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Review of "The Origin of the Sphinx" by Robert Schoch and Robert Bauval (Part 1)

12/26/2016

20 Comments

 
​My Christmas gift was a review copy of the newest tome from maverick geologist Robert Schoch and eccentric engineer Robert Bauval entitled The Origin of the Sphinx: Celestial Guardian of Pre-Pharaonic Civilization (Inner Traditions, 2017). You can imagine how excited I was to find that particular lump of coal in my stocking! Before I get into the book’s contents, I should say a word about its unusual format. The two authors did not write the book together, but rather they divided the chapters among themselves, with each author credited with a few. Robert Bauval wrote chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6, along with the epilogue and appendixes 1-4. Schoch wrote the preface and chapters 2 and 7, along with appendices 5-9. The authors argue that the separate contributions “harmonize” in to a coherent whole. The fact that they needed nine appendices to explain seven chapters suggests that more editing was needed to turn this collection of essays revisiting old claims from the 1990s into a real book.
​According to Schoch, Origin of the Sphinx emerged after both authors were in Bulgaria filming a documentary on Bulgarian megaliths for Bulgarian National Television. They quickly decided to team up to write about the Sphinx because the statue had been, in Schoch’s words, “central to each of our lives for decades.” Robert Schoch concluded in the early 1990s that the Sphinx had been eroded by water and was thus much older than Pharaonic civilization, dating back thousands of years before the Pharaohs. Schoch wrote up a technical paper on the topic in 1992 and presented his claim on the 1993 NBC special The Mystery of the Sphinx. Robert Bauval, inspired by both this claim and Robert Temple’s 1976 book ​The Sirius Mystery, is most famous for trying to re-date the pyramids, or their ground plan, or their “inspiration,” or whatever (it changes from year to year), to around 10,500 BCE based on his belief that the Giza pyramids were laid out to mimic the constellation Orion in that era. Both men were working in a long tradition of ascribing the Egyptian monuments to deepest antiquity, much of which can be traced from R. A. Schwaller de Lubitz (the godfather of the Sphinx water-erosion claim) through Victorian occult writers and Renaissance philosophers and occultists back to medieval Islamic mythology and Late Antique Christian and pagan legends, which claimed that the wonders of Egypt had been erected by Hermes Trismegistus before Noah’s Flood to preserve antediluvian knowledge. Bauval and his colleague Graham Hancock drew on Schoch, who in turn got brought into it by John Anthony West, who was trying to prove Schwaller de Lubitz right.
 
Chapter 1 (Bauval)
Bauval opens the book by asserting that there is no solid evidence connecting the pyramids or the Sphinx to the Egyptian kings to whom they are usually ascribed. After describing the Giza Plateau at length, he suggests that the Great Pyramid (which he paradoxically is happy to now ascribe to Khufu) was situated where it is because a natural formation that resembled a human head once protruded from the sand, later carved into the Great Sphinx, with the pyramid itself sitting atop a rocky mound that may have inspired the pyramid shape. Readers with long memories will recall that Bauval is here reaching back to claims from the 1993 Mystery of the Sphinx TV show. The majority of the chapter, though, is recycled material from The Orion Mystery and its sequels, as well as and especially his coauthored book Keeper of Genesis (U.S. title The Message of the Sphinx), written in 1996 with Graham Hancock. If you’ve read that book, you’ve seen all the material in this chapter about disliking Zahi Hawass, about thinking that the temples near the Sphinx were eroded in the Ice Age and re-covered in granite by Khafre, etc. We’ve been through all this before, but there is a bit of new material: Bauval tries to make up for his coauthoring of Hancock’s Mars Mystery (1998) by breaking from that book and confirming that he believes the Face on Mars to be an optical illusion. This is a bit on the funny side because Bauval happily appears on Ancient Aliens​ whenever he can.
 
Chapter 2 (Schoch)
Schoch’s chapter tries and fails to discuss European interest in the Pyramids and Sphinx. He mistakenly thinks that the Corpus Hermeticum is (a) a single work and (b) the entirety of ancient Hermetic literature, and he dismisses Late Antique and Medieval encounters with the pyramids, and non-European ones, as unimportant despite the fact that the authors he does credit, John Greaves especially, were influenced by medieval Islamic legends of the pyramids. (Greaves cites and quotes them at length.) He goes on to give a summary of nineteenth and twentieth century investigations of the Sphinx, mostly from secondary sources. He focuses on quotations in which early investigators speculated on the causes of the statue’s erosion, or when Victorians wondered if the Sphinx were older than the pyramids. Schoch sees no great irony in the fact that upon visiting the Sphinx, his supporters have “vilified” him for not agreeing that prehistoric sea fossils contained with its stones are evidence that the waters of Noah’s Flood once covered it. The fossils are embedded in the rocks from the time when those rocks were sea-floor, millions of years ago.
 
