Do we really know the age of the Sphinx?
Before it was uncovered in the 1930s, rumours of the Great Sphinx echoed through ancient cultures. Today the same statue still encapsulates the minds of people around the globe.
In this episode Stefan and I explore the mainstream archaeological dating of the Sphinx, and the theories that have challenged these for decades.
Scientific theories are broken when the counterargument builds enough evidence to break convention. Are we on the brink of accepting an older dating of the Sphinx? It’s a problem that spans scientific fields, generations, and continents. Let’s explore the Riddle of the Sphinx.
Here’s the full transcript of this episode:
Stefan: [0:00:04] Hey Steve, how you doing?
Steven: [0:00:07] I’m good. Stef, how are you, man?
Stefan: [0:00:08] Good. Just cooked up a little feast for dinner for you guys. I’ve come up from Sydney and I’m spending a bit of time at the coast, which is always nice. The sun was out today, which was pretty sweet.
Steven: [0:00:20] This is really hard, we always end up talking about the weather…
[both laugh]
Stefan: [0:00:22] Yeah, a bit of awkward chit chat. But today we’re going to be chatting about the Great Sphinx of Giza, which is one of the most amazing carved sculptures on the planet, still to this day. It’s got a bit of interesting history about it.
Steven: [0:00:40] This is one that kind of goes back to nearly two decades now of conjecture as to the origin and the age. The Sphinx is one of the most famous archaeological sites on the planet, millions of people visit it worldwide, and very few people probably aren’t familiar with the Sphinx. But there’s an amazing story behind it, isn’t there? And it’s something that, obviously, even in the early 1900s, when it was discovered, it’s really been embedded into human culture and the psyche of understanding what it is. We’ve been looking at this for a while now, and there’s still a lot to discover.
Stefan: [0:01:29] Yeah, there’s so much. It’s probably one of the things that really got me interested in looking at ancient sites and ancient cultures with these huge megalithic structures. And when you find out that there are these mysteries surrounding them, and debate as to who built them, why they were built, how old they are, it’s really nice to be able to look through the history and realize that the debate still going as to all these questions that have puzzled people for, as you said, hundreds and thousands of years.
Steven: [0:02:00] And that’s the exact riddle of the Sphinx – the question of the age. You kind of assume that it’s known, when the Sphinx was built, but when you really dig into it, it becomes a bit murky. So the Sphinx, for those that haven’t visited, is located on the Giza Plateau near Cairo. It’s actually located below ground because the sites levels are different and it’s different sea levels, isn’t it? It’s one of the biggest monoliths in the world. So it has a height of 66 feet and a length of 240?
Stefan: [0:02:43] Yeah, 66 feet high, 240 feet long, which is about 20 meters high by about 75-ish meters long, which is huge. I mean, you see photos of it, you can look at pictures on Google Earth, but seeing it in the flesh is just… I haven’t seen the flesh, but I can imagine it would be insane to just try and perceive how it was built and who decided to build it. It blows my mind for sure.
Steven: [0:03:12] And it’s carved out of a single block, so it’s supposedly one of the biggest monoliths on the planet, which you don’t really kind of perceive. So if you think of the statue, there’s actually an enclosure around it, which is like a wall surrounding the Sphinx, and it’s thought that it was originally a head that was then carved around it. And the blocks were actually used to build temples adjacent to the Sphinx.
Stefan: [0:03:42] That’s what I found fascinating. The blocks, like you say, I think the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple were built by the blocks that they removed from carving the Sphinx. And when you see the size of these blocks, some of them are like 50+ tons in size, and they were carved out as they went down, carving out the Sphinx from the solid limestone bedrock. It’s unbelievable as to how they did it.
Steven: [0:04:10] For those that aren’t familiar, the Sphinx Temple is probably lesser-known. But if you look at the pictures of it, you see the huge megalithic block building that you see all around the world. How they transport these things and how they cut and construct these things really does boggle my mind.
