Page 409 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

of the Sphinx’. He was, however, the first to have become involved in
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public debates over the immense historical implications of this
weathering. His attitude was that he preferred to stick to his geology:

I’ve been told over and over again that the peoples of Egypt, as far as we know,
did not have either the technology or the social organization to cut out the core
body of the Sphinx in pre-dynastic times ... However, I don’t see it as being my
problem as a geologist. I’m not seeking to shift the burden, but its really up to the
Egyptologists and archaeologists to figure out who carved it. If my findings are in
conflict with their theory about the rise of civilization then maybe its time for them
to re-evaluate that theory. I’m not saying that the Sphinx was built by Atlanteans,
or people from Mars, or extra-terrestrials. I’m just following the science where it
leads me, and it leads me to conclude that the Sphinx was built much earlier than
previously thought ...’
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Legendary civilizations

How much earlier?
John West told us that he and Schoch had ‘a friendly debate going’
about the age of the Sphinx: ‘Schoch puts the date somewhere between
5000 BC and 7000 BC minimum [the epoch of the Neolithic Subpluvial]
mainly by taking the most cautious view allowed by the data to hand. As
a professor of Geology at a big university, he’s almost constrained to take
a conservative view—and it’s true that there were rains between 7000 BC
and 5000 BC. However, for a variety of both intuitive and scholarly
reasons, I think that the date is much, much older and that most of the
weathering of the Sphinx took place in the earlier rainy period before
10,000 BC ... Frankly, if it was as relatively recent as 5000 to 7000 BC, I
think we’d probably have found other evidence of the civilization that
carved it. A lot of evidence from that period has been found in Egypt.
There are some strange anomalies within it, I’ll admit, but most of it—
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the vast bulk—is really quite rudimentary.’
‘So who built the Sphinx if it wasn’t the pre-dynastic Egyptians?’ ‘My
conjecture is that the whole riddle is linked in some way to those
legendary civilizations spoken of in all the mythologies of the world. You
know—that there were great catastrophes, that a few people survived and
went wandering around the earth and that a bit of knowledge was
preserved here, a bit there ... My hunch is that the Sphinx is linked to all
that. If I were asked to place a bet I’d say that it predates the break-up of
the last Ice Age and is probably older than 10000 BC, perhaps even older
than 15,000 BC. My conviction—actually it’s more than a conviction—is
that it’s vastly old?

12 Ibid. The relevant geologists include Farouk El Baz, and Roth and Raffai.
Extracts from Mystery of the Sphinx and AAAS meeting.
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14 Under the category of anomalies, West made specific reference to the bowls carved
out of diorite and other hard stones described in Part VI.

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