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.
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Yet nothing else that 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.
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