His lion's mane was destroyed, his nose was broken, and only holes were left instead of eyes. His head, still bearing traces of red and yellow paint, was severely damaged. Several times he was buried by the sands of the desert, and the contours of his body were eroded by severe erosion.
And no matter what, he has been resting for thousands of years on the western bank of the Nile, guarding and decorating the Giza plateau. In silence, he watches the ancient and modern worlds. Stands, almost forgotten in the shadow of the pyramids. But he is one of the greatest.
Ra-Gorakhti (Gor-m-akhet, Garmachis), a sign of strength and intelligence. Nothing is known about the origin of the word, but maybe it came from the Egyptian words "shesep ankh", meaning "living image".
Carved out of natural limestone, the Sphinx in Egypt is the largest surviving statue of the Ancient World. The human-headed lion is approximately 61 m long, 21.5 m high and 11.6 m wide at the shoulders.
Between the outstretched front paws of the Sphinx is a granite stele - the Stele of Sleep. It records a strange story that took place during the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep II (circa 1426-1400 BC). One day Thutmose IV, one of the younger king's sons, was hunting in the desert near Giza. He was tired of the scorching sun and was exhausted by noon. Near the Great Sphinx, which only had a head above the sand, he found a cool place in the shade and fell asleep.
In a dream, the Sphinx came to life and began to talk to the prince: “I am the sun god and your father. Hear and hear how you are to rule Egypt. The prince was given one task: he had to remove the sand that covered the statue. When Thutmose woke up, he hurried to Memphis and then fulfilled the order. The Sphinx, in turn, also fulfilled the promise in a dream: the prince became a pharaoh instead of his older brothers. He was crowned as Thutmose IV and ruled for ten years.
There are many alternative theories trying to explain the timing and reasons for the construction of the Great Sphinx. Some believe that it was built before the Great Flood. There are stories of ancient secret rooms under the statue.
Be that as it may, this is one of the most mysterious structures on our planet. According to Egyptologists, its function is to protect the eternal rest of the buried pharaohs. However, is this only its purpose? And for what reason did the medieval Arabs call him "the father of horror"?
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Nothing is known exactly about the time of the construction of the Sphinx in Egypt. But if the date of its construction is in doubt, then no one disputes the assertion that he is the keeper of great secrets.
An eyewitness to the Flood
According to ancient legends, the Sphinx is alive. When he doesn't like something in the behavior of people, he jumps off the pedestal, goes to the Libyan desert at night and buries himself deep in the sand … Therefore, not everyone was given to see him. And this, in turn, gave rise to confusion with the date of the construction of the Great Sphinx.
For example, Herodotus in his History, in which he wrote down “everything that he saw and heard in Egypt,” did not write a single line about the Sphinx.
Egyptian officials, who meticulously recorded all the costs associated with the construction of pyramids and temples, also did not leave us a single document.
The answer to this phenomenon can be found in the works of the ancient Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. In his "Natural History" there is a story about the Sphinx, which was once again cleared of the sands of the Western Desert. Studying the sculpture, the researchers came to the conclusion that from time to time it was completely hidden under a layer of sand and had to be dug out. This means that Herodotus could not only not see the Sphinx in Egypt - he could simply walk over it on a flat surface of sand!
The mysterious guardian of eternity, frozen at the foot of the pyramids, found himself in the shadows literally and figuratively. Although this is one of the grandest sculptures of all times and peoples, it is lost before the grandeur of the tombs of the pharaohs. Perhaps that is why researchers constantly perceived the unique statue as something secondary, accompanying the ancient tombs. However, there is reason to believe that the Sphinx contains untold treasures.
The Sphinx is sick today. Time and people did not spare him. In particular, people have tried. One of the rulers of Egypt ordered to take off the nose of the Sphinx. At the beginning of the 18th century, another foolish ruler fired cannons at the face of the sculpture. Napoleon's soldiers fired guns in the eyes of the Sphinx. The English lords beat off a giant stone beard and took it to the British Museum …
Nowadays, the acrid smoke of the Cairo and Helwan factories penetrates into the pores of the statue. Corrodes stone and car engine exhaust. On a summer night in 1988, a large piece of stone, weighing more than 350 kg, broke off from the neck of the Sphinx and with a crash fell down. Only after that did the Egyptian scientists and government sound the alarm, and UNESCO experts became worried. Next to the stone statue, a marching laboratory was set up with various analyzers and a powerful computer.
