The Language Of Stone

The Great Sphinx of Giza is probably the world's best known relic from the distant past. It is shrouded in mystery. Indeed to many it is mystery itself.

The Sphinx is not built with quarried blocks like the pyramids and temples it guards, but carved out of the living bedrock. Its makers gave it a man's head (some say it's a woman) and the body of a lion. It is 66 feet high and an impressive 240 feet long. It has the most extraordinary expression, like a hundred Mona Lisas all rolled into one. And it eyes gaze forever at the distant horizon due east, at the equinox point...at something not of this world but beyond it, in the sky. Something, perhaps, that is reflected or 'frozen' in the essence and age of the Sphinx.

Nothing can prepare a first-time visitor for the awe-inspiring and humbling experience of meeting the Great Sphinx face to face. No matter who you are, no matter what your disposition and temperament are, the Great Sphinx of Giza will not leave you unmoved. John Anthony West is a man who knows this phenomenon well. He has stood in the shadow of this great statue many a time since he started visiting Egypt some thirty years ago. To him the Sphinx had always appeared as a monument apart, and much, much older than anything else he had seen either at Giza or elsewhere.

West's strong 'gut feeling' had rarely let him down. One day, while reading a book on Egypt by the French author and mathematician Schwaller de Lubicz (Sacred Science, Paris 1961) an answer to his intuitive hunch came shooting straight at him. Schwaller made a passing remark on what appeared to be water erosions on the body of the Sphinx. Turning to a close up photograph of the Sphinx, West suddenly realised that the weathering patterns on the Sphinx were not horizontal as seen on other monuments at Giza, but vertical. Now horizontal weathering is the result of prolonged exposure to strong winds and sandstorms. There sure had been plenty of those in this arid region of the Sahara. Could water have caused the vertical weathering on the Sphinx? Water from where?

Something, clearly, was worth investigating here. West knew, of course, that most Egyptologists believed that the Sphinx was built in 2500 BC in the time of the pharaoh Chephren (of Khafre), who is identified with the Second Pyramid at Giza. He also knew that this belief was now so entrenched that it would take an intellectual bulldozer to tug it out. Yet his study had shown him that this believe was more a dogma than any-thing else. He asked himself if a proof- positive identification between Khafre and the Sphinx would stand in an 'open court' under public scrutiny?

The answer was no. The reason was, quite simply, this. There was no inscriptions - not a single one - either carved on a wall or a stela or written on the throngs of papyri that identified Khafre (or anyone else, for that matter) with the construction of the Sphinx and its nearby temples. As for the proximity of Khafre's pyramid to the Sphinx (in fact it is 1700 feet away) this did not prove that both monuments were built as one complex nor, more relevantly, at the same epoch. By such standards future generations of archaeologists may one day allocate ownership of the Sphinx to the builder of the Sound & Light theatre because of its proximity to the Sphinx complex or - as someone else has put it - attribute St. Paul's Cathedral to General Gordon of Khartoum just because his statue was found in it. In short, Khafre may well be the quintessential 'Kilroy was here' of antiquity. So could the Sphinx be much older than the reign of Khafre, as West had long suspected it was? Could this hypothesis explain, for example, the strange vertical weathering on the statue?

In 1991 John West rounded a crack team of scientists who were not hampered by an ingrained Egyptological consensus, and took them to Giza. Along came Dr. Robert Schoch, a prominent geologist and professor from Boston University to examined the unique weathering patterns on the Sphinx and its enclosure. His conclusions, which came after several months of analysis, was to convulse the world of archaeology. The vertical weathering patterns on the Sphinx and its enclosure, Schoch argued, were not caused by wind effect, as had previously been thought, but by water - water from torrential rains and pouring down in sheets over these ancient structures. But how could this be? Was Schoch saying that such heavy rains only fell on the Sphinx area but nowhere else at Giza?

That was impossible, retorted the Egyptologists. Not impossible, said Schoch, if it is conceded that the Sphinx was built at an epoch when such rains were common in this region but that the other monuments at Giza, however, were built long after these rains had stopped occurring. Again impossible, replied the ruffled Egyptologists; such heavy rains stopped occurring thousands of years before the time of Khafre. Schoch politely shrugged his shoulders. This, he answered, was not his problem.

The usual was to happened. John West was branded a charlatan and a sensation-seeker, and Schoch was politely shunned for not minding his own business and for stepping on the Egyptological turf. John West, however, was relentless. True, he did not have the lofty credentials of his learned opponents, but this did not deter him in the least. Scientific logic was on his side, not credentials. He was now determined more than ever to see that the Egyptologists either prove him wrong with equal or better scientific arguments or concede that he, and not they, was right about the age of the Sphinx. Anything less would be short change.

To be fair, the implications of West's theory are, of course, far- reaching. History books will have to be re-written and scientists will have to reconsider the origins of civilisation as a whole. Well, so be it. Progress worked like that. In any case, it had been done many times before. It could be done again. Yet going about to prove that the Sphinx was much older than Khafre was one thing. The question was, how much older exactly? How could science determine the true age of a stone monument?