Without infinite the questions that archaeologists have asked about the origin of Giza’s great sphinx. It is one of the best known monuments of ancient Egypt and, possibly, the most emblematic sculpture in the world. It is located on the western banks of the Nile River, in the city of Giza. Some Egyptologists estimate that it was part of King Kefrén’s funeral complex during dynasty IV, but others say it was much more than a place to contain the “essence” of the monarch for all eternity. Some historians even ventured to defend that, in their origin, it was a huge library, but the theory was refuted and ruled out in countless investigations carried out in recent years.
However, there are still many issues to clarify about this 70 -meter and 20 high sphinx, located next to the pyramids, who visit more than 14 million visitors a year. Did the same form at the beginning? What did their authors want to represent with her? Was he baptized with any name? How was the landscape that surrounded her millennia behind? But above all of them, there is a much more important question: when exactly was this gigantic statue with a lion body and human head?
The main and most accepted theory is that it was built 4,500 years ago. Egyptologists estimate that around the 20th century a. C. Its managers would have been sculpted using a limestone rock mound located on the Giza plateau. In ancient times it was painted in very bright colors that over time were erased: red the body and the face and nemes that covered the head, with yellow and blue stripes.
However, throughout the twentieth century there were several scholars began to shuffle the idea that Giza’s great sphinx had twice as much of what was thought and, therefore, belonged to a much older civilization. A theory that gained adherents with different approaches to the same subject. Some of these hypotheses are unusual and of a pseudoscientific nature, such as the deck by Edgar Cayce, an American visionary who came to affirm that it was built by Atlantean civilization.
«File room»
He even announced that before 1998 he would find a “files of the archives” under the claws of the Sphinx, which would finally demonstrate that the culture of the pharaohs really came from the disappeared Atlántida. The most surprising thing about the case is that his theory caused a rage between international research institutes and prestigious universities, which joined research in this regard without finding, indeed, nothing about it. An example was that of Rhonda James, who traveled to Egypt, in 1957, and even obtained permission to dig along the sphinx in search of that room where the memories of the Atlanteans had to remain hidden, but only found water.
New researchers pointed out a much greater age for sphinx than the one accepted by science, ensuring that he was not 4,500 years old, but more than 12,000. That is, it would have been built around 10500 a. C. The first to sustain this hypothesis was the French philosopher and archaeologist René Schwaller of Lubicz, who lived for twelve years in Egypt studying the temples of Thebes and developing, together with Egyptologist Alexandre Varille, another theory that argued that the temples of that region They were used for mystical initiations.
Schwaller de Lubicz came to excavate in the temple of Luxor between 1937 and 1952, trying to find evidence that, indeed, the Egyptian culture had been much earlier to what was believed until that moment. In one of his works, ‘Le Roi de la Théocratie Pharaonique’ (Flammarion, 1961), speaking of great floods that ravaged Egypt between 9000 a. C. and 8001 a. C., said: «A great civilization must have preceded the vast water movements that swept Egypt, which leads us to deduce that, sculpted in the rock of the hill located west of Giza, there was already the sphinx, whose body Leonino, except his head, shows unmistakable signs of erosion caused by water ».
Other civilizations
At the time, numerous geologists and researchers supported Schwaller’s thesis, mainly due to the fact that they did not find traces of other floods or periods of intense rainfall in the same area prior to the year 10000 BC. C., which could explain the erosion of the sphinx caused. In this sense, it is important to keep in mind that today there seems to be no doubt that such erosion occurred, effectively, by water.
An example was that of John Anthony West, who in 1979 published the book ‘Serpent in the Sky’ (Quest Books), in which he deepened in this theory: «Schwaller of Lubicz observed that the serious erosion of the body of the great sphinx of Giza is due to the action of water and not wind and sand. The confirmation that the Sphinx was eroded by water would suffice to land all the chronologies of the history of civilization that are considered valid. It would force to drastically revalue the assumption of ‘progress’, that is, the assumption on which the totality of modern education is based. It would be difficult to find a single and simple issue that had more serious consequences. The erosion of the sphinx for water is to history that the convertibility of matter into energy is to physics ».
West went further in his statements, by suggesting: «Following an observation that Schwaller made, it is now possible virtually to prove the existence of another civilization, perhaps bigger, which was anticipated in several millennia to the dynastic Egypt and all known civilizations. In other words, it is now possible to test the ‘Atlantis’ and, simultaneously, the historical reality of the flood that the Bible speaks. I write ‘Atlántida’ in quotes, because what is about here is not of the physical location, but rather of the existence of an advanced and old enough civilization to give pábulo to the birth of the legend ».
Undulations
Despite the criticisms and controversies they generated, this theory continued with researchers such as Robert M. Schoch, who in 1992 also assured that the erosion suffered by the monument could not, in any case, have occurred by the action of the wind. These undulations occurred, indeed, as defended by rainfall, which caused still observable vertical fissures. That is the cause that, for him, this enigmatic statue could not have an age under 9,000 years, twice as well as defended by most historians. And, the truth is that most of the investigations of recent years, leave all these hypotheses without solid arguments.
In ‘The hidden message of the Sphinx’ (Martínez Roca, 1997), Colin Wilson also embrace this theory, although he is also careful that they do not call him conspiracy, with clarifications like this: «West did not necessarily speak of Plato’s mythical Atlantis, but also referred to only the possibility that civilization is several millennia older than historians believe. In this case, in a sense what has been called the dreaded word that begins with, which in the act indicates that who says this is a fan, perhaps it is not necessary at all. We are not talking about the fictitious Atlantis of Verne’s novel ‘twenty thousand leagues of underwater travel’ and, either, of ‘Maracot Deep’, by Conan Doyle, but simply the possibility that human culture is much older than the that we believe ».
This theory had so much force that even newspapers such as’ Los Angeles Times’ published an article in 1991 under the following headline: Egypt offers a new turn in the mystery of the Sphinx ‘. The newspaper explained that there were new indications that supported the thesis that the statue was twice as old as it was believed, generating “a furious discussion between geologists who say it must be older and archaeologists, who claim that such Conclusion contradicts everything we know about ancient Egypt ».
The article responded to a study presented by the first at the Convention of the Geological Society of America, which confirmed, according to them, that the signs of the erosion that are seen in the monument were characteristics of a much older period. Archaeologists and Egyptologists, on the opposite side, insisted that the Sphinx could not be much older because “the people who lived there previously could not have built it.” Most of the latter are still convinced that the monument was built during the Kefrén reign, approximately 2500 a. C. «The indications – the newspaper added – suggest that Kefrén just restored the sphinx».
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