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The Great Sphinx: From the Eocene to the Anthropocene

Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen, and I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other cool organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Bob Schneiker, he’s going to talk about one of the most intriguing pieces of work and geology on the planet, the Great Sphinx of Giza. Bob was born in Milwaukee and went to Nicolay High School, and he got his bachelor’s degree at UW-Milwaukee in geology and also got his master’s in geology at UW-Milwaukee. He’s a professional geologist and runs his own company. Today, he gets to talk with us about one of the great puzzles out there that some ways pit some archaeologists versus geologists, is that fair?
– [Bob] Yeah.
– That’s going to be an interesting arm wrestling match. (laughing) So, there are very few things more intriguing than the distinct the Great Sphinx of Giza, looking forward to hearing what Bob has to say about the Great Sphinx from the Eocene to the Anthropocene. Please join me in welcoming Bob Schneiker to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. (applauding)

– Thanks for being here and thanks for that introduction. How I got involved in this is a very unusual story. I get to do the ad, the PBS ad. PBS changed my life. I was watching the Nova program almost exactly five years ago now, December 19th, and I saw Dr. Mark Lehner, who was on the program explaining how the Sphinx today is weathering because of shallow groundwater that’s wicking up. As the water evaporates, salt is accumulating in the surface of the rock. That rock then expands and it exfoliates and what looks like these giant Pringles potato chips– Where’s the mouse? Right there– So this looks like a giant Pringles potato chip and he’s actually reaching under it and pulling it off and as he’s doing this in the program he goes I hate to do this, but this is happening all the time, and what happens is that falls on the ground and it turns to dust. I knew instantly what was going on here, that that is the water’s wicking up, and what I do most the time, my real job, is I’ve got a software package that’s used by regulatory agencies and environmental consultants to establish cleanup standards for contaminants and soil, and to some extent groundwater. And everybody understands the process of rain falling on the ground and then it leeches down to the ground and like a coffee maker, it picks up some contamination and it carries that down into groundwater. Nobody understands the process, or very few people understand the process, where the water is gonna actually wick up, carry contamination with it to the surface, and then at the surface, if it’s a volatile substance, it’ll go to the atmosphere or else it’ll bind, it’ll precipitate out at the soil and do what it’s doing at the Sphynx.

So I was just gonna write a newsletter on the Sphinx, that was it, I was not gonna do anything else. And just trying to– Because part of what I do with my software is I also do training in the development of cleanup standards and trying to get that point across is very difficult to people. So, but isn’t the Sphinx in the desert? How in the world, where is all this water coming from? How can there be water, shallow groundwater affecting the Sphinx when it’s on what’s I’ve always heard has been referred to as the Giza Plateau? Well it turns out that’s not a very good description. It’s actually an escarpment, and what an escarpment is is an area– I’ll go to the next slide– It slopes down like this, and at where the Sphinx is sitting right here, it’s an excavation that was excavated out, and the Nile River– Oh, I shouldn’t have done that– The Nile River– I got to use the mouse– The Nile River will at times actually flood the Sphinx excavation. So into this area right in here. Hmm, I’ll just point to it right there. Going back a slide. So this is the area that we’re looking at where the Sphinx is, and you can see that the Sphinx is sitting actually below grade, the entire Sphinx is, you can think of it as having been constructed below grade. By the time they went around to carving the body, all the material from the head layer up was already used to build the pyramids and then the body itself was excavated out and the material was dragged into the front here to form this area here which is called the Sphinx temple, and the blocks here were cut, were dragged out from the quarry here.

So basically the Sphinx is the remnant in the middle of a quarry. This object over here is this is the valley temple, and this is the causeway that leads up to Khafre’s pyramid, and the Sphinx is typically associated with Khafre’s pyramid, and that’s that sets the time at which most of the Egyptologists assumed that it was constructed. The body has a weathered appearance to it, but the head, and you can’t see it anymore because it’s been covered, the rear paws also don’t look as weathered as does the body itself, looks extremely weathered. The thing to remember is is that it’s an escarpment and that actually at times during high floods the Sphinx would actually have been an island in the Nile. This was like really astounding to me when I started learning all of this stuff. So what I did as I ran three different scenarios in my software to figure out what’s happening to the water at the Sphinx. And so prior to construction, precipitation fell on the ground and it either went to surface water runoff or it evaporated. The groundwater itself was so deep that the wicking zone didn’t intersect the land surface, and so as static, it just rose up to a given point and it didn’t do anything. When they created the Sphinx excavation, when they dug down, they intersected the capillary rise zone, and that turned the wicking on.

And that’s the weathering process that Mark was explaining on Nova. After that, most of the time the Sphinx had been filled in with windblown sand, because it is at the edge of a desert and so the entire excavation filled with sand. At that point, even though there’s only about one inch of precipitation a year, there is about a quarter inch, 0.66 centimeters of recharge from even just that one inch of precipitation. And again, the wicking didn’t reach the surface, and so you get a little bit of positive recharge. So those were the three scenarios, and I went to Vancouver and I presented that. A little bit more background on what the Sphinx is, I already was saying some of this, so it’s a solid rock, there’s no interior, there’s no temple inside, there’s nothing inside. Here and there there’s a couple of borings but nothing much inside. It’s 73 meters long. That’s what, about 240 feet? It’s 20 meters tall, that’s about 66 feet, and it is only as far above sea level as it is tall. It’s only 66 feet above sea level.

The body of the Sphinx has been assumed to weather somewhere between 0.7 to one meters, about two to three feet, and serious modes of weathering have been suggested. The blocks that you’re seeing on this, on the body of the Sphinx, they’ve all been assumed to have been added at a later date after the Sphinx had already weathered for thousands of years, and that was to repair weathering. And the head, there’s a lot of speculation on the head having been recarved. So the question is how old is it? Strangely enough there are no inscriptions. Nobody signed, or at least there’s no artifact left where somebody signed, the artist did not sign this. There is no mention of the Sphinx until what’s called the dream stealer, and that is this object that looks like a door over here– I don’t know what’s going on with the mouse– It’s that object that looks like a door over here– Let me try it this way without that– Anyways, it’s a huge slab of granite that was put there, and Tutmos the 4th put it there. What he did is he was out hunting and he had, and the Sphinx was– And he fell asleep in the shadow of the Sphinx and the Sphinx was buried in sand and he had a dream, and in the dream the Sphinx told him if he were to clear the sand from the Sphinx he would become the next Pharaoh. He was not in line to be the next Pharaoh. To do so he had to kill his brother, which he did, but he had permission from the Sphinx to do so.

(laughing) So that’s the first time there’s any mention of the Sphinx. It’s true, like I said earlier, it’s typically attributed to Khafre or perhaps Khufu, and it’s a 30-year difference between a father and a son at that point. But as I was doing my research, thank you. As I was doing my research, I found that there were a lot of geologists who are saying that the Sphinx is older, far older, than any of the Egyptologists were willing to accept, and they were all using weathering, the weathered surface of the Sphinx as the evidence that the Sphinx must be extremely old. They all without hesitation want to rewrite prehistory. So basically it was refugees from Atlantis who had originally immigrated from Mars that built the Sphinx, is pretty much what they’re saying. (laughing) So they presented these papers, and the biggest one would be Robert Schoch. He’s a PhD geologist, geophysicist from Yale. He teaches at Boston University, and he teamed up with John Anthony West, who’s anti-science pro magic.

And they’re both saying that it’s much older. So where did this come from? What did the idea that the Sphinx is older actually come from? It came from Edgar Cayce. I had never heard of Edgar Cayce. I talked a lot of people. They’re astounded that I didn’t know who this guy is, but I knew nothing of him. He was saying that the Sphinx is older and that there’s a Hall of Records. So that the people who left Atlantis– or while they were in Atlantis– they took all of their knowledge and they put it in these repositories. And one was in Atlantis itself, one is somewhere in the Yucatan Peninsula, and the third one is beneath the paw, the right paw of the Sphinx in Egypt. And it contains the knowledge of Atlantis, Ancient Aliens, or again, something like that.

