Sphinx Water Erosion Hypothesis

Claim that the vertical, undulating weathering of the Great Sphinx enclosure at Giza was cut by prolonged rainfall rather than by wind and sand, which would place the carving in a wetter climate long before dynastic Egypt. Advanced by the writer John Anthony West and developed by the geologist Robert Schoch, who presented it to the Geological Society of America in 1991 and put the original carving at 7000 to 5000 BC. Egyptologists reject it on the grounds that no culture capable of the work is attested in Egypt then and that the quarrying record contradicts it. The geological rebuttals name other mechanisms: K. Lal Gauri and colleagues in 1995 attributed the profile to differential weathering of alternating hard and soft limestone strata, and the enclosure channels to pre-Pliocene karst features exposed by quarrying, while James Harrell in 1994 proposed salt weathering driven by wet wind-blown sand. A 2015 surface luminescence study by Ioannis Liritzis and Vasiliki Vafiadou returned dates clustering around 3100 to 3000 BC, older than the conventional attribution to Khafre near 2500 BC and far short of the eleventh millennium.

Connections§

Robert Schoch · Orion Correlation Theory · Graham Hancock