The 40 000 year old Sphinx

Here's something for y'all ATSers to chew on.

The Lion-Man, dug out in Germany and ascribed to the Aurignacian culture has been dated to be around 40 000 years old.



Well, that`s it, basically. I think its a delicious find because we're still debating whether Sphinxes are a couple thousand of years old or "much older" as some of the fringe-ancient-astronaut-antediluvian-crowd say.

And just to remind you that the Sphinx is not limited to Egypt, here are a few more from around the world. They usually show up as lions with human faces but sometimes the mixes are with other animals.

Some of the oldest lion-men can be found on Hindu Temples. Quoting our Internet Encyclopedia:

A composite mythological being with the body of a lion and the head of a human being is present in the traditions, mythology and art of South and South-East Asia[18] Variously known as purushamriga (Sanskrit, "man-beast"), purushamirugam (Tamil, "man-beast"), naravirala (Sanskrit, "man-cat") in India, or as nara-simha (Sanskrit, "man-lion") in Sri Lanka, manusiha or manuthiha (Pali, "man-lion") in Myanmar, and norasingh (from Pali, "man-lion", a variation of the Sanskrit "nara-simha") or thep norasingh ("man-lion deity"), or nora nair in Thailand.

A Hindu sample of a "man-beast":



A Sumerian Hybrid:



The Celtic Sphinx:



An Anatolian Sphinx:



I could go on and on but these are enough to make the point.

So ATS, what do you think? Are they fictitious figures, as our academic establishment thinks? Or did they really exist? Were they genetically engineered hybrids? Or supernatural beasts? Was the mixing of "the Gods" and humans a reason humanity was wiped out with a flood? Or is this all just symbolic of something else we don't understand or know yet? The possibilities are endless.

reply to post by Skyfloating


Great thread.

Here are some of my favorite Egyptian ones...

Linky

I am really starting to wonder if there was a civilization that we have yet to discover or that we are not being told about . 40,000 years is pretty impressive . I also find it interesting that they found this in Germany that would of been partially covered under ice sheets during the the last ice age

I wonder what we would of found in Canada and any place in the northern hemisphere for ancient civiliations if not buried under miles of ices and crushed and ground into nothingness .

Very interesting indeed. Without fossil evidence proving those things have existed I would speculate they probably didn't exist. Who knows, though. I'm open-minded to the idea of they're possible existence.

Personally I think humans, some more than others, have a need for expression and creativity. Part of it is physical, what you can see, and the imagination aspect. They just look cool. There are only so many subjects to draw, and the truly interesting stuff comes with combining those various parts of nature. I'd guess the other part is that combining humans and animals is one way of expressing certain animal characteristics to a people, person, or civilization. When sculpting human-like figures with lion-heads it might be a way of saying they're as strong or proud as a lion.

reply to post by Skyfloating


Holy history books batman, this is awesome.

Conservators experimented by making a replica of Lion Man, calculating that it would take a highly skilled carver at least 400 hours using flint tools (two months’ work in daylight).

www.theartnewspaper.com...

Even more exciting than the discovery of new pieces, the sculpture’s age has been refined using radio-carbon dating of other bones found in the strata. This reveals a date of 40,000 years ago, while until recently it was thought to be 32,000 years old. Once reconstruction is completed, several tiny, unused fragments of the mammoth ivory are likely to be carbon dated, and this is expected to confirm the result.

How long have we been living on this planet for again, I forgot?

freedomSlave
I am really starting to wonder if there was a civilization that we have yet to discover or that we are not being told about . 40,000 years is pretty impressive . I also find it interesting that they found this in Germany that would of been partially covered under ice sheets during the the last ice age

I wonder what we would of found in Canada and any place in the northern hemisphere for ancient civiliations if not buried under miles of ices and crushed and ground into nothingness .

Beneath the sands of the Sahara, below the Ocean Blue, in the Highlands of Scotland, out in the Canadian forests and in many other places, more surprises await us I believe.

Vast stretches of land have yet to even be inhabited by modern humankind, let alone dug out.

Maybe its time to listen to the Hindus who have always said we've been around that long. Here are two more Hindu Sphinxes:

reply to post by Skyfloating


The lionman has been haunting me for almost 20 years. It was a very contentious topic when I was in school, though mostly on my end, because I was the only one in the lectures who seemed to think that it was at least equally likely if not more so that it is of Neanderthal providence and not that of Modern Humans. The earliest instances of Aurignacian culture overlap with the last few thousands years of Neanderthal presence as well as cohabitation of Neanderthal and MH in the Levant ant 45,000 BCE and with the data and evidence collected thus far I personally don't think there's any one particular item that definitively can place the culture with one or the other, though there seem to have been far more Neanderthal remains found at Aurignacian sites the there have those of MH that still isn't conclusive. Another example of "the more we learn about the past the more we realize we don't know much at all" . But it is a pretty fascinating find in and of itself(the lionman that is) and from a very interesting period of prehistory.

Its almost as if there was some "proto" Civilization that has been lost to the ages, that accounts for the similarities between early civilizations.

Our myths are rife with Lost civs, probably some truth out there.

Last Ice age probably ground the remains to dust, whats left is probably under water or miles of ice.

A lot of us know what the answers are to the connection to art in ancient civilizations but we cant talk about here on ATS.

