Cosmos - Riddle of the Sphinx

Cosmos - Riddle of the Sphinx

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A detailed article by Cosmos Magazine about the research done on the Sphinx by Mark Lehner, Hawass, et. al.

The question of who built the Sphinx has long vexed Egyptologists and archaeologists. Lehner, Hawass and others agree it was Pharaoh Khafre, who ruled Egypt during the Old Kingdom, which began around 2600 BC and lasted some 500 years before giving way to civil war and famine.

It's known from hieroglyphic texts that Khafre's father, Khufu, built the 147 m tall Great Pyramid, not far from where the Sphinx would later be built. Khafre, following a tough act, constructed his own pyramid, only three metres shorter than his father's, close to the Sphinx. Some of the evidence linking Khafre with the Sphinx comes from Lehner's research, but the idea dates back to 1853.

That's when a French archaeologist named Auguste Mariette unearthed a life-size statue of Khafre, carved with startling realism from black volcanic rock, amid the ruins of what would later be called the Valley Temple of Khafre. What's more, Mariette found the remnants of a stone causeway connecting the Valley Temple to a mortuary temple next to Khafre's pyramid. Then, in 1925, French archaeologist and engineer Emile Baraize probed the sand directly in front of the Sphinx and discovered yet another Old Kingdom building - now called the Sphinx Temple - strikingly similar in its ground plan to the ruins Mariette had found.

Why Khafre and not Khufu?

Then, in 1980, Lehner recruited a young German geologist, Tom Aigner, who suggested a novel way of showing that the Sphinx was part of Khafre's larger building complex.

Limestone is the result of mud, coral and the shells of plankton-like creatures compressed together over tens of millions of years. Looking at samples from the Sphinx Temple and the Sphinx itself, Aigner and Lehner inventoried the different fossils making up the limestone. The fossil fingerprints showed that the blocks used for the wall of the temple must have come from the ditch surrounding the Sphinx - as the statue was being carved, the quarried blocks were being hauled away to build the temple.

So "fossil fingerprints" linking quarried stone from alongside the Sphinx demonstrate Khafre was responsible for it's removal. Further connection to Khafre came when a workers "lost city" was uncovered in the immediate vicinity, workers directly linked to Khafre. According to Lehner the Sphinx as a project began under Khafre but was never completed, then lay abandoned under encroaching sand until Thutmose received "divine" provenance from the ruined hulk;

In a dream, the statue, calling itself Horemakhet - or Horus-in-the-Horizon, the earliest known Egyptian name for the statue - addressed him. It complained about its ruined body and the encroaching sand. Horemakhet then offered Thutmose the throne in exchange for help.

Typical language found throughout history when someone of lower rank seeks "divine inspiration" for higher office! Thutmose is the originator of the Sphinx cult, and it's a good bet he never grasped the true origin of the statue, only that it was something from antiquity.

Also stated is research from German climatologists Rudolph Kuper and Stefan Kröpelin indicating the Sahara and region around Giza were still in a "wetter" phase, before succumbing to desertification (due to Earth's processional tilt?)

Excellent article, please read it, as it really addresses the "mysteries" people have with the Sphinx, especially the allusion to greater age due to evidence of erosion.

The most powerful evidence linking the statue to Khafre is the fossil fingerprints linking stone in Khafre's temples to the stone quarried and removed from the ditch surrounding the Sphinx, and giving it's body it's shape. You can't dispute scientific evidence like that.

Very nice article -- some new (to me) information in there. Great find!

I agree, nice article, Between the age of the GP and the Sphinx, I've really come around on some of the more 'out-there' ideas on their origin. The truth is spectacular enough - no reason to invent aliens or non-existent cultures to explain it!

I'm glad you both enjoyed the article. There's a NOVA program that covers this same topic with interviews of Lehner and Hawass; NOVA: Riddles of the Sphinx

NARRATOR: But what does the similarity of the rock in the Sphinx, ditch and temple tell Lehner about how the Sphinx was built?

MARK LEHNER: The Egyptians quarried a horseshoe-shaped ditch leaving a core that left a big block from which they carved the Sphinx itself. They moved the stone, sometimes in blocks of a hundred tons, down to the lower terrace for fabricating the walls of the Sphinx temple.

NARRATOR: So the starting point for the Sphinx must have been a huge rock sticking out of the surface of the Giza Plateau. Workers cut a trench around it, quarrying the stone out from the ditch in huge blocks. They hauled off those blocks to build the nearby Sphinx temple, then sculptors carved the giant rock remaining in the center into the shape of the Sphinx.

MARK LEHNER: The Sphinx was carved right out of the natural mother rock of the Giza Plateau.

This basically amounts to conclusive evidence that stone removed from the horseshoe ditch surrounding the Sphinx was excavated and used in the building of Khafre's temple.