I just watched a segment on the History Channel featuring a geologist who claims that the Great Sphinx of Egypt was built by a pre-Egyptian civilization of which there is no other surviving record. I’ve heard arguments of this type before, usually from folks who seem to be wearing tinfoil hats under their pith helmets, but the argument presented here wasn’t one I’m familiar with. According to this source, the stone of which the Sphinx is carved shows signs of water erosion, which would date it to at least 3000-4000 years before the Pharonic age, an argument which the Egyptologists presented on the show didn’t seem able to counter. Can anyone here shed some light on the subject of whether said said erosion could have occured by other means, or whether the prehistoric Sphinx theories are gaining any ground in the archaeological or Egyptological communities?
I think there was a thread on this a couple of years ago-- I don’t have the bandwidth to search for it, though.
Some interesting points were made in that thread, but there still don’t seem to be any explanations of how the supposed water erosion could have been caused without the Sphinx being as old as Schoch believes it to be. Anyone out there happen to know anything about this?
Dr. Zahi Hawass is an Egyptian Government Official in charge of Egyptian Antiquities on the Giza Plateau. One really cool thing about him is that he answers tin-foil hat types: he has written answers re aliens, pre-Noahain Civilizations, Atlantians etc. He is always ready to mix it up for those who want to say that Egyptians didn’t build Egypt.
Here is a link and a cut n paste of his bottomline. I am not sure about the show – but it is simply not true in real life Egyptologists “don’t have answers” to the water erosion theories. They do: they say it is bunk
http://www.guardians.net/hawass/remnants.htm
The different weathering profiles reflect differences with the physical properties of the rocks, not the age of the monuments. Schoch and West cite the roundness of the protrusions and recesses in the south wall of the Sphinx ditch as evidence of rain erosion, and believe that fissures in the rock were caused by rainwater after the Sphinx was carved. Most scholars believe the fractures were caused by tectonic forces and eroded by groundwater long before the monument was carved.