Graham Hancock on history: what the evidence says · JRE #1543

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

The claim that the Great Sphinx's erosion patterns prove it is roughly 12,500 years old originates with geologist Robert Schoch's "water erosion hypothesis," developed in the early 1990s with writer John Anthony West, who argued the monument's weathering reflected heavy rainfall from a wetter climate period thousands of years before Egypt's Old Kingdom. The mainstream archaeological and geological consensus, based on stratigraphy, quarry evidence, associated tombs and temples, and the Sphinx's integration into the layout of the rest of the Giza pyramid complex, dates its construction to roughly 2558-2532 BCE, during the reign of the pharaoh Khafre. Most geologists and Egyptologists who have reviewed Schoch's methodology find it unpersuasive, noting the same weathering pattern can result from softer, more porous limestone strata combined with subsurface moisture and salt weathering over an ordinary, much shorter timescale, and that no other archaeological evidence supports an advanced civilization at Giza thousands of years earlier. Separate 2023 fluid-dynamics research proposing the Sphinx's basic body shape could have begun as a wind-carved natural rock formation (a yardang) addresses erosion processes at Giza but does not support a 12,500-year date; researchers explicitly maintained the carved monument itself is roughly 4,500 years old. The 12,500-year dating remains a minority position rejected by the large majority of geologists and Egyptologists who study the site.