American Egyptologist whose 1908 renaming of the granite building beside the Great Sphinx as the Valley Temple of Khafre is the step Origins of the Sphinx dates the modern attribution to. Having excavated Menkaure’s temples, he named the Giza building by analogy and reasoned that whatever stood next door to a Khafre temple must be Khafre’s; Cosmopolitan announced in 1912 that an American professor had solved the riddle.
The correction the review supplies
The argument from proximity is not his. Auguste Mariette uncovered the granite temple in 1853 and the diorite Khafre came out of a pit in its floor in 1860; Flinders Petrie was calling the building “often misnamed the temple of the Sphinx” in 1894; and Samuel Birch made the inference in 1842, in the sentence after the one warning that the Dream Stela cartouche could not be read. That makes the attribution an inheritance sixty-six years older than the book allows, and less any one man’s guess. It does not make it evidence, because at every link it is the same argument.
Connections
Great Sphinx · Khafre · Dream Stela · Flinders Petrie · Valley Temple and Sphinx Temple · Origins of the Sphinx