Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #961
SUBJECT: ARCHAEOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
What Schock is saying is that the Sphinx and the trench out of which the Sphinx is cut bears the unmistakable evidence of precipitation-induced weathering, weathering caused by exposure to a substantial period of heavy rainfall.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Geologist Robert Schoch proposed in 1991 that vertical, undulating weathering profiles on the Sphinx and its enclosure walls were caused by heavy rainfall during a wetter climate phase, initially dating the Sphinx to before roughly 5000 BC (a figure he has since pushed back further, to around 9700 BC or the end of the last Ice Age). Mainstream Egyptologists and geologists who have examined the site, including Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, reject this dating: they attribute the weathering to wind and sand abrasion, salt crystallization, and moisture (including recent rainfall) acting on soft limestone, processes that can occur well within the last 4,500 years, and they note the Sphinx enclosure is stratigraphically and archaeologically integrated with Khafre's Fourth Dynasty pyramid complex, with no independent evidence of a civilization capable of the work at the earlier date Schoch proposes. The mainstream, still-current dating places the Sphinx's construction at approximately 2500 BC under Pharaoh Khafre. Schoch's rainfall-erosion hypothesis remains a minority position not accepted by the geological or archaeological mainstream.