The Great Sphinx of Giza is a limestone statue of a resting sphinx — a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion — carved from the bedrock of the Giza Plateau, on the west bank of the Nile in Egypt. It is 73 metres long from paw to tail, 20 metres high from the base to the top of the head, and 19 metres wide at its rear haunches. It faces east. It is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt, part of the Memphite Necropolis, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It is also, for all its size and fame, a monument with no name of its own from the time it was built, no inscription that says who ordered it, and no agreement, even now, about exactly whose face it wears. Around that silence has grown a serious scholarly argument about which king was responsible — and a much louder popular argument, about whether the statue is thousands of years older than the pyramids beside it. This article presents that debate as it stands. It endorses no side.
The Monument as It Is
The Sphinx was sculpted from the limestone bedrock of the Eocene-aged Mokattam Formation. The stone is not uniform. The head was cut from a harder layer of rock, which is one reason it has kept its human features across more than four thousand years. The body was cut from softer, more variable layers, which weather much faster. That difference in the stone explains a great deal about how the monument looks today, and it is central to the argument about its age.
The paws, the body and the enclosure around the statue were quarried from the same bedrock. The stones cut from around the body were used to build a temple in front of it. Neither the enclosure nor the temple was completed in the Old Kingdom, and the relative scarcity of Old Kingdom material suggests that no cult of the Sphinx was established at the time it was built.
The Sphinx has been buried by sand, excavated, and restored many times. Around the First Intermediate Period, drifting sand buried it up to its shoulders. The first documented attempt to excavate it dates to about 1400 BC, when the young Thutmose IV dug out the front paws and erected a shrine between them housing the Dream Stele, an inscribed granite slab. The stele records a dream in which the Sphinx, as the god Hor-em-akhet, “Horus of the Horizon”, promised Thutmose the throne if he cleared the sand. In the New Kingdom the Sphinx was revered as Hor-em-akhet, and Amenhotep II built a temple to the north-east of it nearly a thousand years after its construction.
In Graeco-Roman times Giza had become a tourist destination, and the Sphinx was cleared of sand again in the first century AD. It was buried again after Roman power declined, and it remained largely buried until modern excavations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The circumstances of the destruction of the Sphinx’s nose are unknown, but examination of the face has shown evidence of a deliberate act with rods or chisels. Contrary to a popular myth, the nose was not destroyed by cannon fire from Napoleon’s troops during his 1798 Egyptian campaign.
The Conventional Dating: Khufu or Khafre
Archaeological evidence suggests the Sphinx was created by Egyptians of the Old Kingdom during the reign of Khufu (about 2590–2566 BC) or his son Khafre (about 2558–2532 BC). Scholars believe the face was carved to represent either Khufu or one of his sons, Djedefre or Khafre, but a consensus has not been reached, and the person in whose likeness the Sphinx was carved remains in dispute.
The case for Khafre rests on the Sphinx’s position in the landscape. The angle and location of the south wall of the enclosure suggest that the causeway connecting Khafre’s pyramid and Valley Temple already existed before the Sphinx was planned. The lower base level of the Sphinx temple indicates that it does not pre-date the Valley Temple, and the northern perimeter wall of the Khafre Valley Temple had to be deconstructed in order to build the Sphinx temple, so the Khafre funerary complex preceded the creation of the Sphinx.
That is a strong architectural argument, but it is circumstantial, and Egyptologists have said so themselves. Selim Hassan, writing in 1949 after excavations of the enclosure, put it plainly: “we must give the credit of erecting this, the world’s most wonderful statue, to Khafre, but always with this reservation: that there is not one single contemporary inscription which connects the Sphinx with Khafre, so sound as it may appear, we must treat the evidence as circumstantial, until such time as a lucky turn of the spade of the excavator will reveal to the world a definite reference to the erection of the Sphinx.”
The Dream Stele of Thutmose IV is sometimes cited as a link to Khafre, but the relevant part of its text is damaged. It contains the fragment “Khaf”, which the Egyptologist Thomas Young completed as Khafre by inserting the glyph “ra”. When the stele was re-excavated in 1925, the lines referring to “Khaf” had flaked off and been destroyed. The link, in other words, depends on a reading that can no longer be checked on the stone itself. The original name the Old Kingdom builders gave the Sphinx is unknown. The commonly used name “Sphinx” was given to it in classical antiquity, around two thousand years after its construction, by reference to a Greek mythological beast. In the New Kingdom it was called Hor-em-akhet. In medieval Arabic it was called Abu al-Hawl, “Father of Terror”.