I feel that Edgar Cayce was able to 'see' that ages ago there were man/animal hybrids. I know Cayce has his skeptics, and I don't buy into everything he has said, but I do believe he was able to get into a trance and reveal some in depth answers regarding ancient history. I think if humans can manipulate genes, then it is inevitable that one or more of them would experiment with crossing genes. The curiosity alone is too great and then add in a religion, nobility, or war strategy/weapon angle and maybe the ancients did cross genes. Genetic science though way back then…whoa! I am however, one that suspects some ancients were more advanced than history shows. The question is, did the evidence slip through the crack or is it intentionally kept from us.

they just found a submerged city off the coast of india thats got a buncha sphinx's. i forget the name drawaka maybe or something along those lines? supposed to be very very old.

look up the great catastrophe from 535-536 which lead to the great plague in Europe which lasted til 542. wouldnt be hard to hide knowledge from man if most of the world dies off in 2 years of darkness and cold with no food which turns into the plague.... good times. I'm sure this isn't the only world wide event that could take us back a notch or 2.

just think. after 542 they thought the world was flat again. the people who withheld the knowledge to travel by sea ended up almost ruling the whole world. sneaky sneaky!

A good source for further research

John Anthony West: Symbolist Egypt - The Meaning Behind The Magic

www.youtube.com...

John Anthony West (born 1 January 1932 in New York, USA) is an American author, lecturer, guide and a proponent of Sphinx water erosion hypothesis in geology.[1][2][3]
Influenced by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, in 1993 his work with Robert M. Schoch, a geologist and associate professor of natural science at the College of General Studies at Boston University was presented by Charlton Heston in a NBC special called “The Mystery of the Sphinx” that won West an News & Documentary Emmy Award for Best Research and a nomination for Best Documentary.[4][5][6] The documentary contends that the main type of weathering evident on the Great Sphinx (pictured) and surrounding enclosure walls could only have been caused by prolonged and extensive rainfall during the time period from 10,000 to 5000 BCE and was carved out of limestone bedrock by an ancient advanced culture (such as the Heavy Neolithic Qaraoun culture).[7] This challenged the conventional dating of the carving of the statue circa 2500 BCE. West suggested that the Sphinx may be over twice as old as originally determined, whereas Schoch made a more conservative determination of between 5000 and 7000 BCE.[8][9]

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by onequestion


@ Sky Floating...Awesome thread!

@ onequestion...

A lot of us know what the answers are to the connection to art in ancient civilizations but we cant talk about here on ATS.

Would you mind sending me a link or brief description via private message?

I would much appreciate it if you could.

Thanks.

benrl
Its almost as if there was some "proto" Civilization that has been lost to the ages

Clearly. The mythological commonalities across the globe outweigh the differences. Whether you're in Japan or Mexico, Turkey or Africa, Ireland or Peru, you`ll hear the same tales of sphinxes and serpents, gods and floods and whatnot.

reply to post by Skyfloating


Stone cant be carbon dated so when historians archeologists say how old Sphinx is they make up a date which comfortably fits in with the main stream model of Egyptian antiquity. It could be 40,000 and more than that as well.

Every inhabitet planet has a sphinx. Life can be generated at any frequency. Sort of like channels on a tv. It takes gold to keep it going and what we see with our eyes in this realm is only a small part of what is being done by the sphinx. If we could just get the man-lion to communicate with the mighty oak tree then we would see great things.

AthlonSavage
Stone cant be carbon dated so when historians archeologists say how old Sphinx is they make up a date which comfortably fits in with the main stream model of Egyptian antiquity. It could be 40,000 and more than that as well.

...and the Giza Sphinx has no hieroglyphs or inscriptions nor Egyptian stories told about it, nor have structures of similar size in later Dynasties been found...so who knows whether the Egyptians actually built it...

Just to add to the near-universality of the leontocephaline (I first saw this "figure" in a fever-hallucination years ago and have studied it off and on for some time) if you notice on the Lowenmensch figure (in the OP) there are odd striations that appear (to me) that something was intended to be wrapped or coiled about the arms and (perhaps) legs of the figure which adds the ancient Greek figures Aeon and Phanes ... which links into the Mithratic traditions out of Persia (where the figure is named (or misnamed) Ahrimanus) and on into Gnostic and Christian times (as Abraxas, the Demiurge and the angel Ariel). Someone already mentioned the Egyptian Sekhmet and the Hindu Narasimha.


Here's a link to a Google images search you might find interesting and helpful in your search if the figure "interests" you: Leontocephaline

Just a few to whet your appetite:





I would say this figure is deep within the cultural (and perhaps archetypal) consciousness of humans. The various figures all seem to be related to fire, healing, and defense against "lower forces" but also as deities of time and of being "outside of time."

I say that the figure is "archetypal" because there are literally thousands of artists still drawing the figure today (you can see some in the links), and, I had never (or I was not aware at least) of seeing the figure before I had my "fever-dream."

I've certainly seen him/her plenty since, though.

reply to post by Gryphon66


That's a pretty interesting take on things and really great photos as well. I don't know that the Lionman from the OP fits in so well though. If you look at the figure from a different angle, you will see that the "striations" you refer to are only located on the upper arms and don't actually wrap around the figure as is depicted in the reference photos you posted. Here's a better frontal view to illustrate my point-