Page 407 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

only been a cumulative total of just over 1000 years in which its body has
been susceptible to wind-erosion; all the rest of the time it’s been
protected from the desert winds by an enormous blanket of sand. The
point is that if the Sphinx was really built by Khafre in the Old Kingdom,
and if wind erosion was capable of inflicting such damage on it in so
short a time-span, then other Old Kingdom structures in the area, built
out of the same limestone, ought to show similar weathering. But none
do—you know, absolutely unmistakable Old Kingdom tombs, full of
hieroglyphs and inscriptions—none of them show the same type of
weathering as the Sphinx.’
Indeed, none did. Professor Robert Schoch, a Boston University
geologist and specialist in rock erosion who had played a key role in
validating West’s evidence, was satisfied as to the reason for this. The
weathering of the Sphinx—and of the walls of its surrounding rock-hewn
enclosure—had not been caused by wind-scouring at all but by thousands
of years of heavy rainfall long ages before the Old Kingdom came into
being.
Having won over his professional peers at the 1992 Convention of the
Geological Society of America, Schoch went on to explain his findings to
4
a much wider and more eclectic audience (including Egyptologists) at the
1992 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science (AAAS). He began by pointing out to delegates that ‘the body
of the Sphinx and the walls of the Sphinx ditch are deeply weathered and
eroded ... This erosion is a couple of metres thick in places, at least on
the walls. It’s very deep, it’s very old in my opinion, and it gives a rolling
and undulating profile ...’
5
Such undulations are easily recognizable to stratigraphers and
palaeontologists as having been caused by ‘precipitation-induced
weathering’. As Santha Faiia’s photographs of the Sphinx and the Sphinx
enclosure indicate, this weathering takes the distinctive form of a
combination of deep vertical fissures and undulating, horizontal coves—
‘a classic textbook example,’ in Schoch’s words, ‘of what happens to a
limestone structure when you have rain beating down on it for thousands
of years ... It’s clearly rain precipitation that produced these erosional

Chephren-present day, c. 4700 years 3300 years

4 ‘An abstract of our team’s work was submitted to the Geological Society of America,
and we were invited to present our findings at a poster session of at the GSA convention
in San Diego—the geological Superbowl. Geologists from all over the world thronged to
our booth, much intrigued. Dozens of experts in fields relevant to our research offered
help and advice. Shown the evidence, some geologists just laughed, astounded [as
Schoch had been initially] that in two centuries of research, no one, geologist or
Egyptologist, had noticed that the Sphinx had been weathered by water.’ Serpent in the
Sky, p. 229; Mystery of the Sphinx. NBC-TV, 1993. 275 geologists endorsed Schoch’s
findings.
5 AAAS, Annual Meeting 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?

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