Page 337 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Antiquités undertook its clearance and restoration once more.
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Does this not suggest that the climate could have been very different
when the Sphinx enclosure was carved out? What would have been the
sense of creating this immense statue if its destiny were merely to be
engulfed by the shifting sands of the eastern Sahara? However, since the
Sahara is a young desert, and since the Giza area in particular was wet
and relatively fertile 11,000-15,000 years ago, is it not worth considering
another scenario altogether? Is it not possible that the Sphinx enclosure
was carved out during those distant green millennia when topsoil was still
anchored to the surface of the plateau by the roots of grasses and shrubs
and when what is now a desert of wind-blown sand more closely
resembled the rolling savannahs of modern Kenya and Tanzania?
Under such congenial climatic conditions, the creation of a semi-
subterranean monument like the Sphinx would not have outraged
common sense. The builders would have had no reason to anticipate the
slow desiccation and desertification of the plateau that would ultimately
follow.
Yet, is it feasible to imagine that the Sphinx could have been built when
Giza was still green—long, long ago?
As we shall see, such ideas are anathema to modern Egyptologists, who
are nevertheless obliged to admit (to quote Dr Mark Lehner, director of
the Giza Mapping Project) that ‘there is no direct way to date the Sphinx
itself, because the Sphinx is carved right out of natural rock.’ In the
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absence of more objective tests, Lehner went on to point out,
archaeologists had ‘to date things by context’. And the context of the
Sphinx, that is, the Giza necropolis—a well-known Fourth Dynasty site—
made it obvious that the Sphinx belonged to the Fourth Dynasty as well.
22
Such reasoning was not regarded as axiomatic by Lehner’s
distinguished predecessors in the nineteenth century, who were at one
time convinced that the Sphinx long predated the Fourth Dynasty.

Whose Sphinx is it anyway?

In his Passing of Empires, published in 1900, the distinguished French
Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, who made a special study of the content of
the Sphinx Stela erected by Thutmosis IV, wrote:

The stela of the Sphinx bears, on line 13, the cartouche of Khafre in the middle of
a gap ... There, I believe, is an indication of [a renovation and clearance] of the
Sphinx carried out under this prince, and consequently the more or less certain
proof that the Sphinx was already covered with sand during the time of Khufu and

The Pyramids of Egypt, pp. 106-7.
20
21 Mark Lehner, 1992 AAAS Annual Meeting, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?
22 Ibid.

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