will to build such a structure thousands of years before Khafre’s reign.’ [54]And the redoubtable Zahi Hawass, who had tried to nip the geological research in the bud in the first place, had this to say about the Schoch-West team and their unorthodox conclusions concerning the antiquity of the Sphinx:

American hallucinations! West is an amateur. There is absolutely no scientific base for any of this. We have older monuments in the same area. They definitely weren’t built by men from space or Atlantis. It’s nonsense and we won’t allow our monuments to be exploited for personal enrichment. The Sphinx is the soul of Egypt’. [55]John West was not in the least bit surprised by the rhetoric. In his long and lonely quest to mount a proper investigation into the age of the anonymous Sphinx many such brickbats had been thrown at him before. This time, with Schoch’s heavyweight support—and the massive exposure of the whole matter on NBC television—he felt vindicated at last. Furthermore it was clear that the Egyptologists were rattled by the intrusion of an empirical science like geology into their normally cosy and exclusive academic territory.

West, however, wanted to take the matter a good deal further than Schoch was prepared to go and felt that the geologist had been too conservative and lenient in his ‘minimum’ estimate of 7000 to 5000 bc for the age of the Sphinx: ‘Here Schoch and I disagree, or rather interpret the same data somewhat differently. Schoch very deliberately takes the most conservative view allowed by the data ... However I remain convinced that the Sphinx must predate the break-up of the last Ice Age ...’ [56]In practice this means any time before 15,000 bc—a hunch that West says is based on the complete lack of evidence of a high culture in Egypt in 7000 to 5000 bc. ‘If the Sphinx was as recent as 7000-5000 bc,’ he argues, ‘I think we probably would have other Egyptian evidence of the civilization that carved it.’ [57] Since there is no such evidence, West reasons that the civilization responsible for the Sphinx and its neighbouring temples must have disappeared long before 7000-5000 bc: ‘The missing other evidence is, perhaps, buried deeper than anyone has looked and/or in places no one has yet explored—along the banks of the ancient Nile perhaps, which is miles from the present Nile, or even at the bottom of the Mediterranean, which was dry during the last Ice Age ...’ [58]Despite their ‘friendly disagreement’ as to whether the erosion of the Sphinx indicated a date of 7000 to 5000 bc, or a much more remote period, Schoch and West decided to present an abstract of their research at Giza to the Geological Society of America. They were encouraged by the response. Several hundred geologists agreed with the logic of their contentions and dozens offered practical help and advice to further the investigation. [59]Even more refreshing was the reaction from the international media. After the GSA meeting articles appeared in dozens of newspapers, and the issue of the Sphinx’s age was widely covered by television and radio. ‘We were over the fifty-yard line and heading downfield,’ recalls West. [60]As for the matter of his difference of opinion with Schoch about the dating of the monument, he honestly concedes that ‘only further research will resolve the question’. [61]

The Message of the Sphinx

A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind

Graham Hancock Robert Bauval