Page 336 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

that led up to the Second Pyramid.
From the edge of the causeway I had an unimpeded view of the Sphinx
immediately to my north. As long as a city block, as high as a six-storey
building it was perfectly oriented due east and thus faced the rising sun
on the two equinoctial days of the year. Man-headed, lion-bodied,
crouched as though ready at last to move its slow thighs after millennia
of stony sleep, it had been carved in one piece out of a single ridge of
limestone on a site that must have been meticulously preselected. The
exceptional characteristic of this site, as well as overlooking the Valley of
the Nile, was that its geological make-up incorporated a knoll of hard
rock jutting at least 30 feet above the general level of the limestone
ridge. From this knoll the head and neck of the Sphinx had been carved,
while beneath it the vast rectangle of limestone that would be shaped
into the body had been isolated from the surrounding bedrock. The
builders had done this by excavating an 18-foot wide, 25-foot deep
trench all around it, creating a free-standing monolith.
The first and lasting impression of the Sphinx, and of its enclosure, is
that it is very, very old—not a mere handful of thousands of years, like
the Fourth Dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs, but vastly, remotely, fabulously
old. This was how the Ancient Egyptians in all periods of their history
regarded the monument, which they believed guarded the ‘Splendid Place
of The Beginning of all Time’ and which they revered as the focus of ‘a
great magical power extending over the whole region’.
17
This, as we have already seen, is the general message of the Inventory
Stela. More specifically, it is also the message of the ‘Sphinx Stela’
erected here in around 1400 BC by Thutmosis IV, an Eighteenth Dynasty
pharaoh. Still standing between the paws of the Sphinx, this granite
tablet records that prior to Thutmosis’s rule the monument had been
covered up to its neck in sand. Thutmosis liberated it by clearing all the
sand, and erected the stela to commemorate his work.
18
There have been no significant changes in the climate of the Giza
plateau over the last 5000 years. It therefore follows that throughout
19
this entire period the Sphinx enclosure must have been as susceptible to
sand encroachment as when Thutmosis cleared it—and, indeed, as it still
is today. Recent history proves that the enclosure can fill up rapidly if left
unattended. In 1818 Captain Caviglia had it cleared of sand for the
purposes of his excavations, and in 1886, when Gaston Maspero came to
re-excavate the site, he was obliged to have it cleared of sand once again.
Thirty-nine years later, in 1925, the sands had returned in full force and
the Sphinx was buried to its neck when the Egyptian Service des

17 A History of Egypt, 1902, volume 4, p. 80ff, ‘Stela of the Sphinx’.
Ibid.
18
19 Karl W. Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology,
University of Chicago Press, 1976.

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