Filippo Biondi Claims to Have Found Second Sphinx Under Giza

Regular readers will remember Filippo Biondi, the Italian researcher who claims to have discovered massive structures beneath the Giza pyramids using a controversial scanning technique that archaeologists say can’t yield the results he claims for it. Well, Biondi appeared this morning on The Matt Beall Podcast to discuss his claims, and he added a new one. He now claims to have discovered a second Sphinx buried beneath the Giza plateau.

​If that claim sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve heard it many times before among fringe researchers. It’s been a regular part of the ancient astronaut theory and so-called “alternative” archaeology for decades now.
 
The claim has no deep origins. It does not appear in Classical Antiquity, nor does it appear in even the most flamboyant medieval myths. The closest I could find was a reference in al-Maqrizi’s Al-Khitat (c. 1420 CE) that medieval residents of Egypt believed that the Sphinx had a paired statue and that they were magically connected. However, the Sphinx’s mate was a pharaonic-era statue of a seated woman (probably Isis) in Cairo, not on the Giza plateau. Archaeologist Flinders Petrie had a similar thought and trudged across the east side of the Nile opposite Giza looking for a second Sphinx there, but concluded that he was wrong and there never was one.
 
Instead, the claim originates in the late twentieth century. Their source appears to be tour guide Bassam el-Shammaa, whose 1997 book Egypt: Future of the Past claimed that a second sphinx stood on the Giza Plateau. He renewed those claims when he briefly became famous for advocating that the Egyptian government do more to conserve the Sphinx in 2007. El-Shammaa also promoted NASA satellite photos as indicating an underground structure where he claimed this Sphinx was buried. You’ll recognize this claim as the same one that Biondi is now promoting.
 
El-Shammaa’s warrant for it is the late stela Thutmose IV erected between the Sphinx’s paws in 1401 BCE, known as the Dream Stela. It depicts two sphinxes, positioned back to back near the top. The “alternative archaeology” group concluded that it must represent two Great Sphinxes on the Giza Plateau. (Egyptologists interpret it as visual symmetry reflecting the Sphinx’s duality as statue and god.) The text of the stele, however, makes no mention of a second Sphinx. El-Shammaa also makes many dubious claims, namely citing John Gardner Wilkinson as an early investigator of the “second sphinx” claim, though I can find no reference to it in his published works.
 
Among the 1990s so-called “alternative archaeology” researchers—John Anthony West, Robert Schoch, Robert Bauval, and Graham Hancock--the idea did not gain a great deal of traction, mostly because it came a few years after they became famous for their own ideas (and was likely inspired by them), and as best I can recall it did not explicitly appear in their later books. However, they were happy to use it when prompted. For instance, Ancient Aliens discussed the claim in 2014 (“Mysteries of the Sphinx”). At that time, Bauval was happy to endorse a physical second Sphinx at Giza. “Now, physically, was there another one? It’s quite possible. There is (sic) certain mounds that haven’t been properly excavated on the west side and there may be the remains of a sphinx. There certainly isn’t a whole sphinx. We would’ve seen it by now. But there may be the foundations of a sphinx.” However, by 2017, Bauval had abandoned this idea entirely. In chapter 5 of Origins of the Sphinx, his book written with Schoch (the authors wrote separate chapters), Bauval declared once again that the second sphinx was celestial, the constellation Leo.
 
Biondi is clearly familiar with El-Shammaa’s claims, and it’s no surprise that he interpreted his ambiguous scanning results as confirming a claim from the fringe literature he so clearly loves.