Chapter 47

Sphinx

‘Egyptologists,’ said John West, ‘are the last people in the world to address any anomaly.’

Of course, there are many anomalies in Egypt. The one West was referring to at that moment, however, was the anomaly of the Fourth Dynasty pyramids: an anomaly because of what had happened during the Third, Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. Zoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara (Third Dynasty) was an imposing edifice, but it was built with relatively small, manageable blocks that five or six men working together could carry, and its internal chambers were structurally unsound. The pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (although adorned inside with the beautiful Pyramid Texts) were so poorly built and had collapsed so completely that today most of them amount to little more than mounds of rubble. The Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza, however, were wonderfully well made and had endured the passage of thousands of years more or less intact.

It was this sequence of events, or rather its implications, that West felt Egyptologists should have paid more attention to: ’There’s a discrepancy in the scenario that reads “building kind of rubbishy pyramids that are structurally unsound, suddenly building absolutely unbelievable pyramids that are structurally the most incredible things ever conceived of, and then immediately afterwards going back to structurally unsound pyramids.” It doesn’t make sense … The parallel scenario in, say, the auto-industry would be inventing and building the Model-T Ford, then suddenly inventing and building the ‘93 Porsche and making a few of those, then forgetting how to do that and going back to building Model-T Fords again … Civilizations don’t work this way.’

‘So what are you saying?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying that the Fourth Dynasty pyramids weren’t built by the Fourth Dynasty at all?’

‘My gut feeling is that they weren’t. They don’t look like the mastabas in front of them. They don’t look like any other Fourth Dynasty stuff either … They don’t seem to fit in …’

‘And nor does the Sphinx?’

‘And nor does the Sphinx. But the big difference is that we don’t have to rely on gut feelings where the Sphinx is concerned. We can prove that it was built long before the Fourth Dynasty …’

John West

Santha and I had been fans of John Anthony West ever since we had first started travelling in Egypt. His guide-book, The Traveller’s Key had been a brilliant and indispensable introduction to the mysteries of this ancient land, and we still carried it with us. At the same time his scholarly works, notably Serpent in the Sky, had opened our eyes to the revolutionary possibility that Egyptian civilization – with its manifold glimpses of high science apparently out of place in time – might not have developed entirely within the confines of the Nile Valley but might have been a legacy of some earlier, greater and as yet unidentified civilization ‘antedating dynastic Egypt, and all other known civilizations, by millennia’.¹

Tall and strongly built, West was in his early sixties. He had cultivated a neatly trimmed white beard, was dressed in a khaki safari-suit and wore an eccentric nineteenth-century pith helmet. His manner was youthful and energetic and there was a roguish sparkle in his eyes.

The three of us were sitting on the open upper deck of a Nile cruiser, moored off the corniche in Luxor just a few yards downstream from the Winter Palace Hotel. To our west, across the river, a big red sun, distorted by atmospheric refraction, was setting behind the cliffs of the Valley of the Kings. To our east lay the battered but noble ruins of the Luxor and Karnak temples. Beneath us, transmitted through the hull of the boat, we could feel the lap and flow of the water as it rolled by on its meridional course towards the far-off Delta.

West had first presented his thesis for an older Sphinx in Serpent in the Sky, a comprehensive exposition of the work of the French mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller’s research at the Luxor Temple between 1937 and 1952 had unearthed mathematical evidence which suggested that Egyptian science and culture had been far more advanced and sophisticated than modern scholars had appreciated. However, as West put it, this evidence had been set out in ‘abstruse, complex and uncompromising language … Few readers seem comfortable with raw Schwaller. It’s a bit like trying to wade directly into high energy physics without extensive prior training.’

Schwaller’s principal publications, both originally in French, were the massive three-volume Temple de l’Homme, which focused on Luxor, and the more general Roi de la théocratie Pharaonique. In this latter work, subsequently translated into English as Sacred Science, Schwaller made a passing reference to the tremendous floods and rains which devastated Egypt in the eleventh millennium BC. Almost as an afterthought, he added:

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 water erosion.’²

While working on Serpent, West was struck by the possible significance of this remark and decided to follow it up: ‘I realized that if I could prove Schwaller’s offhand observation empirically, this would be ironclad evidence for the existence of a previously unidentified high civilization of distant antiquity.’

‘Why?’