The chapter’s purpose, though, is to review Schoch’s own 1992 claim that the different layers of the Sphinx weathered differently not because of wind and sand acting on rocks of different hardness but because water ran down over them during a wet period. This work began, he leaves out (at least until Chapter 7), because John Anthony West asked him to examine the Sphinx in hopes of proving Schwaller de Lubitz correct and thus ratifying occult beliefs about Egypt. Schoch adds to his 1992 material Colin Reader’s 2002 analysis of the Sphinx’s geology, which agrees on water erosion, but places the Sphinx only 200 years before Khufu, not thousands. (Many climatologists suggest that Egypt might have remained rainy down to 1500 BCE, allowing plenty of time for rain runoff to erode the Sphinx, but not everyone agrees, least of all Schoch.) This is about the only new information that Schoch adds to a discussion that even he concedes is mostly a summary of his 1992 work. The only other piece of new information is that Schoch now believes that he underestimated the Sphinx’s true age, and miraculum miraculorum the “real” age of the Sphinx is … wait for it … “circa 10,000 BCE (or a bit earlier).” In other words, he places the Sphinx at exactly the fantastical epoch that occult writers identify as history’s most important. It was, as Schoch himself notes, the time when Edgar Cayce said that Atlantis had been destroyed, 10,500 BCE, when Graham Hancock places the first comet to begin the downfall of Atlantis, and when Robert Bauval dates the Orion Correlation.
 
Schoch discusses how seismic investigation allegedly confirms that the Sphinx’s rock is hard and/or soft enough to require Ice Age deluges to destroy, and he says that the same studies show the presence of a chamber under the Sphinx’s paw, which he suggests could be the Hall of Records that he doesn’t quite understand Edgar Cayce borrowed from the Rosicrucians, who took it from Victorian versions of what was a Late Antique and medieval story of buried chambers of scientific wisdom (Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman History 22.15.30; Abu Ma‘shar al-Balhi in  Ibn Juljul, Tabaqat al-atibbaʾ 5-10; Akhbar al-zaman 2.2, etc.). For Schoch, claims don’t have a history so much as they are all representations of an alternative truth, regardless of their origins.
 
Chapter 3 (Bauval)
The third chapter repeats Bauval’s 1997 argument about the Sphinx representing anyone other than the pharaoh Khafre, with the addition of some carping about how hurtful it is to be labeled a pseudoarchaeologist, charlatan, or amateur. He does so while offering another attack on archaeologist Zahi Hawass, his personal bête noire, and other scholars as “blustering” and “patronizing.” Bauval rehearses familiar arguments that there is no evidence for Khafre’s involvement in the Sphinx, and that the much later Dream Stela found between its paws may not contain Khafre’s name as once thought. The question is uncertain; the relevant cartouche flaked off centuries ago, and only drawings survive. To this Bauval introduces Graham Hancock’s recent obsession, the Edfu Building Texts, Ptolemaic mythological accounts of the origins of Egypt. Bauval is angry that Egyptologists don’t accept these texts and other myths, like the gods and demigods who rule Egypt for staggering numbers of years, as legitimately historical. Similarly, he wants to accept that the Inventory Stela, long believed to be a historical fiction created around 670 BCE to give an Old Kingdom pedigree to a Middle Kingdom temple, is actually a copy of a genuine Old Kingdom text that records the existence of the Sphinx in pre-dynastic times. He bases this on his own work, arguing that if the Great Pyramid “targets” the star Sirius, and this star was later associated with Isis, then Isis must have been a great goddess in Old Kingdom times (her name first appears, briefly, only in the Fifth Dynasty, according to most mainstream sources, and the Fourth according to Bauval, and is not widespread until much later) and we are justified in believing the Inventory Stela to be a copy of an Old Kingdom original.
 
Chapter 4 (Bauval)
This chapter asks what race the Sphinx represents, and Bauval describes the statue’s “strong Negroid features.” He then rehearses still more material from Mystery of the Sphinx (1993) and Keeper of Genesis (1996) in attempting to argue that the “Negroid” Sphinx cannot be the pharaoh Khafre. He settles on identifying the Sphinx’s face as that of Khufu, whom he claims to have had “Nubian genes” and thus a “Negroid” jaw. However, Bauval believes that Khufu re-carved a preexisting Sphinx that had been leonine in form, a suggestion that some Egyptologists have made over the years, but also one that is nothing new. It’s 1993 all over again!
 
The trouble is that this tends to get Bauval tied up in some logical knots. He wants the Sphinx to have been stolen, and to have once been a lion. But he also wants it to be identified as the man-headed Horus of the Horizon (Horakhti) of the Pyramid Texts, which is to say, that within a few years of its re-carving, the new form of the Sphinx had been promoted to a full-fledged god, even though it was a depiction of a human king in the form of a stone statue, when no other statues are so worshiped. Even Isis took hundreds of years to rise to great goddess status.
 
Bauval returns repeatedly to the theme that the Egyptian myths and legends, and even medieval folktales, should be believed when convenient. He is especially incensed that Egyptologists claim to use historical records to reconstruct the lives of ancient people. “So if Egyptologists can confidently illuminate ‘the lives of some 1200 kings, queens, princes and princes’ [sic] of ancient Egypt, why could not the ancient Egyptians themselves do the same for their own ancestors?” The difference is that modern historians use multiple lines of evidence, while folklore is just one. That’s a pretty big difference. Consider, for example, that the Copts gave to the Arabs a list of kings of Egypt, about whom fantastical stories were told. They are recorded in books like the Akhbar al-zaman and the Khitat of al-Maqrizi. While the list seems wildly inaccurate, and the legends baroque in their inventiveness, the bare bones of the list can be shown to derive from a corruption of the king list preserved by the Egyptian priest Manetho in Hellenistic times. But while we can use multiple lines of evidence to illuminate this, we cannot take the medieval king list at face value because it is too corrupt, and only recourse to ancient records can reveal the layers of corruption. That is the difference between historiography and legend.
 
Bauval goes on to discuss the integration of the Sphinx into the Egyptians’ adaptation of Babylonian astrology, but there is no reason to believe that these astrological signs were known in 2500 BCE or earlier, though Bauval believes that the constellations had their present identities back then, from some unknown ancient source.

Tomorrow we will see whether this virtual rewrite of Keeper of Genesis has anything new to say as we investigate the final three chapters and the appendixes!
20 Comments
Only Me
12/26/2016 10:51:42 am

This book is nothing but rehashed claims utterly dependent on special pleading then.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
12/26/2016 01:42:05 pm

Once again, you're trooper, wading through this muck.

Reply
Brady Yoon
12/26/2016 05:18:25 pm

The Egyptians had a priestly class that was responsible for the preservation of their nation's history, among other things. Manetho's king list is a direct product of that class. To say that this list is somehow corrupted is just as questionable as to say that a list of presidents compiled by a prominent American historian was corrupted. In every culture, accurately recording the list and chronology of that culture's rulers is among the most important, if not the most important job of the historians or whatever class of people who are entrusted with that task in that society. In my humble opinion, you seem to be grossly underestimating the competence of Egyptian scribes and priests.

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Kathleen
12/26/2016 05:30:34 pm

Weren't some Pharaohs omitted or removed for religious or political reasons? Akhenaten for example.

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Brady Yoon
12/26/2016 05:42:16 pm

Nope. He's in Manetho's list. http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/manetho.html

Only Me
12/26/2016 05:44:30 pm

I think you need to read the relevant paragraph again. Jason didn't say Manetho's list was corrupt; he said the medieval list given to the Arabs by the Copts was a corruption OF Manetho's list.

"the king list preserved by the Egyptian priest Manetho in Hellenistic times"

"we cannot take the medieval king list at face value"

Hellenistic and medieval are describing two different time periods.

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Brady Yoon
12/26/2016 06:07:51 pm

You're right. My bad. Even so, how likely is it that these Arabic sources given to them by the Copts are corrupt? Copying down a list of kings amounts to just writing down names of people, and how long they reigned. There's really not very much room for error, unless you're arguing that the Arabic people intentionally exaggerated the list of kings.

