Read Online From Atlantis to the Sphinx by Colin Wilson - Free Book Online

Sphinx’s breast bore the date of King Thutmose IV, who came to the throne in 1425 BC. The main stela told how King Thutmose IV had fallen asleep near the Sphinx when out hunting, and how the Sphinx—who was inhabited by the god Khepera (a form of the sun god Ra), creator of the universe—spoke to him in a dream and asked him to clear away the sand that buried him. Thutmose not only cleared away the sand, but made extensive repairs to the body. Apparently this was not the first time; the same stela bore the name of the Pharaoh Chefren—although its surrounding writing was flaked away, so that its significance was not clear. Sir Gaston Maspero assumed that Chefren had also performed the same service of clearing the sand, and possibly repaired the Sphinx—the rear of the Sphinx contains repairs that have been dated to the Old Kingdom, which lasted about 450 years (2575-2130 BC).
    But this obviously raises a basic question. If the Sphinx was built by Chefren around 2500 BC, then why should it need repairs in the course of the next three and a half centuries? It was well protected, and was no doubt buried in sand most of the time since it was built. Dr Zahi Hawass, the keeper of the Cairo Museum and a bitter opponent of West’s theory, was to argue that the limestone of which the Sphinx was built was so poor that it began to erode as soon as the monument was completed. West’s reply was that this would involve erosion at the rate of a foot every hundred years, and that if that was the case, the Sphinx would have vanished completely about five centuries ago.
    On the other hand, if Maspero was correct, then Chefren had merely repaired the Sphinx and cleared away the sand; Maspero actually stated that this was proof that ‘the Sphinx was already covered with sand during the time of Khufu [Cheops] and his predecessors’. In fact, it was a commonplace among nineteenth-centry Egyptologists to state that the Sphinx was far, far older than the pyramids. It has only been during the twentieth century, on the evidence of the name of Chefren on the stela of Thutmose IV, that Egyptologists have decided that the Sphinx was built by Chefren, and that its head is supposed to be a portrait of Chefren. They have reached that conclusion on precisely the same evidence that made Maspero decide the Sphinx was far older than the pyramids.
    Another obvious question arises. Most of the Sphinx—as already stated—is below ground level, so it would have been clear to its builder that it would soon be buried in sand. (It seems to take about twenty years.) Does this not suggest that, when the Sphinx was built, the Sahara was still green, which would explain how the Sphinx came to be eroded by rainfall? We know that the Sahara was once green and fertile, and that it has been slowly eroded over the millennia. No one is certain when it was last green, but a conservative guess is 3500 BC.
    It is, of course, even possible that it was still green in the time of Chefren; 1 but then, even if it was built by Chefren in a green Sahara in 2500 BC, this still fails to explain why it needed repairs so soon.

    Now West had the task of trying to prove that Maspero and the other nineteenth-century scholars had been right, and that the Sphinx was already old in the time of Chefren. If he could prove that the body of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx enclosure, had been eroded by water, not by wind-blown sand, then he would certainly have taken a major step in that direction. His first task would be to set about finding the necessary finance to take a team of experts to look at it. Boris Said, a maker of videos, coordinated the project, and Thomas L. Dobecki, a geophysicist, also signed on, with two geologists, an architect and an oceanographer. After an interminable struggle to persuade the authorities to grant permission, they were finally ready to start.
    Now that Schoch could study it all at close quarters, his doubts vanished. If the Sphinx was the same age as the