‘Once you’ve established that water was the agent that eroded the Sphinx the answer is almost childishly simple. It can be explained to anybody who reads the National Enquirer or the News of the World. It’s almost moronically simple … The Sphinx is supposed to have been built by Khafre around 2500 BC, but since the beginning of dynastic times – say 3000 BC onwards – there just hasn’t been enough rain on the Giza plateau to have caused the very extensive erosion that we see all over the Sphinx’s body. You really have to go back to before 10,000 BC to find a wet enough climate in Egypt to account for weathering of this type and on this scale. It therefore follows that the Sphinx must have been built before 10,000 BC and since it’s a massive, sophisticated work of art it also follows that it must have been built by a high civilization.’

‘But John,’ Santha asked, ‘how can you be so sure that the weathering was caused by rain water? Couldn’t the desert winds have done the job just as well? After all even orthodox Egyptologists admit that the Sphinx has existed for nearly 5000 years. Isn’t that long enough for these effects to have been caused by wind erosion?’

‘Naturally that was one of the first possibilities that I had to exclude. Only if I could show that wind-borne abrasive sand couldn’t possibly have brought the Sphinx to its present condition would there be any point in looking further into the implications of water erosion.’

Robert Schoch’s geology: Unriddling the Sphinx

A key issue turned out to be the deep trench that the monument was surrounded by on all sides: ‘Because the Sphinx is set in a hollow,’ West explained, ‘sand piles up to its neck within a few decades if it’s left untended … It has been left untended often during historical times. In fact through a combination of textual references and historical extrapolations it’s possible to prove that during the 4500 years that have elapsed since it was ostensibly built by Khafre it’s been buried to its neck for as much as 3300 years.³ That means that in all this time there has only been a cumulative total of just over 1000 years in which its body has been susceptible to wind-erosion; all the rest of the time it’s been protected from the desert winds by an enormous blanket of sand. The point is that if the Sphinx was really built by Khafre in the Old Kingdom, and if wind erosion was capable of inflicting such damage on it in so short a time-span, then other Old Kingdom structures in the area, built out of the same limestone, ought to show similar weathering. But none do – you know, absolutely unmistakable Old Kingdom tombs, full of hieroglyphs and inscriptions – none of them show the same type of weathering as the Sphinx.’

Indeed, none did. Professor Robert Schoch, a Boston University geologist and specialist in rock erosion who had played a key role in validating West’s evidence, was satisfied as to the reason for this. The weathering of the Sphinx – and of the walls of its surrounding rock-hewn enclosure – had not been caused by wind-scouring at all but by thousands of years of heavy rainfall long ages before the Old Kingdom came into being.

Having won over his professional peers at the 1992 Convention of the Geological Society of America,⁴ Schoch went on to explain his findings to a much wider and more eclectic audience (including Egyptologists) at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He began by pointing out to delegates that ‘the body of the Sphinx and the walls of the Sphinx ditch are deeply weathered and eroded … This erosion is a couple of metres thick in places, at least on the walls. It’s very deep, it’s very old in my opinion, and it gives a rolling and undulating profile …’⁵

Such undulations are easily recognizable to stratigraphers and palaeontologists as having been caused by ‘precipitation-induced weathering’. As Santha Faiia’s photographs of the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure indicate, this weathering takes the distinctive form of a combination of deep vertical fissures and undulating, horizontal coves – ‘a classic textbook example,’ in Schoch’s words, ‘of what happens to a limestone structure when you have rain beating down on it for thousands of years … It’s clearly rain precipitation that produced these erosional features.’⁶

Wind/sand erosion presents a very different profile of sharp-edged horizontal channels selectively scoured out from the softer layers of the affected rock. Under no circumstances can it cause the vertical fissures particularly visible in the wall of the Sphinx enclosure. These could only have been ‘formed by water running down the wall’,⁷ the result of rain falling in enormous quantities, cascading over the slope of the Giza plateau and down into the Sphinx enclosure below. ‘It picked out the weak spots in the rock,’ Schoch elaborated, ‘and opened them up into these fissures – clear evidence to me as a geologist that this erosional feature was caused by rainfall.’⁸

