Erosion sphinx

The Sphinx water erosion hypothesis is a fringe claimcontending that the Great Sphinx of Giza and its enclosing walls eroded primarily due to ancient floods or rainfalls, attributing their creation to Plato 's lost civilization of Atlantis over 11, years ago, erosion sphinx. Egyptologists, geologists and others have rejected the water erosion hypothesis and the idea of an older Sphinx, pointing to archaeological, erosion sphinx and geological evidence to the contrary.

Unlike the pyramids , the Great Sphinx of Giza has mostly avoided debates about its creation. Yardangs, seen here in Dunhuang, China, are formed in environments where water is scarce and the prevailing winds are strong. In a recently completed paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Fluids, Ristroph and his colleagues propose that the Great Sphinx could have started as a yardang, a specific type of rock formation. As Smithsonian Magazine points out, the name may sound a bit like maritime jargon, but the concept has nothing to do with the sea. Yardangs form in desert areas when consistent wind slowly erodes what typically starts as a flat surface.

Erosion sphinx

Many people know me best for my work on the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt. In I first traveled to Egypt with John Anthony West for background information see Forgotten Civilization and Origins of the Sphinx , with the sole purpose of examining the Great Sphinx from a geological perspective. I assumed that the Egyptologists were correct in their dating, but soon I discovered that the geological evidence was not compatible with what the Egyptologists were saying. The thing is, the Sphinx sits on the edge of the Sahara Desert and the region has been quite arid for the last years. Furthermore, various structures securely dated to the Old Kingdom show only erosion that was caused by wind and sand very distinct from the water erosion. To make a long story short, I came to the conclusion that the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx, what I refer to as the core-body, must date back to an earlier period at least BCE, and my latest research now points to the end of the last ice age, circa 10, BCE , a time when the climate was very different and included more rain. Many people have said to me that the Great Sphinx cannot be so old, in part because the head is evidently a dynastic Egyptian head and the dynastic period did not start until about BCE. In fact, if you look at the current Great Sphinx you may notice that the head is actually too small for the body. It is clear to me that the current head is not the original head. The original head would have become severely weathered and eroded. It was later re-carved, during dynastic times, and in the re-carving it naturally became smaller. Thus, the head of the Great Sphinx is not the original head.

Archived from the original on 19 March

Researchers turn to erosion in exploring the role natural elements had in building an architectural wonder. Historians and archaeologists have, over centuries, explored the mysteries behind the Great Sphinx of Giza: What did it originally look like? What was it designed to represent? What was its original name? But less attention has been paid to a foundational, and controversial, question: What was the terrain the Ancient Egyptians came across when they began to build this instantly recognizable structure—and did these natural surroundings have a hand in its formation? To address these questions, which have been raised on occasion by others, a team of New York University scientists replicated conditions that existed 4, years ago—when the Sphinx was built—to show how wind moved against rock formations in possibly first shaping one of the most recognizable statues in the world. Yardangs in Egypt's White Desert.

In Greek tradition , the sphinx is a treacherous and merciless being with the head of a woman, the haunches of a lion, and the wings of a bird. According to Greek myth, she challenges those who encounter her to answer a riddle , and kills and eats them when they fail to solve the riddle. Both the Greek and Egyptian sphinxes were thought of as guardians, and statues of them often flank the entrances to temples. During this period, images of the sphinx were initially similar to the ancient Egyptian version, but when later exported to other cultures, the sphinx was often conceived of quite differently, partly due to varied translations of descriptions of the originals, and partly through the evolution of the concept as it was integrated into other cultural traditions. However, depictions of the sphinx are generally associated with grand architectural structures, such as royal tombs or religious temples. However, the historian Susan Wise Bauer suggests that the word "sphinx" was instead a Greek corruption of the Egyptian name "shesepankh", which meant "living image", and referred rather to the statue of the sphinx, which was carved out of "living rock" rock that was a contiguous part of the stony body of the Earth, shaped, but not cut away from its original source , than to the beast itself. The sphinx is located southeast of the pyramids. While the date of its construction is not known for certain, the general consensus among Egyptologists is that the head of the Great Sphinx bears the likeness of the pharaoh Khafre , dating it to between and BC.

Erosion sphinx

The ancient Egyptians may have crafted the Sphinx, a 4,year-old monument at Giza that stands in front of the pyramid of Khafre not completely from scratch but rather on a natural feature that already looked surprisingly sphinx-like, a new study suggests. In an Oct. However, even if the ancient Egyptians did create the Sphinx from an eerily shaped hunk of rock, they still would have had to delicately fashion the Sphinx's iconic features, which survive to this day, the researchers said.

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In an Oct. Furthermore, chambers and tunnels under the Sphinx would have been flooded from above if the Sphinx had been sitting in a pool of water, unless the Sphinx Enclosure had been watertight. According to Robert Temple, a moat theory explains the water weathering of the Sphinx without hypothesizing that it dates back to an earlier period of more rainfall than the present. Some samples indicated New Kingdom intrusions into the temples. Unlike the pyramids , the Great Sphinx of Giza has mostly avoided debates about its creation. Basically, we used a sledgehammer on a steel plate to generate sound waves that penetrated the rock, reflected, and returned to the surface. There is another theory that claims that the erosion was actually water erosion. Lehner argued that the head is primarily too small in relation to the length of the body, suggesting that without elongating the body the builders wouldn't have been able to complete the latter part of the Sphinx, due to a large natural fissure that cuts through the bedrock. Harrell of the University of Toledo , who advocates that the deep erosion crevices were caused by the haloclasty process being driven by moisture in the sand that covered the carved rock for much of the time since it was exposed by quarrying. Contents move to sidebar hide. Trending Space photo of the week When did humans start wearing clothes? I will summarize half a dozen points. Back in the early s, when I first suggested that the Great Sphinx was much older than generally believed at the time, I was challenged by Egyptologists who asked, "Where is the evidence of that earlier civilization? The expanding crystals cause fine layers of surface limestone to flake off.

When Mark Lehner was a teenager in the late s, his parents introduced him to the writings of the famed clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. During one of his trances, Cayce, who died in , saw that refugees from the lost city of Atlantis buried their secrets in a hall of records under the Sphinx and that the hall would be discovered before the end of the 20th century.

They then ran a fast-flowing stream of water over it, a process that mimicked wind erosion. Hidden categories: Webarchive template wayback links Pages using the EasyTimeline extension Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata Wikipedia indefinitely semi-protected pages Use dmy dates from November The recalcitrant intransigence of mainstream archaeology continues to stupefy me. Schoch and West argued that other structures and surfaces on the Giza Plateau are made from the same band of limestone as the Sphinx enclosure, but do not show the same erosion as the walls of the Sphinx enclosure and that unspecified early dynastic mudbrick mastabas at Saqqara close to Giza have survived relatively undamaged, which lead them to conclude that no heavy rainfall has occurred in the region since the Early Dynastic Period. In they traveled together to Egypt, visiting the Sphinx. As such, Christiansen determined that there was no geological evidence to suggest the Sphinx was carved earlier than any other monuments on the Giza plateau. To recreate how the Sphinx could have formed from a yardang, Ristroph and his team took a shapeless mound of clay and embedded harder materials inside it to replicate the terrain in northeastern Egypt. Scientists just discovered a massive reservoir of helium beneath Minnesota. In I first traveled to Egypt with John Anthony West for background information see Forgotten Civilization and Origins of the Sphinx , with the sole purpose of examining the Great Sphinx from a geological perspective. Nova Online. More about ancient egyptians. Many people know me best for my work on the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt.