Near the pyramid of Cheops, on the edge of the Giza plateau, frayed by nature itself and crippled by man, stands one of the most mysterious statues in the world - the Great Sphinx, depicting a lion with a man's head.
The Sphinx was carved from limestone bedrock. The protrusion, which served as the starting material for the body of the Sphinx, was artificially enlarged using a deep rectangular ditch. Then the stone was given the desired shape. The extra limestone blocks were only used to add the finishing touches, including the beard. It collapsed long ago, but it can be reconstructed from the surviving fragments. The Great Sphinx, apparently, was considered a deity; it is known from the texts that the Egyptians gave him the appropriate honor.
Despite the fact that the Sphinx is huge, archaeologists never assumed that the ancient architects used any special methods to create it, except, of course, hard work and a clear organization of labor. Stone hammers and copper chisels were quite suitable for working limestone, a very soft rock. Similar tools were used to dig a ditch around the Sphinx and work on the details of the sculpture. But it still remains a mystery why, when and by whom it was erected.
According to official science, the Sphinx was erected around 2500 BC. e. by order of the Pharaoh IV of the Khafre dynasty. The same pharaoh built the second largest of the three Great Pyramids of Giza and bequeathed to be buried in it. The Sphinx was a statue of the god Harmachis, and because the pharaoh was considered the embodiment of a deity on earth, the sculptors gave the statue the features of an earthly ruler. The resemblance of the face of the Sphinx to the face of Khafre confirms that the latter was the builder of the monument.
This version was considered quite reliable until relatively recently, when three papers were published, each of which produced the effect of an exploding bomb.
"The first surprising news came in 1991 from Professor Robert Schoch, a geologist in Boston," write the authors of Ancient Secrets, Americans Peter James and Nick Thorpe. - Having studied the features of the erosion of the surface of the Sphinx, he announced that the statue should be several thousand years older than Egyptologists believe. Its creation dates back to the 7th millennium BC. e., and maybe even earlier.
The author of the second mystery was a police artist, Lt. Frank Domingo of the New York City Police Department. Carefully comparing the face of the Sphinx with the face of Pharaoh Khafre, Domingo came to the conclusion that the features of the Sphinx were not at all copied from Khafre!
The third discovery belongs to Robert Bauval, co-author of The Mystery of Orion. Using computer technology, he was able to establish that around 10,500 BC, on the morning of the vernal equinox, the constellation Leo rose on the eastern horizon just in front of the Sphinx. Bauval concluded, that the Sphinx was erected in a distant era as a marker of this astronomical event. Buval later joined forces with Graham Hancock, author of the book "Footprints of the Gods", and they developed their case for a new astronomical dating of the Sphinx in the book "Guardian of Being" (1996)
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Many now believe that the Sphinx was actually hewn out of stone around 10,500 BC. e., at the end of the last ice age, and not at all in the XXV century BC. BC, as claimed by the official science … In fact, the transmission of the Sphinx was used by Hancock and other authors as another confirmation that a civilization like Atlantis actually existed in the Ice Age, but was … in Antarctica.
But is there at least some grain of truth in the statements about the need to transfer the Sphinx on the basis of geological, astronomical, forensic and other data?"
All the current controversy surrounding the Great Sphinx arose largely thanks to one person - Anthony West, an amateur Egyptologist who for many years studied the secrets of Ancient Egypt. West wrote enthusiastically about astrology, believed in the reality of a sunken Atlantis, and believed that a civilization on Mars influenced the development of our own ancient cultures. For example, he interpreted the famous "face on Mars" as an alien analogue of the Sphinx.
Of course, none of these ideas arouses sympathy for him among professional Egyptologists, who consider him a charlatan. Be that as it may, however, West's persistence deserves respect. For decades, he has stubbornly defended the idea that the Sphinx is much older than it is believed.
West gained inspiration for his theory in the late 1970s, when he was imbued with the ideas of the mathematician and occultist Schwoller de Lubitsch from France. He believed that the encrypted symbols of Egyptian art and architecture are both mathematical and mystical in nature and that, by deciphering these symbols, we can gain deep knowledge about this culture, unattainable using conventional methods adopted in Egyptology. His main argument was that the ancient Egyptians had better scientific knowledge than is commonly believed; periodically he hinted that the Egyptians received this knowledge from another, even more ancient civilization.
This civilization disappeared as a result of a catastrophic flood, which, according to de Lubitsch, also covered the territory of Egypt in prehistoric times: “The movement of huge water masses over Egypt should have been preceded by a great civilization, and this leads us to the conclusion that the Sphinx, carved into the rock on the western outskirts of Giza already existed at that time - after all, on his lion's body, with the exception of the head, there are undoubted signs of water erosion."
West began looking for evidence that the strong weathering of the Great Sphinx surface was caused by water currents, not wind and sand particles, as most Egyptologists believed. According to West, there is no doubt that the Sphinx was subjected to water erosion, and given the fact that in Egypt throughout its written history there has never been heavy rains, erosion must have occurred in a rather distant era. Therefore, West initially agreed with de Lubitsch: the Sphinx was built shortly before the catastrophic flood (possibly the Great Flood described in the Bible) that swept all of Egypt.
West was able to convince Professor R. Schoch, a geologist from Boston University, to study the Sphinx and assess the nature of its weathering. Schoch traveled twice to Egypt with West and in 1992, after a second trip, concluded that heavy rains had been the main cause of the erosion of the Sphinx for a very long time. According to him, the surface of the Sphinx had a deep undulating profile of weathering, characteristic of rain erosion. The grooves on the walls of the ditch surrounding the Sphinx also resembled rain marks.