Although in some places obscured by repair blocks put in place by numerous restorers over the passing millennia, the same observation holds true for the scooped-out, undulating, scalloped coves that run the entire length of the Sphinx’s body. Again, these are characteristic of precipitation-induced weathering because only long periods of heavy rainfall beating down on the upper parts of the immense structure (and cascading over its sides) could have produced such effects. Confirmation of this comes from the fact that the limestone out of which the Sphinx was carved is not uniform in its composition, but consists of a series of hard and soft layers in which some of the more durable rocks recede farther than some of the less durable rocks.⁹ Such a profile simply could not have been produced by wind erosion (which would have selectively chiselled out the softer layers of rock) but ’is entirely ‘consistent with precipitation-induced weathering where you have water, rain water beating down from above. The rocks higher up are the more durable ones but they recede back farther than some of the less durable rocks lower in the section which are more protected.’¹⁰

In his summing up at the AAAS meeting, Schoch concluded:

It’s well known that the Sphinx enclosure fills with sand very quickly, in just a matter of decades, under the desert conditions of the Sahara. And it has to be dug out periodically. And this has been the case since ancient times. Yet you still get this dramatic rolling, erosional profile in the Sphinx enclosure … Simply put, therefore, what I’m suggesting is that this rolling profile, these features seen on the body and in the Sphinx ditch, hark back to a much earlier period when there was more precipitation in the area, and more moisture, more rain on the Giza plateau.’¹¹

As Schoch admitted, he was not the first geologist to have noticed the ‘anomalous precipitation-induced weathering features on the core body of the Sphinx’.¹² He was, however, the first to have become involved in public debates over the immensehistoricalimplications of this weathering. His attitude was that he preferred to stick to his geology:

I’ve been told over and over again that the peoples of Egypt, as far as we know, did not have either the technology or the social organization to cut out the core body of the Sphinx in pre-dynastic times … However, I don’t see it as being my problem as a geologist. I’m not seeking to shift the burden, but its really up to the Egyptologists and archaeologists to figure out who carved it. If my findings are in conflict with their theory about the rise of civilization then maybe its time for them to re-evaluate that theory. I’m not saying that the Sphinx was built by Atlanteans, or people from Mars, or extra-terrestrials. I’m just following the science where it leads me, and it leads me to conclude that the Sphinx was built much earlier than previously thought …’¹³

Legendary civilizations

How much earlier?

John West told us that he and Schoch had ‘a friendly debate going’ about the age of the Sphinx: ‘Schoch puts the date somewhere between 5000 BC and 7000 BC minimum [the epoch of the Neolithic Subpluvial] mainly by taking the most cautious view allowed by the data to hand. As a professor of Geology at a big university, he’s almost constrained to take a conservative view – and it’s true that there were rains between 7000 BC and 5000 BC. However, for a variety of both intuitive and scholarly reasons, I think that the date is much, much older and that most of the weathering of the Sphinx took place in the earlier rainy period before 10,000 BC … Frankly, if it was as relatively recent as 5000 to 7000 BC, I think we’d probably have found other evidence of the civilization that carved it. A lot of evidence from that period has been found in Egypt. There are some strange anomalies within it, I’ll admit,¹⁴ but most of it – the vast bulk – is really quite rudimentary.’

‘So who built the Sphinx if it wasn’t the pre-dynastic Egyptians?’

‘My conjecture is that the whole riddle is linked in some way to those legendary civilizations spoken of in all the mythologies of the world. You know – that there were great catastrophes, that a few people survived and went wandering around the earth and that a bit of knowledge was preserved here, a bit there … My hunch is that the Sphinx is linked to all that. If I were asked to place a bet I’d say that it predates the break-up of the last Ice Age and is probably older than 10000 BC, perhaps even older than 15,000 BC. My conviction – actually it’s more than a conviction – is that it’s vastly old.’

This was a conviction I increasingly shared – and, I reminded myself, that most nineteenth-century Egyptologists had shared it too. Nevertheless the Sphinx’s appearance argued against such intuitions since there was no doubt that its head looked conventionally pharaonic. ‘If it’s as old as you think it is,’ I now asked John, ‘then how do you explain that the sculptors depicted it wearing the characteristic nemes head-dress and uraeus of dynastic times?’