Specialists from Egypt, Germany, America, Japan, and France gathered for a kind of consultation. We started by scanning the damaged head with ultrasonic emitters. Dangerous cracks appeared inside. The opinion of experts was unanimous: in the twentieth century alone, the Sphinx was damaged more than in the past 40 centuries. Hundreds of millions of dollars are needed to save the sculpture.
Having made this conclusion, the members of the council left. The money, however, did not work out. The Egyptians began to restore the statue on their own. Large cracks were repaired, the pedestal was strengthened, and the fragments that had fallen off were found and replaced. The British were demanded to immediately return the beard and put it in place in order to return the support to the nine-hundred-ton head. The emergency condition and the beginning of the repair of the ancient sculpture caused a new interest of science in the mysteries of the Sphinx.
The most interesting studies were carried out by Japanese scientists. Tokyo archaeologists under the leadership of Professor S. Yoshimura illuminated the Sphinx statue and its surroundings with sonars. And they came to the conclusion - the stones are sculptures of the ancient blocks of the pyramids. Note: the experts did not mean the geological age of the rock from which the Sphinx was created, but the age of the sculpture itself, that is, the time of stone processing.
Then the electronic equipment showed a narrow tunnel under the left paw of the Sphinx in Egypt, leading towards the pyramid of Khafre. It starts at a depth of 2 m and slopes downward. It turned out to be impossible to trace it further, but Professor Yoshimura promised to create a new device specifically for the study of this underground passage.
After some time, a team of hydrologists replaced the Japanese geologists at the podium of the "lion with a human face". And immediately a new sensation followed: traces of erosion from a large stream of water were found on the base of the statue. As soon as this message was published in the Washington Gazette on the study of nature with new methods, a report appeared in the press that the Nile used to be wider and flowed around the rock from which the stone statue was cut. But the hydrologists objected: most likely, there are traces of not a great river, since a mighty stream of water went against the current of the Nile, from north to south; you should think about … the Flood!
After analyzes and consultations with geophysicists, the probable date of the event was also named - 8,000 BC. e. The British, repeating the analysis, pushed this date back to 12,000 BC. e. and noted that traces of water erosion also fall on the worked part of the rock on which the Sphinx rests. So he stood there before the flood? French archaeologists have noticed: the dating of the Egyptian flood coincides with the date of the death of the legendary Atlantis according to Plato …
Is the mystery of the origin of the Sphinx in Egypt going into antediluvian history? What do we know about that time? Almost nothing. The surviving myths and legends leave room for imagination. But with a high degree of certainty it is possible to assume that a highly developed civilization already existed on planet Earth in the depths of centuries.
From this point of view, interesting legends about the cosmic origin of the ancient Egyptian state, which appeared as if suddenly and initially, in terms of the level of civilization, was to a large extent higher than all the surrounding peoples. According to these legends, the gods arrived in the Nile Valley on a fireball. The king of the gods, Thoth, was the "leader of the ship of the Sun". This is stated in the hieroglyphic texts engraved on the stone, which have survived without damage to our time.
The gods, the legend goes on, began to teach the aborigines the basics of medicine, agriculture, mathematics and astronomy. They erected a large city with a high building of a lighthouse in the center, a special construction for measuring the floods of the Nile, painted a new calendar on the wall of the temple … Agree, this is not very similar to the behavior of the gods. Rather, this is the behavior of missionaries who, by the will of fate, ended up in the wild. Such contradictions gave rise to a lot of hypotheses claiming that the gods of the Egyptian pantheon were lil aliens, or representatives of Atlantis who survived the flood.
The Egyptian priests quickly mastered the knowledge brought by the gods: they comprehended astronomical laws, could calculate the day and minute of the coming eclipse of the Sun. Archaeologists have discovered analogues of modern galvanic batteries. It seems that the gods also knew electricity. Medicine rose to a high level - a record of a conversation with a Memphian priest was discovered, who argued that in the time of Thoth (he was also called the god of longevity and the lord of life), people were not aware of diseases and the burden of old age.
Centuries passed, and the knowledge brought by the gods began to be forgotten. If the ancient Egyptians knew that the Earth is round and revolves around the Sun, then their descendants already considered it flat, like a pancake, and the Sun was perceived as a golden disk pinned to the crystal firmament of heaven. The secrets of the production of unique bronze and nickel alloys have been lost. Forgotten and the recipe for "elixir of immortality", which knew the god Thoth and his son Hermes Trismegistus.
