The Sphinx
See more Monuments & Landmarks. Near to Cairo (13.63 km) in Egypt.
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The largest monumental sculpture in the ancient world, the Sphinx is carved from a ridge of stone 240 feet long and 66 feet high. Antiquarians previously assumed the Sphinx was constructed in the 4th Dynasty by the Pharaoh Chephren (Khafre), yet recent archaeological evidence proves the Sphinx is far older than the 4th Dynasty, and was only restored by Chephren during his reign. The Inventory Stele, for example, tells that the Pharaoh Cheops, Chephren's predecessor, ordered a temple built alongside the Sphinx, meaning that the Sphinx existed before Chephren’s time.
A greater age for the Sphinx was initially suggested by the Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz and confirmed by recent geological and climatological studies. The vertical erosion marks on the body of the Sphinx are not the result of horizontally blown sand, as had been previously assumed, but instead are the result of long exposure to abundant rainfall, which is known to have occurred in the region of Egypt many thousand of years before the Dynastic Egyptians. Furthermore, most of the Sphinx was covered by sand dunes for nearly all of the past five thousand years, indicating its surface erosion occurred prior to that time. Additional evidence for the great age of the Sphinx is indicated by the astronomical significance of its Lion form. Roughly every two thousand years the sun rises against the background of a different constellation. Past constellations have been Pisces the Fish, Aries the Ram, Taurus the Bull, and from 10,970 to 8810 BC, Leo the Lion. Sophisticated computer programs show that during this period, especially on the morning of the spring equinox, the lion-bodied Sphinx would have looked directly at the constellation of Leo. These matters indicate that the Sphinx may have been built during a time when (according to conventional archaeological theory) humans had not yet evolved beyond hunter-gatherer lifestyles. If the Sphinx is indeed this old then contemporary assumptions regarding the development of civilization must be entirely reworked. More about the Sphinx from Sacred Sites
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Photo by Photography: Martin Gray
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