So the structure itself is a lion’s body, but there’s a human head, who supposedly represents the pharaoh that made the Sphinx. But it is oddly shaped as well – it’s a very big body, and the head is unusually small when you think of the proportions, and especially considering how good Egyptians were with building things to biological portion. It’s somewhat odd.
Stefan: [0:05:07] Yeah, absolutely. There are granite statues of Ramesses II and all these other pharaohs that they’ve done scans on the symmetry of them and they’re carved out of solid granite, which is extremely hard stone, and they find that the symmetry is almost perfect. So if you can build structures and pharaohs out of stone, to that degree of precision, then it is a bit strange to not get the anatomy right of a lion with a human’s head. So yeah, that just adds to the mystery of it. Why was it like that, why the size was slightly out.
It was sort of a legend throughout the ancient world. I think that’s how it was first discovered and uncovered because it was buried for, who knows how long – hundreds, if not thousands of years under the sands of Egypt. I think it was 1817 that Captain Caviglia and his men (160 men strong) tried to uncover the Sphinx. They’d come and seen the head poking out of the sand and there was so much sand filling back in as they were digging it out that they couldn’t uncover the entire Sphinx itself, because no matter how many men they had, and how long they dug for, they couldn’t reveal it, which kind of shows you the scale and the size of this thing.
Steven: [0:06:32] Yeah, the legends echoed through Greece and Rome. I think it was the tip of the head that was exposed at some point. Imagine how frustrating it was when you go in to uncover this legendary statue and then all this sand, you’re digging it out with 160 people and it keeps flowing back in. That would just be really shattering.
So it wasn’t until the 20s or 30s that an archaeologist, Selim Hassan (in late 30s) actually took a team to dig out, and actually uncovered and excavated the Sphinx. So it was really recent – that was during World War II, which is quite bizarre – that it was actually uncovered. With that kind of short history, it kind of explains why we don’t potentially know the full story of it.
Stefan: [0:07:34] It hasn’t even been 100 years since it was completely uncovered and revealed to the world. We know what it’s like now and there’s millions of people visiting it, but if it wasn’t for the painstaking attempts by these old archaeologists, it may have never been uncovered fully. It may have just remained an enigmatic part of Egypt, like so much of Egypt is still under the ground. Maybe the Sphinx could have been the same.
Stefan: [0:07:59] And that really surprised me about the story; that there was a relatively young uncovering of it and the new world really didn’t know about it in great detail. But the Sphinx itself echoes throughout Egyptian culture. There is a Sphinx in Luxor, and the Temple of the Moon has 900 sphinxes with ram heads – so it’s lion body with a ram head.
The Sphinx actually echoes throughout many different cultures, from Greece, even Rome, they’ve got the modern version of the Sphinx. So it transcends culture, and over thousands of years to China and Ireland. It seems to be this symbolic character. In Greece, I think it was the gateway of the city Thebes and you had to answer the Sphinx riddle or you’d be eaten whole before you entered. So she was like the knowledge keeper. But really, the symbol of the Sphinx did seem to transcend throughout different cultures and civilizations.
Stefan: [0:09:13] It’s widely accepted that the Sphinx, among many other symbolic reasons, was the guardian of Egypt. It has connections to the Great Pyramid of Giza – there’s an ancient causeway that connects the pyramid to the Sphinx – which has led some people to believe that the Sphinx was built at around the same time that the pyramid was built, to protect the pharaohs he went through to the afterlife. But I think it’s attributed to the Pharaoh Khafre at around 2500 BC, give or take a little bit here or there. It seems that that date has stuck to a lot of researchers of Egypt to try and pinpoint the exact date that it was built.
But it’s interesting that the Egyptians themselves didn’t know. There’s no texts describing them building it, there’s no texts talking about when it was built, or why it was built, or who built it. There are definitely texts talking about the repair jobs that were done, and there seems to have been quite a few repair jobs. Even today, there’s repairs going on at the Sphinx, so it’s an ongoing process. But in terms of when it was built, in terms of the Egyptians’ perspective, they don’t really have a set dialogue on that specifically, which has been the interesting entry point for a lot of other researchers coming up with different ideas as to when it was built.
