Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2215
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
result of heavy rainfall, exposure to heavy rainfall for thousands of years. And you have to go back to the younger dryers to get that kind of heavy rainfall in Giza. Hence the notion that the Sphinx geologically, whatever else we may say about it, is 12,000 plus years old.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The water-erosion hypothesis, advanced by Robert Schoch and John Anthony West in the early 1990s, is a minority view rejected by mainstream Egyptology and most geologists, who date the Sphinx to Khafre's reign around 2500 BCE. Schoch himself argued for a construction date of roughly 7000 to 5000 BCE, not the 12,000-plus years the quote asserts, so pinning the erosion to the Younger Dryas (about 9700 BCE) overstates even the fringe claim. The premise that only Younger Dryas rainfall was heavy enough also fails: radiocarbon-dated climate records for the Eastern Sahara show a humid African Humid Period long after the Younger Dryas, with gradual desiccation of the Egyptian Sahara beginning only around 5300 BCE, meaning wet conditions capable of weathering limestone persisted for millennia after the Younger Dryas ended. Geologists including K. Lal Gauri and James Harrell further attribute the enclosure weathering to salt exfoliation, poor limestone quality, and wetting of the buried monument by sand and floodwater rather than direct rainfall over 12,000 years. There is no accepted evidence that the Sphinx is more than 12,000 years old.
Who Benefits
A pre-Egyptian, greater-than-12,000-year date for the Sphinx supports Graham Hancock's lost ice-age civilization thesis, which he promotes commercially in his books, including Magicians of the Gods.