Even if they did this, there are other sources independent of Manetho's king list that attest to the deep antiquity of Egyptian civilization, including the Palermo Stone and the Turin Papyrus. Surely, these count as "multiple lines of evidence" that Colavito regards as the exclusive province of "modern historians"?

Jason Colavito link
12/26/2016 06:18:51 pm

See the article "Maqrizi's Names of the Pharaohs" starting on page 51 of the June 1924 edition of "Ancient Egypt." I've linked my name to it, so just click my name to be taken to the Google Books copy.

Only Me
12/26/2016 06:32:57 pm

Well, the Palermo Stone includes not just a list of kings, but also significant events during the years of their reigns. The Turin Papyrus was originally a tax roll and on the back was a list of rulers that included gods, demigods and spirits.

I point out what Jason said above:

"Consider, for example, that the Copts gave to the Arabs a list of kings of Egypt, about whom fantastical stories were told."

Not including the possibility of copying errors, what if these stories were based on both the significant events that occurred during each king's reign and the inclusion of gods/demigods/spirits on the list? What about the confusion of some kings having multiple names, based on competing myths of who built the pyramids and why? There's a lot to unravel when you consider all the above.

V
12/27/2016 02:48:49 pm

"Even so, how likely is it that these Arabic sources given to them by the Copts are corrupt?"

Welp, the Copts are, and were in the medieval period, Christians. Historically speaking, Christians have been known to heavily edit texts on the basis of their own belief system. They're not the only ones, of course, but knowing that this was a widespread practice, the reliability of any documents they produced is low enough to require significant corroboration. So...fairly likely, honestly.

Pierre Cloutier
12/27/2016 12:40:37 am

Jason was calling corrupt later lists of the Kings of Egypt from Medieval times, written down after the Arab conquest. He was saying those lists corrupt Manetho, not that Manetho is corrupt.

Also, remember that Manetho History of Egypt has not survived, what has survived is summaries of it. What we have of Manetho's list is a confused parcel of fragments. And in this confused parcel of fragments we have only some of the names of the Egyptian Kings and frequently what we have is only a total of the number of kings in a particular dynasty and the number of years the dynasty lasted. Further the summarizers seemed to have made mistakes in what they copied in that different summarizers give different numbers of years for the length of a dynasty for example among other contradictions. The result has been a constant headache for modern researchers trying to make sense of what survives from Manetho's list. Finally I would not be altogether sure that if Manetho's History of Egypt had survived it would have been completely accurate given that despite the confusion of the surviving sources of Manetho he does appear to have seriously over estimated the actual length of Egyptian history.

Given that Manetho only survived in fragments preserved by authors like George Synkellos in his Chronology. ( George is the best source for the surviving fragments of Manetho's king list. See The Chronology of George Synkellos, Translated + Notes by William Adler, Paul Tuffin, Oxford University Press, 2002.) And given that the surviving fragments frequently only list the number of kings per dynasty and total dynastic length. I rather doubt that later medieval versions of a already abbreviated and corrupted list would not be even more corrupted.

See Manetho, W. G. Waddel, Loeb Classical Library, 1940, For Fragments of Manetho. See also Berossos and Manetho: Introduced and Translated, Gerald P. Verbrugghe, John M. Wickersham, University of Michigan Press, 2001.

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Pierre Cloutier
12/29/2016 10:02:23 pm

Manetho's original books did not survive instead what seems have happened is that Manetho was summarized in a epitome which was then used by Julius Africanus and later by Eusebius for their writings. In turn George Synkellos included those two versions of Manetho's king list in his Chronology. George also included a third version of Manetho based it appears on the epitome but very fanciful and very distorted called The Book of Solis which is generally considered near worthless in reconstructing Manetho's king list at least in comparison to what survives from Julius Africanus and Eusebius.

Now Julius Africanus and Eusebius has preserved by George Synkellos have differences between them although Julius Africanus is generally considered to be closer to Manetho's original. Further both lists are woefully incomplete in terms of naming kings. What we have is a mutilated, distorted and incomplete king list not the full list that Manetho originally wrote it seems.

We can compare what appears to be Manetho's actual list has preserved by George Synkellos, (Ussually the Julius Africanus version), and it appears that Manetho's list is not quite the same has the modern understanding. ( See Berossos and Manetho: Introduced and Translated, Gerald P. Verbrugghe, John M. Wickersham, University of Michigan Press, 2001.) pp. 185-203.)

