The granite stela Tuthmoses IV set up between the paws of the Great Sphinx around 1400 BCE, recording a dream in which the buried monument asked to be cleared of sand. Since 1842 Egyptology has read the name of Khafre on its thirteenth line, and that line is the only ancient text ever offered to connect the monument to a king.
The cartouche is no longer there
It was drawn by Henry Salt at the time of Caviglia’s clearance, copied from Salt by Thomas Young and again for Vyse’s 1842 volumes, and pressed in paper by Lepsius the same year. The copies disagree with each other, no photograph of it has ever been found, and the sign that completes the name, the sun disc that turns “Khaf” into Khafre, is a restoration rather than a reading of the stone.
What the first reading actually said
Samuel Birch’s note on the tablet in Vyse’s volumes is the earliest reading in print. It gives the cartouche as “the prenomen of the king Ra-shaa-f, or Shafre,” and warns in the same sentence that “the fracture in the inscription makes it impossible to determine in what manner the name is mentioned.” The next sentence of the same paragraph then makes the inference from position that the attribution has rested on ever since. Breasted’s 1906 translation is reprinted in Origins of the Sphinx as appendix material, and Breasted called the step from the stela to authorship “a conclusion which does not follow”.
The excavator’s verdict
Selim Hassan, who dug the monument in the 1930s, wrote in 1949 that excepting that line, “which proves nothing, there is not one single ancient inscription which connects the Sphinx with Khafre.” This is the layer of the argument that needs no geology and no astronomy, and every step of it can be checked.
Connections
Great Sphinx · Khafre · Selim Hassan · Origins of the Sphinx · Inventory Stela · George Reisner · Rainer Stadelmann