Free From Atlantis to the Sphinx by Colin Wilson Page B

Prophecies of the Great Pyramid , by Rodolfo Benvenides, published in 1969, contains a drawing of the Sphinx with a kind of temple underneath it. (The ‘prophecies’—based on the measurements inside the Great Pyramid—include little green spacemen landing in 1970, and a world war between 1972 and 1977.) Dobecki’s discovery at least seemed to confirm that some of the stranger legends about the Sphinx are not pure fantasy. Then, in October 1994, Associated Press reported that workers repairing the Sphinx had discovered an unknown passageway leading down below its body. The Giza plateau authorities immediately announced that further excavations by international teams would be delayed until 1996, because repairs to the Sphinx were their primary concern...
    One of Dobecki’s other discoveries had momentous implications concerning the age of the Sphinx. Vibration technology can also be used to investigate ‘subsurface weathering’, the weathering that penetrates below the surface when porous rocks are exposed to the elements. Dobecki discovered a strange anomaly. At the front of the Sphinx, the subsurface weathering penetrated about eight feet. Yet at the rear, it was only four feet deep. The implication seemed to be that the front of the Sphinx had been carved out first, and the rear end thousands of years later. So even if we assume that the rear end was carved in the time of Chefren, 4,500 years ago, it would seem that the front part of the Sphinx is twice that age. And if the rear part of the Sphinx was carved long before Chefren, then the front part could be far, far older.

    As far as Schoch could see, West was basically correct. The weathering of the Sphinx—compared to that of the Old Kingdom tombs only 200 yards away—meant that it had to be thousands of years older than the tombs, and therefore than the pyramids. The two Sphinx temples pointed clearly to the same conclusion; their weathering was also far more severe than that of the Old Kingdom tombs, as well as being of a different kind—rain as opposed to wind weathering.
    At this point Schoch decided that the time for academic caution was at an end; it was time to go public. He submitted an abstract of his findings to the Geological Society of America, and he was invited to present his case at the annual convention of the Society in October 1992; it was being held that year in San Diego, California. Geologists are not slow to express disagreement, and he anticipated being given a hard time. To his pleasant surprise, far from raising objections, the audience listened with obvious interest, and afterwards no less than 275 enthusiastic geologists came up to him and offered to help on the project; many expressed astonishment that no one had noticed earlier what now struck them as obvious—that the Sphinx was weathered by water.
    But then, they were geologists, not Egyptologists; they had no vested interest in denying that the Sphinx could be older than Chefren. Egyptologists, when the news leaked out, were indignant or dismissive. ‘Ridiculous!’ declared Peter Lacovara, assistant curator of the Egyptian Department of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in the Boston Globe .
    ‘There’s just no way that could be true,’ said archaeologist Carol Redmount in the Los Angeles Times . Others asked what had happened to the evidence for this earlier Egyptian civilisation—its other monuments and remains. For West and Schoch, the answer to that was obvious: it was underneath the sand.
    One of the sceptics was Mark Lehner, an American who had been investigating the Sphinx since 1980. Yet it was Lehner who had inadvertently encouraged West’s belief that the Sphinx predated Chefren. In the careful survey he had conducted with L. Lai Gauri, a stone conservation expert, Lehner had reached the odd conclusion that although the earliest repairs to the flanks of the Sphinx looked typical of the Old Kingdom (i.e. the time of Chefren), they were actually from the New Kingdom