The Last Secrets of the Sphinx of Giza I SLICE HISTORY

To find more clues, we have to return to the time when the Giza Plateau was created, along with its famous pyramids. To study the Sphinx's environment and examine the layout of this legendary site, where everything seems to be connected. Even today, scientists are still scouring the area, hoping to uncover its secrets. Scientists like Mark Lehner, one of the world's leading experts on the constructions in Giza. When I walk the Giza Plateau, every time I'm always taking pictures, because I'm always seeing something new. It's like my notebook. I take it with me all the time, and I'm always taking pictures, even if it's the same picture that I've taken many, many times before. So like right now, I'm seeing we're right on the diagonal of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. And one interesting thing about the relationship between the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx is that the diagonal points right at the Sphinx to the southeast. And so, for example, if I take a picture of this perspective, and then one of the Sphinx, the two pictures suggest to me that I should look again at that alignment. According to experts, almost all of the Giza Plateau was sculpted during the Fourth Dynasty, around the year 2,500 BC. One of the most remarkable times in the history of ancient Egypt is the Fourth Dynasty. So by the size of these pyramids, we know that during this time, Egypt was very wealthy, everything was very well organized, there was a large labor force, and there was plenty of food to feed them. So clearly this was a time where things moved smoothly, swiftly, the country was economically solid, and the arts and crafts flourished. It's into this prosperous era that we'll have to immerse ourselves in search of new clues to the creation of the Sphinx. This period is above all marked by the reign of a renowned pharaoh, the Great Khufu. In the early days of the Old Kingdom, he was the first to set his sights on Giza. This place offered the ideal conditions to build a structure that would leave an indelible mark on human history. A monumental tomb that would guarantee him a glorious life after death. I think Khufu came to Giza to build because the Giza Plateau offered him all the best natural conditions that were required for building the Great Pyramid. You have good, hard bedrock here, and Khufu's Great Pyramid is the first one to be built on the bedrock. To the south here at Giza, there are limestone layers that you see in the Sphinx. They go soft and more clay-like, hard, soft, hard, soft, beautiful for cutting stones, for the quarries, for the access to the valley, for the good foundation. The Giza Plateau was ideal. With its 230-meter long square base, the Great Pyramid of Khufu rose to a height of over 147 meters until its limestone cladding was destroyed, reducing its height by 10 meters. To build it, over 10,000 laborers worked ceaselessly for 20 years, carving the two million blocks of stone, if not more, that were needed. If you stood in front of the Great Pyramid of Khufu and you knew nothing about Egyptology, you would never believe that a human being could build it. The pyramid was a national project of the whole nation. Every household in the south and the north of Egypt participated in building the pyramid by sending workforce and food to help the king. The total mastery in its execution and its vast dimensions would make the Great Pyramid the tallest structure ever built for nearly four millennia. But when he came to the Giza Plateau, Khufu didn't stop at building his own giant tomb. Today, between the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, many other tombs rise up from the sand. These tombs were for his senior officials on the west, his senior family members on the east. And over time, the people who served them, their dependents, their officials, when they died, they wanted to be buried near their lord. As he was building his pyramid, he was building a necropolis, a city of the dead, one of the biggest cities of the dead the world has ever seen. Thanks to Khufu, the Giza Plateau became the focal point of power and memory for ancient Egypt. He left such a mark that his son, Khafre, followed suit. Around the year 2,500 BC, when he came to the throne, Khafre began to construct a pyramid of his own. A structure every bit as impressive, in order to sit beside his father for eternity. The building of Giza's funeral complex was a gradual process. A few years later, Menkaure, the son of Khafre, added his own Great Pyramid. It took just three generations for this legendary site to take shape in the form that we know today. It is extraordinary that one family in the space of about 60, 70 years had managed to transform the face of Egypt for millennia to come. And the more we have learned, the more we realize that the best question is maybe not how did the Egyptians build the pyramids, but how did the pyramids help to build Egypt? By amassing all these resources, by establishing a bureaucracy, accounting to make these giant pyramids, it put a spin on Egyptian civilization like a giant gyroscope, sending it into a new direction, and it was never the same again. According to Egyptologists, it was almost certainly during this flurry of activity on the Giza Plateau that would change Egypt forever, that the Sphinx was carved, as if to offer protection to this nascent necropolis. But there's one thing we still don't know. Which of these ambitious pharaohs ordered its construction? To shed some light on the mystery, we need to take a closer look and carefully observe this guardian of the pyramids. This was the first challenge of Mark Lehner's career. I was determined to come and work here at the Sphinx because I was drawn by the legends of a lost hall of records and the questions of who built the Sphinx and when and why. So I spent every waking moment that I could out here on the Giza Plateau, and especially the area around the Sphinx. It was in 1977 and 78 that I first started working here, actually, and doing archaeology and making maps. I was particularly concerned that nobody had mapped the Sphinx in detail. So we arranged a project to map the Sphinx to scale. As astonishing as it may seem, this structure, that had been revered for thousands of years and fascinated generations of archaeologists, had never been precisely mapped. So Mark Lehner began the ambitious process of photogrammetry, a technique that uses photography to precisely record the dimensions of an object. In just a few weeks, he was able to produce the first accurate plans of the statue, not just the design, but also the topographic curves, the structure of the rock, and the tool marks left over time. All this work was carried out on the front and the two sides of the body. For the first time we could see the Great Sphinx in a drawing, like an architectural drawing, to scale. That took three weeks. But we couldn't use the photogrammetry to do a bird's-eye view, a straight-on map. So I did that by hand, and it took me two years. I did a series of drawings, the top of this paw, the top of that paw, the top of the back, the top of the head, and then I put the drawings together through survey, like a jigsaw puzzle. The result is this 1 to 50 map of the Great Sphinx, the master plan, stone by stone. For the first time in history, the Great Sphinx could be studied in detail, with scientific precision. What became exciting and satisfying for me was no longer looking for lost civilizations, or even so much the kings and the queens and all the fancy people. What I really loved was capturing ancient realities as they are, and freezing them in photographs, line drawings, and then trying to understand what they mean. When you reach the Giza Plateau, one thing is immediately apparent when you examine the Sphinx. The statue, with its lion's body, is perfectly aligned with the Pyramid of Khafre, situated on the higher ground. It's a coincidence that deserves a closer look. Entering this colossal edifice means squeezing along corridors barely big enough for a human being, and descending a hundred meters beneath millions of tons of rock. At the end of the corridor, in the center of the pyramid, directly beneath its peak, is the burial chamber. The pyramids are tombs, huge, gigantic tombs for the kings, for the pharaohs. If they were only symbolic tombs, as some think, that the kings weren't really buried here, they're still tombs. There's no getting around that. Every one of them has a sarcophagus, and I think it's very probable this is the sarcophagus where Khafre was laid to rest after he died, for sure after he died, and was mummified. Building tombs such as these was vitally important to ancient faiths, as demonstrated by the enormity of these structures. When a king dies, his son, the successor, comes to power, becomes a new king. And the first thing he's doing, he's making his tomb, his pyramid at that time. Not only the tomb, the place from where he'll resurrect, he'll climb up to the sky. So this is the first thing, let's say, from the first day, he's choosing a place and starting the building. This is where they thought they were perpetuated and kept alive with their court in the afterworld. The pyramids are tombs for that purpose, but they're not just tombs where you put the king away forever. They are actually like a big resurrection machine, where the king and his whole court and society live on in a city of the afterlife.