Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #872

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Geologist Robert Schoch proposed in 1991 that the deep, undulating weathering on the Great Sphinx's body and enclosure walls resulted from centuries of heavy rainfall in a wetter climate period, implying the monument was carved well before the conventional Fourth Dynasty date of roughly 2500 BC under Pharaoh Khafre. This water-erosion hypothesis, later popularized in Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval's book The Message of the Sphinx, has not been accepted by mainstream Egyptology or geology, which continues to date the Sphinx to about 4,500 years ago. Critics tie the rainfall-redating to the broader Younger Dryas 'lost advanced civilization' hypothesis, for which mainstream science finds no supporting physical evidence, such as impact craters or artifacts of an advanced culture, and characterize the argument as reasoning from a lack of evidence rather than from positive evidence. Researchers have also proposed alternative natural explanations for the Sphinx's form: a 2023 fluid-dynamics study found that wind and sand erosion alone can carve yardang rock formations resembling a lying lion, suggesting ancient Egyptians may have refined an already-weathered natural outcrop rather than that the monument's shape requires millennia of rainfall to explain. The rainfall/Younger Dryas redating of the Sphinx remains a minority position rejected by the broader archaeological and geological community.