Posted on 12/13/2004 5:36:33 PM PST by blam
I have solved riddle of the Sphinx, says Frenchman
By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent
(Filed: 14/12/2004)
Archaeologists, who are able to tell us who built the pyramids of Ancient Egypt, have puzzled over the riddle of the Sphinx for generations.
The identity of the ruler who ordered the building of the 65ft high, 260ft long limestone half-human statue that has guarded the Giza Plateau for 4,500 years has been lost in the sands of time.
Workers on the Sphinx in a television reconstruction
Now, following a 20-year re-examination of historical records and uncovering new evidence, Vassil Dobrev, a French Egyptologist, claims to have proved that the largest single stone statue on Earth is the work of a forgotten pharaoh.
The most popular theory of the origins of the Sphinx is that it was conceived by Khafre, a king of the Fourth Dynasty whose pyramid sits behind the statue.
However, in Secrets of the Sphinx, a documentary to be broadcast tonight on Channel Five, Dr Dobrev says it was created by Djedefre, Khafre's half brother and a son of Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid.
Dr Dobrev, of the French Archaeological Institute in Cairo, said: "It is incredible. The most important image in Egypt, the Sphinx, and we can't say who it was with certainty.
"This is the first time it has been proposed that the Sphinx has been built after the death of Khufu by his son Djedefre who succeeded him."
Khafre, the builder of the nearby second pyramid at Giza who ruled from 2558 to 2532 BC, has traditionally been credited with creating the Sphinx.
He is referred to in the Dream Stella, a stone tablet that tells of a young prince who dreamed that the Sphinx promised to make him king if he cleared the sand from its paws. He built both the pyramid behind the Sphinx and two temples in front of it.
However Dr Dobrev noticed that the causeway connecting Khafre's pyramid to the temples was built around the Sphinx - meaning it was already in existence.
All known statues of Khafre show him with a beard - but the Sphinx has none. Dr Dobrev says fragments of a giant beard found beneath the sphinx that survive in Cairo Museum were a later addition.
Several years ago Rainer Stadelmann, the former director of the German Institute of Archaeology in Cairo, suggested an alternative theory, that Khafre's father Khufu - the builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza - created the Sphinx.
A small statuette of Khufu, the only commonly acknowledged image of the pharaoh, shows him to have a very square chin, like the Sphinx.
Dr Dobrev says he has uncovered other images of Khufu, none of which have beards, and that this proves the sphinx represents Khufu.
The nemes, the sphinx's headdress, has markings representing two small pleats and one large. Khufu is shown with a similar nemes in at least one other statue.
Dr Dobrev says the Sphinx was built by Djedefre in the image of his father Khufu, identifying him with the sun god Ra in order to restore respect for their dynasty.
George Reisner, a respected American archaeologist in the 1930s, portrayed Djedefre as a plotter whose tomb was built away from Giza because he tried to murder his brother Kawab. Dr Dobrev says Reisner's theory is unsubstantiated. He asks why a carved stone list of donations made to Kawab's daughter would have an emblem of Djedefre on it if he was her father's murderer. He says that Djedefre was a visionary builder who built a sun temple at Abu Roash, six miles from Giza, a structure so far believed by archaeologists to be a pyramid.
Dr Dobrev re-examined graffiti carved by workers at a site called Zawiyet el-Aryan and believes this shows he has uncovered Djedefre's pyramid tomb
Dr Nigel Strudwick, of the British Museum, said: "It is not implausible. But I would need more explanation, such as why he thinks the pyramid at Abu Roash is a sun temple, something I'm sceptical about. I have never heard anyone suggest that the name in the graffiti at Zawiyet el-Aryan mentions Djedefre.
"I remain more convinced by the traditional argument of it being Khafre or the more recent theory of it being Khufu."
I diddled the frenchmans sphincter Sol said.
No, sweetie, that's the Luxor....
Are you a turtle?
It's a shame the Egyptians didn't have duct tape; they could have fixed it sooner. http://www.napoleonseries.org/faq/sphinx.cfm It may not have been Napolean, but, dare I say, a Muslim fanatic...
"Dr Dobrev re-examined graffiti carved by workers at a site called Zawiyet el-Aryan..."
"For a good time, call Cleo"
"Tut was here"
"Kufu + a large, half-jackel, mythical demigod = TLA"
Interesting, I'd never heard that, didn't know they grew
anywhere in Egypt.
I am of the opinion that the head is a woman and represents the change between the ages of Leo and Virgo.
And if the Egyptians had had duct tape the Sphinx would still have a nose:)
Actually the damage is courtesy of The Religion of Peace.
From: http://www.sis.gov.eg/sphinx/html/sphnx001.htm
Although popular legend blames Napoleon and his troops during the French campaign in Egypt (1798-1801) for having shot the nose off the Great Sphinx, in fact this story just isn't true. I have yet to locate an original source for this myth. The idea that Napoleon was to blame for the Sphinx's missing nose dates at least to the beginning of the twentieth century.
One traveler to Egypt around the time of World War One wrote the following: "To take our photos sitting in front of the Sphinx on a camel was the aim of another....And so, repulsing the hordes of robbers on all sides, we came to the wonderful, inscrutable, worth-millions-of-pounds-to-authors Sphinx. The great riddle of the mysterious East. How many reams of rubbish have been written about this misshapen block of stone. Napoleon, a practical man, fired a few cannon balls at its face. High explosive shells were not invented in those days." [From: Sommers, Cecil. Temporary Crusaders. (London: John Lane, 1919) Chapter VI. "19th April."]
