Page 338 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

his predecessors ...
23
The equally distinguished Auguste Mariette agreed—naturally enough
since he had been the finder of the Inventory Stela (which, as we have
seen, asserted matter-of-factly that the Sphinx was standing on the Giza
plateau long before the time of Khufu). Also generally concurring were
24
Brugsch (Egypt under the Pharaohs, London, 1891), Petrie, Sayce and
many other eminent scholars of the period. Travel writers such as John
25
Ward affirmed that ‘the Great Sphinx must be numberless years older
even than the Pyramids’. And as late as 1904 Wallis Budge, the respected
keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, had no hesitation in
making this unequivocal assertion:

The oldest and finest human-headed lion statue is the famous ‘Sphinx’ at Giza.
This marvellous object was in existence in the days of Khafre, the builder of the
Second Pyramid, and was, most probably, very old even at that early period ... The
Sphinx was thought to be connected in some way with foreigners or with a foreign
religion which dated from predynastic times.
26
Between the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, however,
Egyptologists’ views about the antiquity of the Sphinx changed
dramatically. Today there is not a single orthodox Egyptologist who
would even discuss, let alone consider seriously, the wild and
irresponsible suggestion, once a commonplace, that the Sphinx might
have been built thousands of years before Khafre’s reign.
According to Dr Zahi Hawass, for example, director of Giza and Saqqara
for the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, many such theories have been
put forward but have ‘gone with the wind’ because ‘we Egyptologists
have solid evidence to state that the Sphinx is dated to the time of
Khafre.’
27
Likewise, Carol Redmont, an archaeologist at the University of
California’s Berkeley campus, was incredulous when it was suggested to
her that the Sphinx might be thousands of years older than Khafre:
‘There’s just no way that could be true. The people of that region would
not have had the technology, the governing institutions or even the will
to build such a structure thousands of years before Khafre’s reign.’
28
When I first started to research this issue, I had assumed, as Hawass
appeared to claim, that some incontrovertible new evidence must have
been found which had settled the identity of the monument’s builder.
This was not the case. Indeed there are only three ‘contextual’ reasons
why the construction of the anonymous, uninscribed and enigmatic

23 Gaston Maspero, The Passing of Empires, New York, 1900.
24 See Chapter Thirty-five.
25 For a general summary of these views see John Ward, Pyramids and Progress, London,
1900, pp. 38-42.
The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, pp. 471-2 and volume II, p. 361.
26
27 Interview in Mystery of the Sphinx, NBC-TV, 1993.
28 Cited in Serpent In The Sky, p. 230.

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