Something About The Sphinx No Longer Makes Sense

Every textbook says Khafre, around twenty five hundred BC, and most people treat that as settled the way they treat the name of the river beside it. Here is what the textbooks tend to leave out. There is no inscription anywhere on the Sphinx naming its builder. No quarry marks, no logbook, no worker's village tied to it, none of the four independent lines that make the Great Pyramid's attribution so solid. The whole case rests on where the thing is sitting relative to other things. In this one I go through each pillar of that case and what is actually holding it up. The Dream Stela, which popular accounts call direct proof, is a granite slab erected eleven hundred years later by a pharaoh legitimising his own throne, and the word everyone cites is one damaged syllable, Khaf, sitting in a line where the surrounding text is physically missing from the stone. It may name a builder. It may just be describing a location. Nobody can tell, because the context is gone. Then Robert Schoch, who went to Giza in nineteen ninety expecting to confirm the standard date and found deep rounded vertical fissures on the enclosure walls that look nothing like the horizontal wind scouring on confirmed Fourth Dynasty structures on the same plateau. I give the counter-arguments proper weight too, because subsurface salt wicking is a real mechanism and the three limestone layers genuinely weather at different rates. And the head is too small for the body, which is measurable and undisputed, in a culture where recarving predecessors' faces was routine.
#archaeology #history