‘I’m not bothered about that. In fact, as you know, Egyptologists contend that the face of the Sphinx resembles the face of Khafre – its one of the reasons why they claim it must have been built by him. Schoch and I have looked into this very carefully. We think, from the proportions of the head relative to the rest of the body, that it’s been recarved during dynastic times – and that’s why it looks very dynastic. But we don’t think it was ever meant to represent Khafre. As part of our ongoing research into these issues we had Lieutenant Frank Domingo, a forensic artist with the New York Police Department, come over and do point by point comparisons between the face of the Sphinx and the face of Cephren’s statue in the Cairo Museum. His conclusion was that in no way was the Sphinx ever intended to represent Khafre. It’s not just a matter of it being a different face – it’s probably a different race.¹⁵ So this is a very ancient monument that was recarved at a much later date. Originally it may not even have had a human face. Maybe it started out with a lion’s face as well as a lion’s body.’

Magellan and the first dinosaur bone

After my own explorations at Giza I was interested to know whether West’s research had cast doubt on the orthodox dating of any of the other monuments on the plateau – particularly the so-called Valley Temple of Khafre.

‘We think there’s quite a lot of stuff that may be older,’ he told me. ‘Not just the Valley Temple but also the Mortuary Temple up the hill, probably something to do with the Menkaure complex, maybe even the Pyramid of Khafre …’

‘What in the Menkaure complex?’

‘Well, the Mortuary Temple. And actually I’m only using the conventional atribution of the Pyramids for convenience here …’

‘OK. So do you think it’s possible that the pyramids are as old as the Sphinx too?’

‘It’s hard to say. I think something was there where those pyramids now are – because of the geometry. The Sphinx was part of a master-plan. And the Khafre Pyramid is maybe the most interesting in that respect because it was definitely built in two stages. If you look at it – maybe you’ve noticed – you’ll see that its base consists of several courses of gigantic blocks similar in style to the blocks of the core masonry of the Valley Temple. Superimposed above the base, the rest of the pyramid is composed of smaller, less precisely engineered stuff. But when you look at it, knowing what you’re looking for, you see instantly that it’s built in two separate bits. I mean I can’t help but feel that the vast blocks on the bottom date from the earlier period – from the time the Sphinx was built – and that the second part was added later – but even then not necessarily by Khafre. As you go into this you begin to realize that the more you learn the more complex everything becomes. For example, there may even have been an intermediate civilization, which actually would correspond to the Egyptian texts. They talk themselves about two long prior periods. In the first of these Egypt was supposedly ruled by the gods – the Neteru – and in the second it was ruled by the Shemsu Hor, the “Companions of Horus”. So, as I say, the problems just get more and more complicated. Fortunately, however, the bottom line stays simple. The bottom line is the Sphinx wasn’t built by Khafre. The geology proves that it’s a hell of a lot older …’

‘Nevertheless the Egyptologists won’t accept that it is. One of the arguments they’ve used against you – Mark Lehner did so – goes something like this: “If the Sphinx was made before 10,000 BC then why can’t you show us the rest of the civilization that built it?” In other words, why don’t you have any other evidence to put forward for the presence of your legendary lost civilization apart from a few structures on the Giza plateau? What do you say to that?’

‘First off, there are structures outside Giza – for example the Osireion in Abydos, where you’ve just come from. We think that amazing edifice may relate to our work on the Sphinx. Even if the Osireion didn’t exist, however, the absence of other evidence wouldn’t worry me. I mean, to make a big deal out of the fact that further confirmatory evidence hasn’t been found yet and to use this to try to scuttle the arguments for an older Sphinx is completely illogical. Analogously it’s like saying to Magellan … “Where are the other guys who’ve sailed round the world? Of course it’s still flat.” Or in 1838 when the first dinosaur bone was found they would have said, “Of course there’s no such thing as a giant extinct animal. Where’s the rest of the skeletons? They’ve only found one bone.” But once a few people began to realize that this bone could only be from an extinct animal, within twenty years the museums of the world were filled up with complete dinosaur skeletons. So it’s sort of like that. Nobody’s thought to look in the right places. I’m absolutely certain that other evidence will be found once a few people start looking in the right places – along the banks of the ancient Nile, for example, which is miles from the present Nile, or even at the bottom of the Mediterranean, which was dry during the last Ice Age.’

The problem of transmission

I asked John West why he thought that Egyptologists and archaeologists were so unwilling to consider that the Sphinx might be a clue to the existence of a forgotten episode in human history.

