Origins of the Sphinx: Celestial Guardian of Pre-Pharaonic Civilization, by Robert Schoch and Robert Bauval, Inner Traditions, 2017, 528 pages. Seven chapters written in alternating voices and each signed by the man who wrote it, plus nine appendices that run to close to two fifths of the book.
Two clocks
The geological half is Schoch’s: the rainfall weathering profile of the enclosure, the 1991 Sphinx Seismic Survey and the depth ratio behind the rump, and the reprinted 1992 KMT paper with his 2016 second thoughts set inside it in brackets. The astronomical half is Bauval’s: the two New Kingdom names for the monument, the due-east gaze, and the Age of Leo reading that puts the carving near 10,500 BCE. Bauval concedes the limit of his own half in the sentence that matters most in it: the connection to that epoch “cannot be proved only by astronomy. So this is as far as the OCT can take the investigation.”
What survives without either clock
Chapter three walks the Dream Stela attribution back copy by copy and requires no geology and no astronomy. What it establishes is not that the monument is old but that its date was never demonstrated, only inherited, which is a different claim with a different burden.
Where the book overreaches
Every seismic date in it assumes the floor behind the rump was first exposed around 2500 BCE, a Khafre date borrowed from the chronology under attack, and assumes a weathering rate Schoch calls crude and then treats as roughly linear. The epilogue, alone among the sections, says “unequivocally”; none of the seven chapters before it reaches for the adverb. The book’s own chief witnesses disagree with it: Selim Hassan attributed the Sphinx to Khafre, and Colin Reader dates the excavation to the early dynastic period rather than seven thousand years earlier.
Connections
Robert Schoch · Robert Bauval · Great Sphinx · Dream Stela · 1991 Sphinx Seismic Survey · Sphinx Water Erosion Hypothesis · Orion Correlation Theory · Khafre · Colin Reader · Selim Hassan · Fingerprints of the Gods · The Giza Power Plant · Solar Outburst Hypothesis