Could the missionary gods have foreseen that people would not be able to preserve the knowledge and skills they received? Maybe yes. This means that they had to make sure that at least something was preserved, to build somewhere a cache with "reference literature" and "textbooks". And if the figure of the Sphinx actually survived from the antediluvian time, then there really is no better place for a cache.
Medieval alchemists literally prayed for Hermes Trismegistus - Hermes the Three Times Greatest. It is believed that he was the founder of the system of esoteric knowledge, possessed the secret of making a "philosopher's stone" with which it is possible to turn any metal into gold, as well as create a cure for all diseases, a panacea, and a mysterious remedy for eternal life - the elixir of immortality.
An ancient proverb says: "When the Sphinx speaks, life on Earth will leave its usual circle." Perhaps this is a hint at a treasure of knowledge that in reality can drastically change the life of the people who discovered it. However, it is also possible that this knowledge will be of only historical value to us, that our civilization has already passed the path of the Atlanteans and even far ahead of them. There is, however, another version that in the womb of the Sphinx there is nothing but a cold stone.
Egyptian Sphinx prototype
According to official Egyptology, the stone statue was carved with the face of the king of the 4th dynasty. Since the Great Sphinx stands next to the pyramid of Khafre (Khafre), it is believed that the model for the sculpture was Pharaoh Khafren, the fourth ruler of this dynasty, who ruled around 2520-2494 BC. e.
Official Egyptology is not entirely sure that the face of the Great Sphinx bears a complete resemblance to Chefren. But some experts believe that the builder of the Great Sphinx was the Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops), who ruled from about 2589 to 2566 BC. e.
Over the centuries, the Sphinx has undergone many reconstructions and cosmetic manipulations.
1991 Frank Domingo, forensic expert for the New York police, begins to analyze the face of the Sphinx. He reconstructed the face and found that it was completely different from the description of Khafre. Domingo concluded that the Great Sphinx and this pharaoh have no similarities. According to Frank Domingo, the sculpture has distinctly African, Nubian, or Negroid features that are absent from Khafre's famous description.
The reconstruction clearly demonstrates the differences between the two. Yet another aspect of the Egyptian Sphinx is curious - the connection between Egypt and Mesoamerica. The face of the Sphinx does not resemble the fourth pharaoh of the 4th dynasty, but if we compare it with the statues of the Olmec heads, we will see amazing coincidences. Today, the identification of the Great Sphinx remains a mystery. If he could speak, would he tell us his true story? Will we ever find out who he was, or are there some secrets that are destined to remain unsolved?
What does the secret room keep?
Some of the ancient Egyptian wall inscriptions and papyri contain intriguing references to hidden chambers - the Chamber of Archives, the Hall of Records, which have been regarded as an allusion to some kind of underground chamber below or near the Sphinx.
Even 200 years ago, scientists and just adventurers in pursuit of the gold of the pharaohs were looking for secret voids in the Guard of Eternity. They drilled holes in the body of the Egyptian Sphinx, but their efforts were in vain.
1978 - American specialists arrived in Giza and received official permission to drill deep wells under the monument. The drilling equipment was installed in a stone statue temple right in front of the sculpture's paws. The first well showed nothing. The second, scientists examined using a special camera, but saw only "holes, like in Swiss cheese", formed by dissolving limestone naturally. The work was stopped.
It has already been mentioned that in 1989, with the help of special equipment, a group of Japanese scientists discovered a narrow tunnel under the left paw of the Sphinx, leading towards the Khafre pyramid. In addition, the researchers found outside signs of the presence of a tunnel south of the pyramid, extending under the monument.
In the same 1989, the American geophysicist Thomas Dobetzky also conducted a seismic survey of the Sphinx. And it also led to the discovery of a large rectangular chamber under the front paws of the Sphinx - 10 m long and 9 m wide. This room has a rectangular shape, therefore, the version that this is a karst void formed naturally as a result of soil erosion is excluded.
But work on the study of the underground room was unexpectedly stopped by a representative of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization. Moreover, the government of the country did not allow any further geological or seismic studies to be carried out around the statue. It's a shame that this happened exactly when the research came to the clue of the age of the Sphinx, in which the local authorities were previously interested.
One can only guess what is in this room, because the Egyptians stubbornly refuse to allow any excavations in this place.
Of course, their resistance only fuels the curiosity of scientists. Some believe that the mysterious hall contains evidence of the existence of an ancient civilization on our planet. But if this civilization was able to create the figure of the Sphinx, it is only possible to imagine what level of knowledge it possessed! And who knows if, apart from other evidences, there is a solution to the secret of the Sphinx itself in Egypt …
S. Reutov