Steven: [0:10:45] The Egyptians were so diligent in recording their history and their beliefs and what happened in their daily lives. And interestingly, there is a stela on the front of the Sphinx that’s dated to 1400 BC, of King Thutmosis, and how he rediscovered the Sphinx whilst dreaming. He dreamt himself sleeping in the shadow of the head of the Sphinx, and he was told by the Sphinx itself that if he uncovered it, that he would become king. And then he did become king. And this was supposedly how it was rediscovered. But that kind of tells that the Sphinx itself was lost in a way, and it built some uncertainty even within Egyptian culture, about who built it.
And so, there’s this strange mystery that kind of pervades through, without direct evidence. The causeway that you described, if you think of the Giza Plateau, there’s this running down from the Khafre Pyramid to the Sphinx Temple, and that’s how they attributed to Khafre. But we really don’t have anything else. There’s no hieroglyphs, nothing.
There are some other newer kind of discoveries on that which we’ll cover later. But today, we’re mainly going to look at the dating of the Sphinx, and that’s more or less what conventional archaeology has looked at, and what the textbooks say. Then, in the 90s, there was a guy named John Anthony West that spent a lot of time in Egypt and was an independent researcher, and he had a different theory, didn’t he?
Stefan: [0:12:27] Yeah, he was a fascinating man. If anyone listening has not come across John Anthony West, I really recommend checking him out. He’s got a few books out, he’s made a lot of documentaries, he’s done a lot of podcasts. Sadly, he passed away last year. But he spent the majority of his life looking through Egypt, reading the records, trying to understand exactly what the history was, and what the symbolic meaning for a lot of the temples were. He just did an incredible job in giving us a lot of the information we have today. He spent decades, literally decades, in Egypt, trying to work out what was going on and trying to put the story together because he found the traditional ways of looking at Egypt were missing quite a lot of the picture.
Steven: [0:13:19] What I like about West is that he based his work on the writings of Schwaller de Lubicz, who was a French anthropologist who spent many years in Egypt, through the 20s and 30s, and wrote a set of books called The Temple of Man, which are some of the most remarkable books – very, very difficult to read, but he actually translated them from French into English.
The books themselves, I’m still tackling them, but the things that Lubicz wrote about Egyptian culture and their knowledge, and particularly the building of the Temple of Luxor, that was something that really struck West, and that led him into the thinking like this. And the thing about the whole story, there was a documentary created in the early 90s, but since then, the stories have really piled up. He actually contacted a geologist based on a line that Schwaller de Lubicz wrote in The Temple of Man saying that the Sphinx is far older than what it is conventionally dated to.
Stefan: [0:14:22] Yeah, it was just like a throwaway line, it didn’t have a chapter dedicated to it or anything. It was pretty much saying, “obviously, we know the Sphinx shows unmistakable signs of water-induced weathering” or something to that effect, which, to anyone else reading, it’s [inaudible 0:14:44] it not that many were people at the time, but that stood out to West because he realized that this was potentially the ticket that he’d been looking forward to.
He was always under the impression that Egypt was a lot older because of this high knowledge and high science that seemed to reflect through the temple building and the myths and the legends and everything. He thought there was more to it and this line got him so inspired that he called Robert Schoch over in 1990, really to start this debate of the mystery of the Sphinx, which is still going today, which is unbelievable.
Steven: [0:15:18] And Schoch is a faculty member at the Boston University, he’s a geologist by training. So West, his goal was to find someone who would independently date the rocks around the Sphinx to see if there was anything to Schwaller’s theory. And so he took pictures to, I think, it was Boston and probably back in those days he had to go physically there, and then, without showing that it was the Sphinx, he basically got people to agree, but then once they knew it was the Sphinx, they wouldn’t go and investigate it.