The Water-Erosion Hypothesis
Beginning in the early 1990s, a different argument was put forward. The French writer R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz had suggested in the 1950s that the Sphinx showed signs of water erosion. The independent Egyptologist John Anthony West took up the idea, and in 1990 he persuaded the Boston University geologist Robert Schoch to examine the Sphinx. Schoch concluded that the weathering patterns on the enclosure walls and on the body of the Sphinx itself were characteristic of prolonged rainfall, not of wind and sand alone.
Schoch and West presented their hypothesis at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in 1991. Their argument, as its proponents state it, is that the deep, vertical fissures and rounded weathering on the enclosure walls could only have been produced by centuries of heavy rainfall, and that such rainfall had not existed at Giza since a far wetter period in the region’s climate. Schoch originally estimated that the Sphinx was created before 5000 BC, and later pushed his estimate to about 9700 BC. West suggested an even earlier date, around 10,500 BC, linked to the end of the last Ice Age. The geophysicist Thomas Dobecki conducted seismic surveys around the enclosure in 1992, and his work has been cited by proponents as placing the weathering, and therefore the enclosure, in the range of 7000–9000 BC.
On this reading, the Sphinx — or at least its enclosure and its core — predates dynastic Egypt itself, and would imply a culture capable of monumental carving long before the pharaohs. That is why the hypothesis has attracted so much attention outside academic Egyptology, and why it has been so strongly resisted within it. A middle position has also been proposed. In 1997 the British geologist Colin Reader suggested that the Sphinx enclosure may indeed pre-date the Fourth Dynasty, but only by some centuries to perhaps a thousand years, with an Early Dynastic construction window around 3000 BC. Reader’s proposal does not require a lost civilisation, and it does not accept the much earlier dates proposed by Schoch and West.
The Mainstream Response
Mainstream Egyptologists, archaeologists and most geologists reject the water-erosion hypothesis, for several converging reasons, as they state them. First, they argue that the weathering can be explained by other processes. The geologists K. Lal Gauri and James Harrell, among others, attribute much of the decay to haloclasty — salt crystallising in the porous limestone as groundwater rises and evaporates, prising the stone apart flake by flake — together with wind-driven sand abrasion and the natural weakness of the middle limestone strata. The differential erosion, on this account, tracks the rock layers, exactly as a salt-and-wind model predicts, rather than the top-down pattern that pure rainfall would leave.
Second, they argue that the climate evidence does not require deep antiquity. Newer palaeoenvironmental work indicates that appreciable rainfall persisted in the region until roughly 2200 BC, near the end of the Old Kingdom, so the plateau saw moisture long after a Sphinx built around 2500 BC was carved. Rainfall alone, on this view, does not date the monument. Third, they point to the archaeological context. Radiocarbon dating of mortar in nearby Giza structures points consistently to the mid-third millennium BC, not to 7000 BC or earlier. No securely dated artefact found at Giza requires a prehistoric Sphinx. The Sphinx’s alignment with Khafre’s funerary complex, described above, places it firmly in the Fourth Dynasty landscape.
Schoch has continued to defend and refine his hypothesis, arguing that his critics do not adequately explain the specific erosion patterns he observes. The argument has not been accepted by mainstream Egyptology, and it has not gone away.
What Is Documented and What Is Not
Documented: The Great Sphinx is a limestone statue, 73 metres long, 20 metres high and 19 metres wide, carved from the Mokattam Formation bedrock on the Giza Plateau, facing east. Archaeological evidence places it in the Old Kingdom, in the reign of Khufu (about 2590–2566 BC) or Khafre (about 2558–2532 BC), but no contemporary inscription links it to either king, and the identity of the face remains disputed. Thutmose IV excavated the paws about 1400 BC and erected the Dream Stele. The nose was damaged deliberately by unknown hands, not by Napoleon’s cannon. Schoch and West presented the water-erosion hypothesis in 1991; Schoch proposed dates before 5000 BC and later about 9700 BC; West proposed about 10,500 BC; Dobecki’s seismic work has been cited for 7000–9000 BC; Reader proposed about 3000 BC. Mainstream Egyptologists and geologists reject the earlier dates, citing salt crystallisation, wind erosion, layered limestone, rainfall persisting until about 2200 BC, and radiocarbon dates from nearby structures.
Unverified or disputed: That the Sphinx was built by Khafre specifically; that its face is Khafre’s; that the enclosure walls show rainfall erosion requiring a date thousands of years before the Old Kingdom; and that a lost pre-dynastic civilisation built the Sphinx. This article endorses no side in the water-erosion debate.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza
- http://historyrise.com/article/when-was-the-sphinx-built-in-ancient-egypt/
- https://www.wndrhow.com/studies/great-sphinx-of-giza/
- https://anomalydesk.com/sphinx-weathering.html
- https://owlcation.com/curiosities/facts-great-sphinx-of-egypt