For example Manetho appears to have given 9 kings for the third dynasty and said it lasted 214 years. The modern version is 5 kings and 74 years. For dynasty 7 Manetho apparently lists 5 kings for 70 days when it appears to be 9 kings for 8 years. For dynasty 8 Manetho lists 5 kings over 146 (or 100) years. Modern versions list 6 kings over a period of 13 years. For dynasty 11 Manetho apparently lists 16 kings (No names.) over a period of 43 years. Modern estimates are 7 rulers over a period of 142 years.

There are more problems but you get the picture further there are a lot of more minor problems etc.

Tom
12/27/2016 07:12:19 am

Robert Schoch has doubled his original 1990's estimated age of the core Sphinx carving.
He was widely criticised, perhaps he feels unjustly, so is this a case of" in for a penny in for a pound" since, after all,
fringe books sell better than geology tomes.

Reply
DaveR
12/27/2016 08:26:35 am

I saw a documentary and the argument was the Sphinx was built under the orders of Djedefre to honor his father Khufu. They also stated the Sphinx existed before Khafra constructed his pyramid at Giza because the causeway for Khafra's pyramid goes around the Sphinx.

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Kal
12/27/2016 02:17:30 pm

These fringe author guys did not think to actually ask an Egyptian archaeologist while going to the Valley of the Kings. And they think others are critical, but of course they would be! You have to actually go there before making up wild stories. If they just cribbed someone else's work from the 1990s, that's not even research. It might even be called copying and pasting.

The point is is not that the king list is different or changed, but that there is not one shred of evidence, proven in any text, that the Sphinx is older than it can possibly be.

The Nile could have flooded the valley at any point back 4,000 years, when its course was different, and they could have some erosion from water. That does not mean the other thing, that a fantastic story where somehow some even more ridiculous Atlantis like city state was built and disappeared, in what appears the plot of a cheesy movie (10,000 BC, Star Gate, etc), leaving behind one statue of what is clearly an Egyptian cat god of some kind.

Reply
Mick Youther
1/1/2017 10:14:04 am

Wouldn't a geologist be able to differentiate erosion caused by rainwater running down rocks from erosion caused by flowing flood waters?

Reply
rsjson
1/1/2017 01:16:57 pm

Sounds like we could use a forensic geologist. Is Scott Wolter available?

Kal
12/28/2016 01:07:35 pm

Or Jay Davidson from Star Gate and The Fifth Element meets the same from The Crying Game...

Reply
Harte
1/3/2017 05:21:51 pm

It is seldom pointed out, but should be, that the date Schoch arrived at in his original paper "Redating the Great Sphinx of Giza" is entirely dependent on subsurface weathering of the bedrock under the sphinx enclosure. Schoch himself states in that paper that this sort of weathering is caused by exposure to the atmosphere, and has nothing to do with water.

Schoch then points to the so-called water erosion on the statue itself as sort of a verification of his age calculated from the subsurface weathering. Serendipity, if you will.

I wonder if this particular point is more effective for arguments against this belief that rainfall erosion "proves" the sphinx's antiquity.

Reply
Chris Archer
11/18/2017 09:32:09 am

All I see him do is offer an alternative, hes not "debunking" anything. This guy is an author like Graham Hancock. Schoch is not the only geologist to recognize it as water damage, I think most geologists now admit it was water damage not "sand damage" or something, but they say it could be caused by plane flooding and run off which if the case would push the building date closer to the academic accepted one. There is no way to say one way or another who is right or wrong here but he acts as though he "debunked" something when he did not. There is no other evidence of when the Spins was built other then the face which I think anybody with eyeballs and sight can see thats not the original head. And also the Spinks had been buried for most of its life which should have protected the enclosure and the spinks from any sort of damage, they say that without constant maintenance the sand would fill it back in fairly quickly, so that also to could suggest an earlier time when the region was less dry, then of course is like Hancock points out that the Spinks correlation with the constellation of Leo would put it smack dab in the time when their would have been heavy rains in Egypt. Now we have Gobekli Tepe slapping them in the face, ok so the original idea was that the Spinks was created in the current time frame because there is nothing older, but now there is. The dogma here is off the scales here. Its just attack attack and ridicule by the establishment which is what establishments do when they are threatened. We already know the establishment is wrong about human civilization and history, human time frame...big wrong there pie on their face, and they are still fighting that, I mean now they say "oh well, i guess hunter gatherers were more capable then we though" Why not, "shit, sorry we were wrong"

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