‘The reason, I think, is that they’re quite fixed in their ideas about the linear evolution of civilization. They find it hard to come to terms with the notion that there might have been people, more than 12,000 years ago, who were more sophisticated than we are today … The Sphinx, and the geology which proves its antiquity, and the fact that the technology that was involved in making it is in many ways almost beyond our own capacities, contradicts the belief that civilization and technology have evolved in a straightforward, linear way … Because even with the best modern technology we almost couldn’t carry out the various tasks that were involved in the project. The Sphinx itself, that’s not such a staggering feat. I mean if you get enough sculptors to cut the stone away they could carve a statue a mile long. The technology was involved in taking the stones, quarrying the stones, to free the Sphinx from its bedrock and then in moving those stones and using them to build the Valley Temple a couple of hundred feet away …’

This was news to me: ‘You mean that the 200-ton blocks in the Valley Temple walls were quarried right out of the Sphinx enclosure?’

‘Yes, no doubt about it. Geologically they’re from the identical member of rock. They were quarried out, moved over to the site of the Temple – God knows how – and erected into forty-foot-high walls – again God knows how. I’m talking about the huge limestone core blocks, not the granite facing. I think that the granite was added much later, quite possibly by Khafre. But if you look at the limestone core blocks you’ll see that they bear the marks of exactly the same kind of precipitation-induced weathering that are found on the Sphinx. So the Sphinx and the core structure of the Valley Temple were made at the same time by the same people – whoever they may have been.’

‘And do you think that those people and the later dynastic Egyptians were connected to each other in some way? In Serpent in the Sky you suggested that a legacy must have been passed on.’

‘It’s still just a suggestion. All that I know for sure on the basis of our work on the Sphinx is that a very, very high, sophisticated civilization capable of undertaking construction projects on a grand scale was present in Egypt in the very distant past. Then there was a lot of rain. Then, thousands of years later, in the same place, pharaonic civilization popped up already fully formed, apparently out of nowhere, with all its knowledge complete. That much we can be certain of. But whether or not the knowledge that Ancient Egypt possessed was the same as the knowledge that produced the Sphinx I really can’t say.’

‘How about this,’ I speculated: ‘The civilization that produced the Sphinx wasn’t based here, at least not originally … It wasn’t in Egypt. It put the Sphinx here as some sort of a marker or outpost …’

‘Perfectly possible. Could be that the Sphinx for that civilization was like, let’s say, what Abu Simbel [in Nubia] was for dynastic Egypt.’

‘Then that civilization came to an end, was extinguished by some sort of massive catastrophe, and that’s when the legacy of high knowledge was handed on … Because they had the Sphinx here they knew about Egypt, they knew this place, they knew this country, they had a connection here. Maybe people survived the ending of that civilization. Maybe they came here.… Does that work for you?’

‘Well, it’s a possibility. Again, going back into the mythologies and legends of the world, many of them tell of such a catastrophe and of the few people – the Noah story that’s prevalent through endless civilizations – who somehow or other retained and passed on knowledge. The big problem with all this, from my point of view, is the transmission process: how exactly the knowledge does get handed on during the thousands and thousands of years between the construction of the Sphinx and the flowering of dynastic Egypt. Theoretically you’re sort of stuck – aren’t you? – with this vast period in which the knowledge has to be transmitted. This is not easy to slough off. On the other hand we do know that those legends we’re referring to were passed on word for word over countless generations. And in fact oral transmission is a much surer means of transmission than written transmission, because the language may change but as long as whoever’s telling the story tells it true in whatever the language of the time is … it surfaces some 5000 years later in its original form. So maybe there are ways – in secret societies and religious cults, or through mythology, for example – that the knowledge could have been preserved and passed on before flowering again. The point, I think, with problems as complex and important as these, is simply not to dismiss any possibilities, no matter how outrageous they may at first seem, without investigating them very, very thoroughly …’

Second opinion

John West was in Luxor, leading a study group on Egypt’s sacred sites. Early the next day he and his students went south to Aswan and Abu Simbel. Santha and I journeyed north again, back towards Giza and the mysteries of the Sphinx and the pyramids. We were to meet there with the archaeo-astronomer Robert Bauval. As we shall see, his stellar correlations provided startling independent corroboration for the geological evidence of Giza’s vast antiquity.