French Egyptologist, founder of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and of the collection that became the Cairo Museum, and the excavator of a remarkable number of the objects the alternative literature argues about.
Four finds that matter here
He located the Serapeum of Saqqara in 1850 by following a line of sphinxes emerging from the sand. He uncovered the granite temple beside the Great Sphinx in 1853, which is the building later renamed the Valley Temple of Khafre. In 1858 he found the Inventory Stela at Giza, the text that says the Sphinx already stood in Khufu’s reign and which Egyptology dates to the twenty-sixth dynasty. And in 1860 the diorite statue of Khafre that anchors the whole Sphinx attribution came out of a pit in the floor of that temple.
Why the sequence matters
The attribution of the Sphinx to Khafre is usually credited to George Reisner in 1908, and Origins of the Sphinx makes that case. But the argument from proximity is older: Mariette had uncovered the temple, the statue had come out of its floor, and Samuel Birch had already drawn the inference in 1842. Correcting the date does not rescue the attribution, which was never demonstrated at any link, but it does show that no single person invented it.
Connections
Serapeum of Saqqara · Great Sphinx · Khafre · Inventory Stela · George Reisner · Valley Temple and Sphinx Temple · Origins of the Sphinx · Flinders Petrie · Zahi Hawass