Evidence continues to mount that The Great Sphinx, the temple buildings associated with it, and the Giza Pyramids are considerably older than Egyptian civilisation.
John Anthony West (in his book Serpent in the Sky), using rainwater erosion as his criterion and now backed in his judgment by geologist Dr Robert Schoch, gives the Sphinx a minimum age of 9,000 years. Bauval and Gilbert for their part (in The Orion Mystery) and using this time star alignments, favour 10,450 BC as the most likely date for the construction of the Sphinx.
I have my own grounds for considering that these various structures long pre-date the Egyptian civilisation, and these are set out in detail in the book co-authored with David Myers Two-Thirds: A History of our Galaxy. We will come to some of those reasons later.
However, as it happened, in 1994 I saw the BBC TimeWatch TV documentary Age of the Sphinx on John Anthony West's theories in company with the author Stan Gooch. After the programme I put the question to Stan, what did he think that the face of the Sphinx represents? I had not discussed this matter with him on any previous occasion, nor was it a point he had himself previously considered.
It must be mentioned by way of background that Stan, most notably in his latest book Cities of Dreams, has long argued that our early ancestor the Neanderthals, far from being a more or less speechless brutes as he is conventionally portrayed, had evolved a highly developed religious civilisation. Why then, one asks, has no trace of this alleged civilisation survived? Gooch's answer in short is that it has, both in legend and in structures such as that of the Cretan maze – where as is well known Theseus is said to have slain the Minotaur (that is, the Neanderthals themselves).
In any event, Stan's answer to my question, after he had studied a number of photographs and drawings of the Sphinx, was that he considered the head of the Sphinx to be a deliberate and quite 'unnatural' combination of Neanderthal characteristics (nose, mouth and jaw) with characteristics of Neanderthal's later successor, the Cro-Magnon (eyes, brows, crown and ears).
As it happens, orthodoxy does not dispute the possibility that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons met and mingled genetically in the Middle East, some 35,000 years ago. This view is based on several actual skeletons with dramatically mixed characteristics found on Mount Carmel (the Tabün and Skühl finds). Israel, incidentally, is also the only country in the world where pure Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon remains have been found side by side.
The Tabün bones were Neanderthals, the Skühl bones were Cro-Magnon (now termed early modern Homo Sapiens). More Neanderthals were found in the caves of Kebara on Mount Carmel and near the Sea of Galilee at Amud. Meanwhile, investigators also discovered a larger find of Cro-Magnon buried at the Jebel Qafzeh cave near Nazareth, also in Galilee.
However, among the Tabün and Skühl finds, researchers also found some examples of hybridisation, as has been found in skulls found at Mladec in the Czech Republic. Further, six bones found in 1952 in the Romanian cave of Pestera Muierii have recently been re-evaluated by Erik Trinkaus (now of Washington University in St Louis).
Trinkaus and his colleagues dated these bones to 30,000 BP, but controversially for some, found them to have Neanderthal characteristics as well as those of Cro-Magnon. There is also the Portugese find: In 1998, the skeleton of a male child was unearthed at the Abrigo do Lagar Velho rock shelter in Portugal. The Lagar Velho boy, who died about 25,000 years ago, has been described as a ‘hybrid’, with a mixture of modern and Neanderthal features.
Stan himself is now wholly convinced that the Sphinx is a monument to this human hybridisation – which he personally considers gave birth to many of the vigorous abilities of ourselves, modern humans. Both animal and plant breeders do, of course, habitually cross widely-divergent species in order to produce dramatically new strains, hence the term hybrid vigour. On this view of a monument to human hybridisation, and in Stan's particular opinion, the Sphinx could be of very considerable antiquity, as much in principle as 35,000 years old.
What Stan did not know of at this point was the view proposed in Two-Thirds (published 1993). This book, although written in the form of an epic novel, telling the story of human evolution, is based on data we have generated using a form of remote viewing into bygone epochs. We ourselves consider it to be essentially factual. At any rate, in our book the order given to the designer of the Sphinx (long prior to Egyptian civilisation, incidentally) is this:
Part 2 Chapter 10 Two-Thirds: A History of our Galaxy
After he had recovered from his astonishment on being shown this text, Stan and I then began the attempt to recreate the head of the Great Sphinx by combining a drawing of an actual Neanderthal skull with a drawing of an actual Cro-Magnon skull.
