I had heard about this debate years ago but never payed it much attention, but after actually seeing the evidence I must say it is compelling. Unfortunately this video is hosted by Charlton Heston and even though it is an awkward early-90's low budget production the evidence is still in there and it's worth watching.
tl;dr basically the consensus right now is that the Sphinx is about 4500 years ago. (built around 2550 b.c.)
According to this there is clear evidence that the Sphinx and the surrounding enclosure had been eroded by water. The erosion patterns on the limestone is indicative of centuries of heavy rainfall.
There has not been any significant rainfall in the Sahara desert since the end of the last iceage about 10,000 years ago. At that time man was supposedly just coming out of the caves.
We'd have to rewrite everything we know about human evolution if indeed the sphinx is as old as the evidence suggests
Adam420
Desiderata
A traveler from distance Stars escaped a dying world. With it's body decaying and weak he searched the galaxies looking for a way to cheat death. He then came to a world rich with life were he encountered a primitive race, Humans, A species which with all his powers and knowledge he could maintain a Human body indefinitely like a parasite and then appointed himself ruler of all.
i saw the real jesus in my toast this morning... the real one!
Desiderata
lol
aNYthing
The Fingerprints of Gods... somewhat dry reading but definitely full of scientific, historic, and archealogic research to the point where you'll be like
Seems that most of the scientific community disagrees
quote:
"only a culture with a pattern of social stratification and the capability to enlist the labor of a large pool of workers would have been capable of building the Great Sphinx, and for the period predating 2500 BCE, there is no evidence at all of such a culture."
quote:
Peter Lacovara, an Egyptologist and curator at the M. C. Carlos Museum in Emory University, assigns "some of the erosional features" on the enclosure walls to quarrying activities rather than weathering, and states that other wear and tear on the Sphinx itself is due to groundwater percolation and wind erosion.
quote:
One of the alternative erosion mechanisms proposed is called haloclasty. Moisture on limestone will dissolve salts, which are then carried by percolating moisture into the spaces inside the porous limestone. When the moisture dries the salt crystallises, and the expanding crystals cause a fine layer of surface limestone to flake off. It is accepted by Schoch et al that this mechanism is evident in many places on the Giza Plateau. One proponent of the haloclasty process is Dr James A. Harrell of the University of Toledo, who advocates that the deep erosion crevices were caused by the haloclasty process being driven by moisture in the sand that covered the carved rock for much of the time since it was exposed by quarrying. [21] Lal Gauri et al,[22] also favour the haloclasty process to explain the erosion features, but have theorised that the weathering was driven by moisture deriving from atmospheric precipitation such as dew.
aquila
So maybe this could've really happened?
aNYthing
sure did... still recovering from watching this drek:
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BCE on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek. Because it presents essentially the same text in all three scripts (with some minor differences between them), it provided the key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Originally displayed within a temple, the stele was probably moved during the early Christian or medieval period and eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was rediscovered there in 1799 by a soldier, Pierre-Francois Bouchard, of the French expedition to Egypt. As the first ancient bilingual text recovered in modern times, the Rosetta Stone aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher the hitherto untranslated Ancient Egyptian language. Lithographic copies and plaster casts began circulating amongst European museums and scholars. Meanwhile, British troops defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, and the original stone came into British possession under the Capitulation of Alexandria. Transported to London, it has been on public display at the British Museum since 1802. It is the most-visited object in the British Museum.
Ever since its rediscovery, the stone has been the focus of nationalist rivalries, including its transfer from French to British possession during the Napoleonic Wars, a long-running dispute over the relative value of Young's and Champollion's contributions to the decipherment, and since 2003, demands for the stone's return to Egypt.