But Schoch was actually someone who was interested enough to go and have a look. He very much wanted to see the evidence himself and make the assessment. And he describes the first kind of five minutes of looking at the site, basically citing Geology 101 that this was water-induced weathering on the walls of the Sphinx enclosure. And if you look at the Sphinx enclosure, there are these deep groove lines, single groove lines and running down in vertical lines. And in geological terms, that pattern can only be made when there’s a large amount of water running over the rock for either a long time or a large volume running through. In geology, they either categorize wear on rock patterns to wind or water, and Schoch was just clearly 101 water erosion.
It kind of speaks to something that scientific disciplines have suffered from by not looking outside. Because geologists and archaeologists do clash a lot, and this is one of the classic examples that there’s obviously a lot to learn from what other scientific disciplines offer. And Schoch just straight up gave this alternative theory and it unwound a whole story from there, didn’t it?
Stefan: [0:17:17] Yeah, it’s unbelievable and it’s still going. There’s been debates for the last 30 years, almost, going back and forth with this geologist presenting evidence and building cases and writing books about the evidence he’s found in the rock, and then mainly the Egyptological society, trying to refute his claims by saying that, “no, no, we don’t see any evidence of this in Egypt… it can’t possibly be older because we all know Egypt, we all know it was built at this time by this Pharaoh”. And here comes a geologist saying, “well, the evidence is in the rock, maybe we should investigate this”, and there was just a huge clash. But I think that one of the first things he said to West was something like, “oh, my God, these rocks look thousands and thousands of years old”, and then sort of turned to West and said, “don’t quote me on that”.
Schoch is a very meticulous geologist, I think that’s really important to note. He frustrated John Anthony West so much because he was so strict about his collecting data, and they’d go back year after year. Schoch was trying to make sure that he hadn’t missed something because in his mind, he thought he was going crazy thinking that he’d seen something that all these other people had missed. He was like, “there must be something I’m missing”. But yeah, it turns out, he still hasn’t found the thing he’s missing. He’s still trying to put the case together that the Sphinx is much older.
Steven: [0:18:51] But he published a lot of data around the geological evidence behind the dating of the Sphinx – actually, the rainfall weathering that most people, if you’ve heard the story, are kind of familiar with and that’s the most obvious. But they actually did a lot of other measurements. They did seismic measurements, where they send seismic waves into the floor of the Sphinx enclosure, and you can actually measure the… it’s a dating technique, isn’t it?
Stefan: [0:19:26] They basically have a steel plate connected to this electronic device, and they hit it with a sledgehammer, and it sends shock waves down through the rock, and sort of goes through the soft rock until it hits bedrock, which has obviously not been carved or eroded, and then comes back up. So they can sort of get a picture of different parts (they did this in the Sphinx enclosure) so different parts of that enclosure to see how the weathering worked, and if it was all uniform, which it should be. But it turned out that it wasn’t uniform, which is interesting.
The front end and the sides of the Sphinx enclosure were a lot deeper than the back. And Schoch’s conclusion was that it must have been that the back of the Sphinx enclosure was carved out much later than the front, which kind of points to this idea that he has that, yes, there was a lot of work done to the Sphinx at 2500 BC, like most people agree on, but it wasn’t the original building of the Sphinx. It was just this restoration that sort of went on.
There’s lots of other evidence too, which really, I find interesting. There’s a place called Saqqara and there’s these old mastabas that were built out of mud bricks, which, generally speaking, should erode quite quickly because it’s made of mud, not rock. But these mastabas were built long before the Sphinx is thought of being built, back later than 2500 BC. But they don’t show any signs of weathering anywhere near as bad as the Sphinx does. So Schoch’s kind of saying, “there’s all these other examples of mud that hasn’t even eroded, so how can it be possible that these rocks have eroded so badly?”
And you can see in the Sphinx enclosure, the weathering is really, really intense – it’s gone back 3-5 feet in some cases. The rocks look really old. I’m not a geologist, but when you see side by side comparisons of a temple and rock that should be eroded similarly, and you see the mud that hasn’t eroded as badly, it’s pretty interesting. And it’s quite compelling because you’re looking at a rock. There’s not too many lies a rock can tell you, which is something I’ve found really interesting.