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.................... Figure 1 Neanderthal ................................................ Figure 2 Cro-Magnon –––––––––––––––––––––
Figures 1 & 2 show the complete skulls of actual Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, respectively.
Figure 3 Sphinx profile and combined skulls
Figure 3 shows the result of combining the lower section of the former (unchanged) and the upper section of the latter (unchanged) plus the superimposition of this new combined skull on the head of the Sphinx. The reader will form his or her own judgement as to the goodness of this fit. We consider it excellent.
There are further factors. Stan Gooch has long held totally heretical views on the anatomy and physiology of the Neanderthals (such as considering him to be left handed), which the scientific community has refused to countenance. Nevertheless, with passing time, more and more of Stan's views are being confirmed. One of these concerns the Neanderthal’s nose. Stan has always maintained that Jews have a larger admixture of Neanderthal genes, certainly than any European group – and that anti-Semitism is in fact anti-Neanderthalism. (Stan is himself half Jewish, incidentally.)
Then in 1988 Robert Franciscus and Erik Trinkaus then of the University of New Mexico published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology their finding that Neanderthals had a far larger nose than modern humans, an average 34 millimetres broad compared with an average 25 millimetres broad, which also projected at least as far out as the most projecting modern nose, and probably further. One of the most persistent views of the anti-Semite is of course that Jews have big noses.
Figure 4 Reconstruction of a Neanderthal
Figure 4 is a reconstruction of a Neanderthal with a large nose added. By no coincidence whatsoever, this reconstruction looks both Jewish and American Indian. Stan has long maintained that the Jews are the people with the strongest dose of Neanderthal genes.
Figure 5 The Great Sphinx today, viewed from the left
The face of the Great Sphinx as we see it today is damaged (see Figure 5). It has been claimed that it was used at some point in the past as a target by the military, when the then-existing nose was shot off. Napoleon's soldiers were among those suspected of this crime. However, the idea that Napoleon's men actually had anything to do with the damage to the nose of the Sphinx has been withdrawn by archaeologists. The most popular current theory is that the Turkish army destroyed the nose of the Sphinx during target practice.
Figure 6 The Great Sphinx |
But this claim is not supported by any credible primary data. There is no evidence that the military did any such thing as “shoot off” the nose. The question is why would they demolish only the nose, so precisely as to not damage the other parts of the statue? If an army had so little respect for the structure, surely they wouldn’t stop at the nose. It is unlikely that it was the handiwork of some phantom Napoleonic armoury or even Turkish sharpshooters.
Some have argued that the Sphinx has a Negroid lower face. (A portrait of the Pharaoh Chephren it is definitely not!) But Stan Gooch and myself say that this is no typical Negroid mouth and chin – the lips are wrong, for example: they are full but not everted. Then the further suggestion by those who favour this Negroid hypothesis is that the Sphinx had the bridgeless Negriod nose. Yet that would hardly have formed an adequate foundation for suggesting that it was an inviting target for the soldiers' cannon, would it?
We are convinced that the original Sphinx had the full Neanderthal/Jewish nose, and Figure 3 above incorporates an impression of the Sphinx nose profile as we believe it originally was.
So have we solved a little more of the riddle of the Sphinx – while opening the door to further wonders? I feel our case to be very strong. We have, after all, used actual Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon skulls, and our joining of these has produced a very good approximation of the head; and of course the bones found in the caves of Skühl and Tabün on Mount Carmel and elsewhere, actually do exist.
Moreover, seven years after writing this article, a cover story in the NewScientist on 3 March 2007 declares that: "Humans are hybrids after all".
I believe that we have here provided solid further general support for the view that the Great Sphinx and the other Giza structures are in fact far, far older than orthodoxy will currently accept.
David S Percy
AULIS Online – Different Thinking