Another book from about the same time, In the Footsteps of Napoleon (1915) by James Morgan (p 85), states "There is a tradition among the Arabs of the Pyramids that all the scars of time and the wounds of a hundred wars, which the Sphinx carries, were inflicted by Napoleon's soldiers, who used its mystifying and majestic countenance as a target. That, however, is only a legend for the tourist. Long before the discovery of gunpowder, the Arabs had laid iconoclastic hands on the beard of this god of the desert..." Though the Arab guides may have originally spread this tale, this myth appears to have been perpetuated over the years by countless teachers the world over who have passed this bit of "history" on to their students.
A poll conducted on the Internet found that fully 21% of respondents believed Napoleon was responsible for the Sphinx's missing nose. One of the most recent examples of the persistence of this falsehood was Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March" speech where he said: "White supremacy caused Napoleon to blow the nose off the Sphinx because it reminded you [sic] too much of the Black man's majesty." And the perpetuation of this myth in "Afrocentric" circles was even the subject of a segment of the U.S. television investigative journalism program "60 Minutes."
This error has persisted in spite of the fact that the truth can be readily found in such common reference sources as the Encyclopedia Americana (Danbury, CT: Grolier, 1995). vol.25, p.492-3 under "Sphinx", which states: "Over the centuries the Great Sphinx has suffered severely from weathering...Man has been responsible for additional mutilation. In 1380 A.D. the Sphinx fell victim to the iconoclastic ardor of a fanatical Muslim ruler, who caused deplorable injuries to the head. Then the figure was used as a target for the guns of the Mamluks." In the book The Egyptian Pyramids: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), p.301, the author, J.P. Lepre, adds the fact that, in addition to the 14th century damage, "The face was further disfigured by the eighteenth century A.D. ruler of Egypt, the Marmalukes [Mamluks]."
In National Geographic, April 1991, page 36, Mark Lehner, an archaeologist from Chicago's Oriental Institute who created a computer reconstruction of the Sphinx, writes: "I sought clues from history and archaeology for the computer reconstruction of the Sphinx. An early 15th-century Arab historian reported that the face had been disfigured in his time. Yet to this day the damage is wrongly attributed to Napoleon's troops." Again, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2001. Vol. 1, p. 30) also states of the perpetrator of the missing nose, "This accusation is most often leveled at Napoleon Bonaparte, who is said to have shot the nose off the Sphinx -a claim that is manifestly incorrect, not only because earlier western representations of the Sphinx depict it with its nose missing (for example, the drawing published in 1755 by Frederick Norden) but also because medieval Arabic texts attribute the damage to a Muslim fanatic in the fourteenth century CE."
European visitors to Egypt prior to Napoleon's expedition had already discovered the vandalism to the Sphinx. In 1546, for example, when Dr. Pierre Belon explored Egypt, he visited "the great colossus." "The Sphinx," writes Leslie Greener in The Discovery Of Egypt (London : Cassell, 1966), p.38, by this time "no longer [had] the stamp of grace and beauty so admired by Abdel Latif in 1200." Greener goes on to say: "this exonerates the artillerymen of Napoleon Bonaparte, who have the popular reputation of having used the nose of the Sphinx as a target." Frederick Norden, an artist and marine architect who visited Egypt in 1737, accurately depicted the Sphinx without its nose in his 1755 Travels. (Richard Pococke, who visited Egypt in the same year as Norden, depicts the Sphinx with its nose, but the engraving is generally considered a copy of that of Cornelius de Bruyn's earlier drawing.) The charge against Napoleon is particularly unjust because the French general brought with him a large group of "savants" to conduct the first scientific study of Egypt and its antiquities.
Finally, an article by Ulrich Haarmann, "Regional Sentiment in Medieval Islamic Egypt," published in the University of London's Bulletin Of The School Of Oriental And African Studies (BSOAS), vol.43 (1980) p.55-66, states that according to Makrizi, Rashidi and other medieval Arab scholars, the face of the Sphinx was vandalized in 1378 A.D. by Mohammed Sa'im al-Dahr, a "fanatical sufi of the oldest and most highly respected sufi convent of Cairo." The nose and ears are mentioned specifically as having been damaged at this time. According to one account, Haarmann states, the residents in the neighborhood of the Sphinx were so upset by the destruction that they lynched him and buried him near the great monument he ruined. (Thanks to Ann Macy Roth's article in the online Ancient Near East Digest (University of Chicago, Oriental Institute) for the information on Haarmann's article). This confirms information published in Selim Hassan's book The Sphinx: Its History in Light of Recent Excavations (Cairo: Government Press, 1949. P. 81-83) which states that Sa'im al-Dahr pried off the Sphinx's nose with crowbars.
That might be, but the former animal neck was incompletely chopped away.
I agree with Schoch/West theory as well. The water damage is very evident.
sounds to me more like Russian. Simple - Russians invented it and then it was hit by truck while crossing the road.
======================================================
It's kind of pathetic that the wealthy and technologically advanced world we live in now won't build monuments that would last many centuries.
The Sphinx is like Rushmore. It was essentially there before the artwork. The surface erodes and gets hammered, but the rock is already there and is going noplace very fast.
No, the Sphinx was there as a mushroom, tens of thousands of years before anybody even lived along the Nile. The neck and body were carved later, and finally a face was put on the mushroom.
Anyway, you cannot rule out importation! The ancients knew their mushrooms.
Egypt was "wet" up until about 7,000 years ago.
Lenny: Hey Carl, when'd we start worshipping cats?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.