Sphinx
"A gigantic statue, with lion body
and the head of a man, gazes east from Egypt along
the thirtieth parallel. Sphinx
is a monolith, carved out of the limestone
bedrock of the Giza plateau, two hundred and forty
feet long, thirty eight feet wide across the shoulders, and sixty
six feet high.
It is worn down and eroded, battered, fissured and collapsing.
Yet nothing else that
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has reached us from antiquity even remotely
matches its power and grandeur, its majesty and its
mystery, or its sombre and hypnotic watchfulness.
It is Great Sphinx Once it was believed to be
an eternal God. Then amnesia ensnared it and it fell into an enchanted
sleep. Ages passed: thousands of years. Climates changed. Cultures
changed. Religions changed. Languages changed. Even the positions
of the stars in the skies changed.
But still the statue endured, brooding
and numinous, wrapped in silence. [1].
"There is a belief that Great Sphinx
was fashioned during that period of Egyptian history
classified as the `Old Kingdom' on the orders of the Fourth
Dynasty Pharaoh named Khafre whom
the Greeks later knew as Chephren
and who reigned from 2520-2494 BC. [2]. "
"In these same sources it is also repeatedly stated as fact that the
features of the Sphinx were carved to represent Khafre
himself in other words, its face is his face. [3]. "
"The only problem at any rate without access to a time machine is
that none of us, not even distinguished Egyptologists,
is really in a position to say whether or not the Sphinx is
a portrait or likeness of Khafre. Since the Pharaoh's
body has never been found we have nothing to go on except statues
(which might or might not have closely resembled the king himself).
The best known of these statues, an almost unsurpassable masterpiece
of the sculptor's art carved out of a single piece of black diorite,
now reposes in one of the ground floor rooms of the Cairo
Museum. It is to this beautiful and majestic representation
that the scholars make reference when they tell us with such confidence
that the Sphinx was fashioned in Khafre's
likeness. [4]. "
"The origins of this controversy go back to the late 1970s when John
Anthony West, an independent American researcher, was studying
the obscure and difficult writings of the brilliant French
mathematician and symbolist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz.
Schwaller is best known for his works on the Luxor
Temple, but in his more general text, Sacred Science (first
published in 1961), he commented on the archaeological
implications of certain climatic conditions and floods that last afflicted
Egypt more than 12,000 years ago:
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 in the
rock of the west cliff at Giza that Sphinx
whose leonine body, except for the head shows indisputable signs of
aquatic erosion."
Schwaller's simple observation, which nobody appeared
to have taken any notice of before, obviously challenged the Egyptological
consensus attributing the Sphinx to Khafre
and to the epoch Of 2500 BC. What West immediately
realized on reading this passage, however, was that, through geology,
Schwaller had also offered a way 'virtually to prove
the existence of another, and perhaps greater civilization antedating
dynastic Egypt and all other known civilizations
by millennia' If the single fact of the water erosion of the Sphinx
could be confirmed, it would in itself overthrow all accepted chronologies
of the history of civilization; it would force a drastic re evaluation
of the assumptions of 'progress' the assumption upon which the whole
of modern education is based. It would be difficult to find a single,
simple question with graver implication…[5]. "
References:
[1] - [5] Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock, Keeper Of Genesis. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1996.
Amazon eBay: The water-cut
hollows are formed, as a rule, under transgression, i.e. under
sea tide. The transport of the horizontal sea water surface
occurs both gradually and discontinuously, and the hollow
formation lasts for hundreds and even thousands of years. An
analogy with wave-cut hollows gives reasons to think that the
formation of the GES hollows took place under its long-term
submersion in high water. The Nile seasonal floods could not
play any considerable part.
Limestones, dolomite limestones with small interlayers of
clay (Rushdi, 1965) of Eocene age prevailed in the geological
structure of the GES. These rocks possess different degree of
resistance to the wave effect. If the hollows formation were due
to sand abrasion only, the hollows had to correspond to the
strata of a certain lithological composition. The GES hollows
are formed in fact within several strata, or occupy some part of
the stratum of homogeneous composition (Fig. 4).
The formation of wave-cut hollows in the massif of rocks
composing the GES was a process directed from the bottom to
the top, which means the adjustment of the highest deep
hollow to the maximum level of the monument submersion
(Fig. 5). The back part of the head and the body surface were
in the zone of the least effect of waves but the waves left their
traces even there (rain traces, according to Schoch).
The absolute mark of the territory in the Giza Plateau region
(149 m above the present sea level from the data of physicalgeographical
map of Egypt, 1965) as well as the mark of the
upper deep hollow from the GES foot being allowed for; it
would be about 160 m above the present sea level. In this
connection there arises a question, when could have the GES
been submerged and what kind of water body it was.
Geologists of the Republic of Egypt (Rushdi, 1965) and other
countries have established, when studying the sedimentary
series adjoining the Giza Plateau, that from the end of Pliocene
the lacustrine deposits represented by alluvium often occurred
there. They had considerable thickness in geological crosssections
and covered vast territories.
Fig. 4. A fragment of the Sphinx surface composed by the rocks of
various lithological compositions
310
Fig. 5. The upper hollow of the Sphinx (white arrow)
It follows from the investigations of the substance
composition of rocks in geological cross-sections that they
were deposits of fresh-water reservoirs, lakes supplied with the
Nile waters. The Nile ran at a higher level at that time. The
Pleistocene lakes occupied the territory of the present Birket-
Karun Lake at least ten times (Rushdi, 1965, 89). Tools of
ancient people were found in these lacustrine deposits.
Chumakov (1965; 1967) in his works dedicated to the
Pliocene and Pleistocene deposits of the Nile Valley also
comes to a conclusion about the broad development of
lacustrine deposits. He notes that in the Late Pliocene the sea
waters began penetrating the Nile Valley and its level rose.
That led to formation of lacustrine deposits which are at the
mark of 180 m above the present level of the Mediterranean
Sea. The lacustrine deposits are also known in the Fajum
depression.
In his large generalizing work Tseiner (1963) presents results
from the analysis of measuring the levels of the coastal
terraces of the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea,
regularly distributed in time from the Pleistocene to the
Holocene. Based on the obtained data, the author has made a
plot with distinguishing certain phases, which corresponded to
absolute marks of Sea levels and time intervals (Fig. 6). As is
seen from the figure, the highest mark of the Mediterranean
Sea level took place during the Calabrian phase and was
above 160 m relative to the present sea level.
Fig. 6. Curve of the ocean level change during the Pleistocene from the
data of the Mediterranean Sea terraces (Tseiner, 1963). Levels: 1 –
Calabrian, II – Sicilian, III – Milan, IV – Tirranian, V – Monastery.
Conventional signs: along the vertical axis – meters; along the horizontal
axis – thousands of years
All the following phases differed by wavy lowering of the sea
level marks. It is the sea level during the Calabrian phase
which is the closest to the present mark with the highest GES
hollow at its level. High level of sea water also caused the Nile
overflowing and created long-living water-bodies. As to time it
corresponds to 800000 years.
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