Steven: [0:21:50] Well, then this brings in another area of science, meteorology, where you have to start thinking, “okay, so if this is a weather pattern that does indicate that there was rainfall or waterfall, when would this be?” And you have to go back to the end of the last ice age, roughly around 11,000 years ago, to find that kind of rainfall on the Giza Plateau. And so then we’re starting to move into the zone of, ‘it’s a very unfamiliar environment, the desert conditions of the Sahara Desert.
That was very unfamiliar in the 90s, but now, we’re starting to see that this is very much the reality, where a lot of the climate and geological data from this period is known. There was a very different environment happening on the planet – lots of rainfall, lots of sea level rises, potentially big areas being flooded. And so, it’s starting to feed into a picture that perhaps Schoch and West were onto something that the scientific community hadn’t really gathered enough collective data on, to really understand.
So when you start to kind of bring all these different pieces of the puzzle, then the mystery becomes quite interesting. Because, if the Sphinx does show weathering patterns in this way, was it present before the end of the last ice age or during, which would make it far, far older. So we’re talking well back before dynastic Egypt. This is dating long before any known human civilization or recorded human civilization existed on earth.
And this is why it was so controversial, wasn’t it? There’s many parts of this also, like, for instance, it does seem to be built in periods so there are different styles of building. So for instance, the temple itself, the blocks, and the style of building of the temple was quite different. And you see this pattern all over the world, as well, where sites were re-appropriated. The Sphinx itself was repaired many times, and this actually built on some of Schoch’s evidence too, didn’t it?
Stefan: [0: 24:16] Yeah, because there’s evidence for repair on the Sphinx that was carried out at around 2000 BC, so roughly 500 years after the Sphinx is thought to have been carved. But that erosion, that weathering, in some places was already 3 feet deep, which seems almost unbelievable in a geological sense because that should have taken thousands of years to erode that much, especially, as you were saying, because of the hyper-arid conditions of the Sahara at that time – it’s desert, there’s no rain. So if it doesn’t appear to be eroded by wind, then you have to start looking back to when was it raining that much in Egypt? And yes, it’s a long time ago.
They’ve also dated the temples that they made when they carved the Sphinx – the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple, which we were talking about before. They’ve done surface luminescent dating on the stones. Those two temples were repaired around 2500 BC as well, and the old limestone rocks were covered with fresh granite stones, which are still there today in pretty perfect condition. So they took the dates of this granite and found that the granite dates to around the period between 2500-2000 BC.
It’s hard with dating rock, because there’s quite a lot of discrepancies in the numbers, but it roughly translates to the period that the Sphinx is thought to have been built, which adds Schoch’s theory a little bit that it could have been a repair job on the Sphinx as well as on the temples. Because if you look at the rocks behind the temple, behind those new granite blocks, they’re severely weathered and they’re eroded away so badly that they’re splitting and they’re falling off. These new granite boulders make this temple appear like it’s new, but if you take a look behind them, it looks ancient, it looks much older than it does after the granite repairs had been done.
Steven: [0:26:31] One thing, just eyeballing the Sphinx, it does look remarkably older than the pyramid, doesn’t it? It seems strange that just by that kind of Malcolm Gladwell’s thin-slicing, we take that the first impression, the Sphinx really feels older. But also it’s deceiving because it’s been worked on and changed so many times. So the body, actually dates to many different kind of timelines because they’ve repaired it, so you don’t really get a true sense. But when you look at those areas that do have these weather patterns, it does look a lot older. And, as you say, the repair patterns on the Sphinx add to that as well.
Overall, for me, I’m not geologically-trained but I’ve read a lot of Schoch’s work and I’ve read a lot of the others. I was really interested in what the scientific community responded to this, because, at the time, there wasn’t any real scientific response to this besides that they weren’t existing cultures to build this in the time frame that he was talking about, so it can’t make sense. Since then, we know that there’s a lot more going on.
