Graham Hancock on history: what the evidence says · JRE #1897

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Hancock's claim traces to a hypothesis popularized in the 1990s by geologist Robert Schoch and writer John Anthony West, arguing that heavy vertical weathering channels on the Sphinx enclosure walls were caused by prolonged rainfall during a wetter Saharan period thousands of years before the Old Kingdom, which would place the Sphinx's origin more than 12,000 years ago. Mainstream Egyptology and geology instead date the Great Sphinx to roughly 2520 BC, attributing it to Pharaoh Khafre of the Fourth Dynasty as part of his pyramid and valley temple complex at Giza. Geologists who have reviewed Schoch's weathering evidence have argued the erosion patterns can be explained by mechanisms operating after the Old Kingdom, such as repeated wetting of the limestone by water-saturated windblown sand that buried the Sphinx enclosure for most of its history, without requiring a much older construction date. No archaeological evidence of a prehistoric civilization or comparable monumental structures dating to the timeframe Hancock proposes has been found at Giza, while artifacts and inscriptions tied to Khafre's Fourth Dynasty are abundant at the site. The water-erosion redating hypothesis remains a minority position rejected by the consensus of archaeologists and geologists who have examined the site.