It was this sequence of events, or rather its implications, that West felt
Egyptologists should have paid more attention to: ‘There’s a discrepancy
in the scenario that reads “building kind of rubbishy pyramids that are
structurally unsound, suddenly building absolutely unbelievable pyramids
that are structurally the most incredible things ever conceived of, and
then immediately afterwards going back to structurally unsound
pyramids.” It doesn’t make sense ... The parallel scenario in, say, the
auto-industry would be inventing and building the Model-T Ford, then
suddenly inventing and building the ’93 Porsche and making a few of
those, then forgetting how to do that and going back to building Model-T
Fords again ... Civilizations don’t work this way.’
‘So what are you saying?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying that the Fourth
Dynasty pyramids weren’t built by the Fourth Dynasty at all?’
‘My gut feeling is that they weren’t. They don’t look like the mastabas
in front of them. They don’t look like any other Fourth Dynasty stuff
either ... They don’t seem to fit in ...’
‘And nor does the Sphinx?’
‘And nor does the Sphinx. But the big difference is that we don’t have
to rely on gut feelings where the Sphinx is concerned. We can prove that
it was built long before the Fourth Dynasty ...’
John West
Santha and I had been fans of John Anthony West ever since we had first
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started travelling in Egypt. His guide-book, The Traveller’s Key had been
a brilliant and indispensable introduction to the mysteries of this ancient
land, and we still carried it with us. At the same time his scholarly works,
notably Serpent in the Sky, had opened our eyes to the revolutionary
possibility that Egyptian civilization—with its manifold glimpses of high
science apparently out of place in time—might not have developed
entirely within the confines of the Nile Valley but might have been a
legacy of some earlier, greater and as yet unidentified civilization
‘antedating dynastic Egypt, and all other known civilizations, by
millennia’.1
Tall and strongly built, West was in his early sixties. He had cultivated a
neatly trimmed white beard, was dressed in a khaki safari-suit and wore
an eccentric nineteenth-century pith helmet. His manner was youthful and
energetic and there was a roguish sparkle in his eyes.
The three of us were sitting on the open upper deck of a Nile cruiser,
moored off the corniche in Luxor just a few yards downstream from the
Winter Palace Hotel. To our west, across the river, a big red sun, distorted
by atmospheric refraction, was setting behind the cliffs of the Valley of
the Kings. To our east lay the battered but noble ruins of the Luxor and
Karnak temples. Beneath us, transmitted through the hull of the boat, we
could feel the lap and flow of the water as it rolled by on its meridional
course towards the far-off Delta.
West had first presented his thesis for an older Sphinx in Serpent in the
Sky, a comprehensive exposition of the work of the French
mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Schwaller’s research at the Luxor
Temple between 1937 and 1952 had unearthed mathematical evidence
which suggested that Egyptian science and culture had been far more
advanced and sophisticated than modern scholars had appreciated.
However, as West put it, this evidence had been set out in ‘abstruse,
complex and uncompromising language ... Few readers seem comfortable
with raw Schwaller. It’s a bit like trying to wade directly into high energy
physics without extensive prior training.’
Schwaller’s principal publications, both originally in French, were the
massive three-volume Temple de l’Homme, which focused on Luxor, and
the more general Roi de la théocratie Pharaonique. In this latter work,
subsequently translated into English as Sacred Science, Schwaller made a
passing reference to the tremendous floods and rains which devastated
Egypt in the eleventh millennium BC. Almost as an afterthought, he
added:
A great civilization must have preceded the vast movements of water that passed
over Egypt, which leads us to assume that the Sphinx already existed, sculptured
the head, shows indisputable signs of water erosion.’2
1 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt; Serpent in the Sky, p. 20.
2 Sacred Science, p. 96.
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While working on Serpent, West was struck by the possible significance of
this remark and decided to follow it up: ‘I realized that if I could prove
Schwaller’s offhand observation empirically, this would be ironclad
evidence for the existence of a previously unidentified high civilization of
distant antiquity.’
‘Why?’
‘Once you’ve established that water was the agent that eroded the
Sphinx the answer is almost childishly simple. It can be explained to
anybody who reads the National Enquirer or the News of the World. It’s
almost moronically simple ... The Sphinx is supposed to have been built
by Khafre around 2500 BC, but since the beginning of dynastic times—say
3000 BC onwards—there just hasn’t been enough rain on the Giza plateau
to have caused the very extensive erosion that we see all over the
Sphinx’s body. You really have to go back to before 10,000 BC to find a
wet enough climate in Egypt to account for weathering of this type and
on this scale. It therefore follows that the Sphinx must have been built
before 10,000 BC and since it’s a massive, sophisticated work of art it also
follows that it must have been built by a high civilization.’
‘But John,’ Santha asked, ‘how can you be so sure that the weathering
was caused by rain water? Couldn’t the desert winds have done the job
just as well? After all even orthodox Egyptologists admit that the Sphinx
has existed for nearly 5000 years. Isn’t that long enough for these effects
to have been caused by wind erosion?’
‘Naturally that was one of the first possibilities that I had to exclude.
Only if I could show that wind-borne abrasive sand couldn’t possibly have
brought the Sphinx to its present condition would there be any point in
looking further into the implications of water erosion.’
Robert Schoch’s geology: Unriddling the Sphinx
A key issue turned out to be the deep trench that the monument was
surrounded by on all sides: ‘Because the Sphinx is set in a hollow,’ West
explained, ‘sand piles up to its neck within a few decades if it’s left
untended ... It has been left untended often during historical times. In
fact through a combination of textual references and historical
extrapolations it’s possible to prove that during the 4500 years that have
elapsed since it was ostensibly built by Khafre it’s been buried to its neck
for as much as 3300 years.3 That means that in all this time there has
3 West’s det
ailed evidence is set out in Serpent in the Sky, pp. 184-20. Concerning the
covering of the Sphinx by sand he arrives at the following table:
Sphinx buried
Chephren-Tuthmosis IV c. 1300 years
1000 years
Thuthmosis IV-Ptolemies c. 1100 years
800 years
Ptolemies-Christianity c. 600 years
0 years
Christianity-Present day c. 1700 years
1500 years
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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
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,4 Schoch went on to explain his findings to
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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features.’6
Wind/sand erosion presents a very different profile of sharp-edged
horizontal channels selectively scoured out from the softer layers of the
affected rock. Under no circumstances can it cause the vertical fissures
particularly visible in the wall of the Sphinx enclosure. These could only
have been ‘formed by water running down the wall’,7 the result of rain
falling in enormous quantities, cascading over the slope of the Giza
plateau and down into the Sphinx enclosure below. ‘It picked out the
weak spots in the rock,’ Schoch elaborated, ‘and opened them up into
these fissures—clear evidence to me as a geologist that this erosional
feature was caused by rainfall.’8
Although in some places obscured by repair blocks put in place by
numerous restorers over the passing millennia, the same observation
holds true for the scooped-out, undulating, scalloped coves that run the
entire length of the Sphinx’s body. Again, these are characteristic of
precipitation-induced weathering because only long periods of heavy
rainfall beating down on the upper parts of the immense structure (and
cascading over its sides) could have produced such effects. Confirmation
of this comes from the fact that the limestone out of which the Sphinx
was carved is not uniform in its composition, but consists of a series of
hard and soft layers in which some of the more durable rocks recede
farther than some of the less durable rocks.9 Such a profile simply could
not have been produced by wind erosion (which would have selectively
chiselled out the softer layers of rock) but ‘is entirely ‘consistent with
precipitation-induced weathering where you have water, rain water
beating down from above. The rocks higher up are the more durable ones
but they recede back farther than some of the less durable rocks lower in
the section which are more protected.’10
In his summing up at the AAAS meeting, Schoch concluded:
It’s well known that the Sphinx enclosure fills with sand very quickly, in just a
matter of decades, under the desert conditions of the Sahara. And it has to be dug
out periodically. And this has been the case since ancient times. Yet you still get
this dramatic rolling, erosional profile in the Sphinx enclosure ... Simply put,
therefore, what I’m suggesting is that this rolling profile, these features seen on
the body and in the Sphinx ditch, hark back to a much earlier period when there
was more precipitation in the area, and more moisture, more rain on the Giza
plateau.’11
As Schoch admitted, he was not the first geologist to have noticed the
‘anomalous precipitation-induced weathering features on the core body
6 Mystery of the Sphinx.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 AAAS Annual Meeting 1992.
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of the Sphinx’.12 He was, however, the first to have become involved in
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 n
ot 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 ...’13
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,14 but most of it—
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.
13 Extracts from Mystery of the Sphinx and AAAS meeting.