Also, in that time, there’s been a number of geological responses, but also the archaeological community seem to quote a theory on haloclasty, which says that you can get saltwater diffusing through the rock that can cause the erosion pattern, so you don’t have to have exposure to running water. So actually, the mechanism is via moisture in the air and dew entering the cracks in the limestone. I can’t exactly comment on that, and certainly, we should be looking at alternative theories, but that to me doesn’t really seem to explain it. There’s a number of other anomalies that kind of point to that there’s more to the story.
Stefan: [0:28:44] And I think it’s really interesting, looking at the argument now that there are so many different disciplines researching it. When Schoch and West first went there, they were dismissed immediately because they’re not Egyptologists. John Anthony West, to a lot of trained Egyptologists and archaeologists, he wasn’t very liked because he was coming over to Egypt with these seemingly wild theories and bringing his geologist friend over with him. He was an easy target because he was almost like the outsider. And his ideas were pretty out there at the time, because the evidence of the end of the last ice age, the earth changes that happened at that time weren’t really known. So, what Schock and West were talking about seemed like a wild fairy tale. But now that there is more evidence coming out of these earth changes, and now that there is a context that the origins of the Sphinx can fit into quite easily, it does open the question, “do we need to be looking back at this period?”
One of the main arguments, which was fair enough, was, “well, if the Sphinx is so old, where are the other temples built during this time? Where’s the pottery, where’s any evidence? Give us one piece of evidence, and we might consider your theory. But the fact that you’re saying that the Sphinx is so old, but there’s nothing else in the planet that old, that was one thing that they really took Schoch down on, because he had no defense for that. He was trying to say he understands that point, but the rock’s telling him this other story, so maybe there is something we haven’t found. And they did. There have been a few things found in that in the last 5-10 years that have sort of challenged the current model.
Steven: [0:30:36] It was actually in 1994 that Göbekli Tepe was just being dug up, and they didn’t have the data on it, then. But since then, Malta and Sardinia, for instance, have large kind of megalithic building cultures that have been unearthed that aren’t very conventionally referenced in terms of their age. The island of Sardinia is covered in these huge, and also very precision similar to, the kind of rock carvings that we see in the Sphinx temple. Malta, the same. It does kind of lend to that story.
Since Schoch and West’s time, the evidence has only begun to build up in terms of what we’ve understood about the earth, but also about the age of civilizations and everything. And it makes sense, because if you think about how much of the archaeological record that we’ve uncovered in [inaudible 0:31:25] it’s probably 1%, or something like that. So, as we dig deeper, we learn more, and so forth. It’s happening all over the world.
But the big one, too, is the multidisciplinary view of how we can actually date these things. One big field that’s really interesting is the archaeoastronomy, where the alignments to astronomical phenomena can give us dates. It’s amazing that you can use software to actually go back in time and look at the sky and see when this would be. The Giza Plateau, via conventional archaeology, Mark Lehner, who did a lot of the surveying of the Sphinx and the Giza Plateau, noted that it was an equinoctial marker and that the Sphinx itself marks when the sun rises on the vernal equinox, it rises directly over the head of the Sphinx.
So we’re now into the kind of area where we should really be thinking about, was this a marker for the precession of the equinoxes, which is the 26,000-year cycle. We’re beginning to see that there is maybe another line of evidence there that we can piece all of this together to start thinking about whether the Sphinx actually is older, and whether Egyptian culture does go back further, or whether it was a pre-culture that they adopted.
Stefan: [0:32:57] Much like many of the ancient structures across the planet that were built in bygone eras, many of them were aligned to, and are still aligned to the sunrise or the equinox, or the solstices. They were these markers. And yeah, there is that really interesting new field of archaeoastronomy that is looking at dating these monuments, because they all seem to have aligned to the stars on purpose, that can turn back the heavens in a way, turn back and look at where these monuments were pointing to specific stars during specific periods.
