The recumbent lion with a human head carved from the living bedrock of the Giza plateau, sitting in a rock-cut enclosure below the causeway of the second pyramid. Mainstream Egyptology places it in the Fourth Dynasty and argues about which king; no ancient inscription names its builder, and the only text ever offered is line thirteen of the Dream Stela.
The enclosure
The walls of the enclosure carry a rolling, undulating profile with vertical fissures wider at the top than the bottom, deepest at the western end where runoff from the plateau would have arrived first. Old Kingdom tombs cut south and west from the same limestone sequence carry the angular, stepped profile that wind and sand leave instead. That contrast is the whole of the Sphinx Water Erosion Hypothesis in one photograph, and every published counter-explanation is an attempt to reach the first profile by some other route.
The head
Both sides agree the head is too small for the body and is a dynastic recarving. Origins of the Sphinx concedes the point outright and is content for the face to be Khufu’s or Khafre’s, since one king remodelling an older lion changes nothing about the age of the body.
What is under it
The 1991 Sphinx Seismic Survey found the weathered layer under the enclosure floor about twice as deep on the flanks and front as behind the rump, plus a rectangular low-velocity anomaly under the left paw roughly twelve metres by nine. In March 2019 the Glen Dash Foundation, working with Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, ran ground-penetrating radar in front of the south-east corner of the Sphinx Temple where runoff vanishes down a crevasse; the survey, published in AERAGRAM in 2024 as “Where the Water Disappears”, found a uniform reflection about a metre down read as quarried levelling blocks and right-angled reflections to about four metres taken for a second buried course rather than a tunnel. The report closes by saying that what the radar shows can be confirmed only by direct observation.
Connections
Sphinx Water Erosion Hypothesis · Dream Stela · Khafre · 1991 Sphinx Seismic Survey · Valley Temple and Sphinx Temple · Mark Lehner · Zahi Hawass · Great Pyramid of Giza · Origins of the Sphinx · Selim Hassan · Edgar Cayce · John Anthony West · Auguste Mariette · Frank Domingo