Other monuments on the Giza plateau, dated to about 2500 BC. BC, according to Shokh, had a completely different weathering pattern. This period lasted from approximately 10,000 to 3,000 BC. e. It was then, Schoch argues, that the Sphinx underwent rain erosion. Based on the assessment of the duration of the impact of erosion processes, he attributed the construction of the Sphinx to the VII-V millennia BC. e.
Schoch proposed a scenario that is significantly different from generally accepted ideas. According to him, well-organized societies of the Neolithic era were able to erect colossal monuments like the Sphinx. Perhaps, he thought, some analogue of these proto-urbanist societies existed in Egypt, and the Sphinx is the greatest surviving monument of that culture. Shortly after 7,000 BC. e. In Egypt itself, agriculture and settled settlements appeared, so the Schoch model is plausible from an archaeological point of view.
West, of course, was delighted with Schoch's geological findings. He readily replaced his early model of large-scale flooding with heavy rainfall. Now all that remained was to deal with the personality of Khafre. In 1993, West persuaded police artist Lt. Frank Domingo to travel to Egypt and compare the features of the Sphinx to the diorite statue of Khafre in the Cairo Museum. Domingo used computer graphics to make a point comparison of the characteristic features of each face.
His conclusion was quite unexpected: “After analyzing the drawings, diagrams and measurement results, my final conclusion coincides with the initial reaction - that is, these two works depict two different individuals. The proportions of the frontal view, especially the angular ratios as well as the lateral proportions of the profile, convinced me that the face of the Sphinx is not the face of Khafre.
Domingo's results are difficult to dispute.
Whatever we think about West's fabrications about the Sphinx, he managed, with the support of Frank Domingo, to draw attention to an issue that modern Egyptologists have taken very lightly. The widespread opinion that the face of the Sphinx repeats the features of the pharaoh Khafre has now become only an assumption, while poorly substantiated.
As the researchers rightly point out, the fact that the Sphinx faces east has some astronomical significance. It is difficult to doubt this, especially because the ancient Egyptians identified the Sphinx with various solar deities. Among his Egyptian names were Gor-am-Akhet (Harmakhis), "Mountains on the Horizon" and Sheshep-ankh Atum, "The Living Image of Atum." (The Greek word for Sphinx is probably an abbreviation for Sheshep-ankh.) Because Horus and Atum were solar deities, the connection between the orientation of the Sphinx and the rising of the sun is undeniable.
Bauval and Hancock noted that true (geographic) east is the direction of sunrise at the vernal equinox (March 21), one of two points in the earth's orbit where the length of day and night is the same. They further suggested that the Sphinx was built as an indicator of the vernal equinox, and this remains a major factor in their computer calculations.
Convinced that the Giza pyramid complex reflects the position of the stars in the constellation Orion for 10,500 BC. BC, Bauval and Hancock set their computer simulations of the starry sky to this date and found that on the vernal equinox, shortly after sunrise, the Sphinx should have looked across the Giza plateau directly to the constellation Leo. Due to the slow circular displacement of the earth's axis (this phenomenon is called "precession") in different epochs the constellations not only ascended in different places; the angle of their elevation above the horizon also changed considerably.
According to the calculations of Bauval and Hancock, shortly before dawn on the day of the vernal equinox in 2,500 BC. e. (approximate "official" dating of the construction of the Sphinx) Leo constellation rose not in the east, but 28 ° to the north.
Moreover, the constellation was at an acute angle to the horizon, and the front part of Leo's "torso" was much higher than the back. But for 10,500 years BC. e. before dawn on the vernal equinox, the Lion not only rose directly in front of the Sphinx, looking east, but also occupied a horizontal position in relation to the horizon. They illustrate this with diagrams comparing the position of the constellation Leo in 2,500 BC. e. and in 10,500 BC. e. In the latter case, the coincidence seems perfect.
Bauval and Hancock went even further and stated that the precession of the equinoxes, which is generally considered the discovery of the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived in the 2nd century BC. e., was known much earlier. But in order for the ancient astrologers to be able to detect the precession of the equinoxes, they would have had to conduct careful astronomical observations for centuries, if not millennia. (Hipparchus possessed archives in the Babylonian Library dating back at least 500 years.)
Despite the unconditional skill of the compilers of prehistoric calendars, who began to record the results of their observations in rock paintings as early as 20,000 BC. e., no drawings or records have survived, reflecting the relative position of the stars.
For Hancock, it is not difficult to solve this problem either: he believes that the deification of the constellation Leo is part of the ancient legacy of a technologically advanced civilization that flourished in Antarctica at the end of the last ice age.
This opinion is not supported by absolutely any evidence, except for the Piri Reis map and some controversial finds.
The rest of the researchers believe that upon closer examination, new "scientific" evidence for an earlier dating of the Great Sphinx simply disappears. Astronomical correspondences are very vague, and geological justifications are rather dubious. Putting them together, as many contemporary authors do, is like building a house of cards.
So, the Great Sphinx continues to keep its secrets. We still do not know the reasons or the exact date of its creation. Therefore, the efforts of West and his followers cannot be called absolutely fruitless. Old views were challenged, Egyptologists had to lay their cards on the table, and evidence that was last seriously considered in the early twentieth century is now under scrutiny. New methods and new approaches are always welcome, although some of them, as is usually the case, do not give unambiguous answers.
Further scientific research on the Sphinx may one day provide a concrete explanation for the unusual erosion pattern on its surface. Recently, there have been unconfirmed rumors about the discovery of voids in the rock under the Sphinx. Are they made by human hands? Could they be, as the followers of Edgar Cayce believe, secret halls, where historical records are kept, dating back to time immemorial? Or are they natural voids in limestone? Time will tell…
N. Nepomniachtchi