And because the Sphinx points directly, it is the perfect equinoctial marker. Still today, thousands of people go and watch the sunrise on the equinox because it still perfectly, as you said, rises between the poles. And it does make it interesting if you think of it as a marker of the equinoxes. Because obviously, the Sphinx is a lion, so it could potentially be representing the constellation Leo, which would throw it back to the 10000 BC era, which is similar to when these floods were happening, similar to when the rainfall was happening in Egypt. So there’s little clues which are putting together quite a remarkable story if it turns out to be true, which is a pretty wild thought.
Steven: [0:34:30] Yeah, completely. Once you kind of see this story start to emerge, you’re your mind really runs. But we are in a situation now, where we really don’t know, if we’re honest about it. We can conclude that there were turbulent weather events during this time and we are at the point now, where potentially, we can predate Egyptian civilization.
I think it’s going to really bring a lot of different scientific fields to break this open because when you stay in your own kind of specialization, you don’t see what great scientists are doing with different perspectives. And that goes across all scientific fields. I think we’re in the period now, where we’ve all gathered our own data and understanding of very detailed scientific fields, but it’s a time to begin to collate that, and build a better understanding. And if it means that human civilization goes back earlier, then we really need to know that.
And one thing, too, is that you see the Sphinx, as we said at the start, it does resonate through cultures. It resonates from Egypt, into the future through Greece, to Rome, through Ireland and China, which is really quite bizarre. So there is a pattern there of it being transmitted through time. So, is it an equinoctial marker? That’s amazing enough to investigate further whether this is really all of it.
But Schoch really kind of lays down the hard geological evidence that hasn’t been quite conventionally accepted, but I think there’s enough effort and credibility and scientific method there to take this seriously.
Stefan: [0:36:31] I’ve found that working on the Human Origin Project and being able to look into all these different disciplines and interview people and share ideas, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Being able to talk about geology, being able to talk about astronomy, being able to mix the two, it seems so natural.
The Egyptians built their culture on astronomy, built their culture out of stone, they mixed the two. I feel like it’s important that we get our mindset back to an almost Egyptian way of thinking, that there’s more than just our perception of the Egyptians. What were they saying about themselves? What were their myths? What was their lifestyle and their culture about? Some of the myths, a lot of them talk about this first time, which could potentially be pointing back to this Göbekli Tepe era when everything sort of began or rebooted, or whatever it is.
But yeah, I find it really, really interesting when you can think like that and when you can open your mind to a varied class of disciplines. The picture that starts getting laid out gets a little bit clearer in a way. Although it is a long story, but it is interesting, nonetheless.
Steven: [0:37:58] And one thing I think that’s really enriching, too, is that everyone has their own ideas, and they put their own minds and skillsets to things, and it really does bring out interesting ways to look at things. And if it’s just that, I think it’s worthwhile spending that time to open your perspective a bit.
I think this is definitely a topic we’ll cover. There’s a lot to cover on the Sphinx age, there’s an article up on the website called The Riddle of the Sphinx, and there’s a nice video to play the kind of summarizes a lot of Schoch’s work and the general state of what we know about the aging of the Sphinx. There’s a lot more to look into; there’s the head of the Sphinx, there’s also some new research the Schoch is doing on the name of the Sphinx, which is really interesting that comes out of Egyptian hieroglyphs that [inaudible 38:50]
Stefan: [0:38:51] I feel like I’m going a bit crazy trying to learn about hieroglyphs, but there’s so much to it. It’s fascinating. That’s a topic we should investigate another time. I’m really looking forward to getting into some of the other theories about the Sphinx and opening this conversation up because it is so interesting. It’s been going for so long and there’s a lot to get through, but we’ll get there.
Steven: [0:39:19] We’ll get there. So anyone listening, please leave your comments and thoughts on the age of the Sphinx and what you think about the different theories, and what you’d like us to cover on the Sphinx as well. I think we covered that pretty well.
Stefan: [0:39:32] Yeah.
Steven: [0:39:32] There’s a lot of detail there, isn’t it?
Stefan: [0: 39:35] Yeah, there’s a lot. We could talk about this forever. Looking forward to unpacking it a bit more. Definitely.
Steven: [0:39:43] Alright, see you next week.
Stefan: [0:39:45] See you, man.