You can’t really pin these people down on anything. How does he know this? How does Edgar Cayce you know this? Well he in a previous life was there. He was the one of the high priests. These people that– You know, you get reincarnated. You’re never that just the laborer. He was the high priest who helped design the pyramids and the Sphinx, and his name at the time was Rata, so this was at 10,500 BC roughly. So the question is who would believe any of this? Well this is Mark Lehner, this is the guy that was on Nova, that was explaining that how the Sphinx is weathering today. He actually went there in the early ’70s as a follower of Edgar Cayce. I mean, the way I describe it is it’s like, do you talk to people who are smokers and you’re saying, “Well, why are you smoking?” And they say, “Well, I did this, you know.” This is not me making this decision, this was a teenager making this decision to smoke.

He was a teenager when he was enthralled with all of this, and quite capable, and got the funding and went over there and they drilled where the Hall of Records is supposed to be and he found nothing. And then he abandoned the idea. He’s acting as a scientist even though he wasn’t a scientist at this point. He was not emotionally attached to this, so I’m not criticizing him, I’m praising him for his ability. It was within hours, a day at the most, after drilling it, that he gave up the idea that there was a Hall of Records beneath the paws of the Sphinx so now he’s gone to the dark side, according to all the Edgar Cayce followers. He’s, you know, science, he’s gone to science. And so he’s now, if you go online you’ll find they already talked about him concealing the truth, and he’s hindering research. Mark is not like that. I met with Mark, and he was like encouraging me to do the work that I’m doing.

I went to Boston and met with him. He was just the nicest person, he’s just like he is on TV, he’s all excited about showing me things, so he’s not like that at all. So the Sphinx is clouded in myth, and I knew that the groundwater wicking couldn’t fully explain what I was seeing. And you’ve got these geologists who are claiming that it’s older, and you’ve got the abrupt appearance of the Egyptian civilization. I just decided to start at the beginning as a geologist to see what I might find. Not sure I’d find anything, but for a geologist, the beginning is when the rocks were deposited. So the rocks that make up the Sphinx were deposited 40 million years ago, they’re a limestone, so 40 million years ago puts it here into the Eocene. I didn’t know much about the Eocene and I was really puzzled by this thing here. I was like okay, well what started that the Eocene? It’s the PETM.

So I’m like well, what is the PETM? So it turns out that that’s the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. So when geologists divide time up they didn’t know for instance that an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs, they just knew something big happened, no idea what that something big was. Nobody knew anything about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, but there’s a distinct difference between the rocks and the animals before and after this event. So what was it? It was a release of 3000 to 10 billion tons of carbon. This is roughly equivalent to all known fossil fuel reserves or perhaps double all known fossil fuel reserves on the planet, and they all, it all has a signature of organic carbon, so whatever the source is, it was organic. Humans have only put this in perspective since 1751. We’ve released 337 billion tons. So this release occurred somewhere between over 13 years of perhaps even shorter. Most estimates around 10,000 years.

I’m finding now that people are thinking more around 5000 years is how long it took to release all of this carbon. So what happened? Well, prior to the PETM, carbon dioxide levels were about 1000 parts per million. During the PETM they climbed to 1600 or perhaps as high as 3000 parts per million for carbon dioxide. Global warming of four to eight degrees C. Extreme ocean acidification. And it took Earth 50,000 to about 150,000 years to recover from that. So where did all this carbon come from? Well, a big part of it is they’re thinking… Well no one’s really sure is the first answer, but it could be the methane hydrates, the clathrates that are at the bottom of the ocean is one of the sources, the volcanic baking of organic sediments is like peat deposits and the northern Atlantic as the continents are being ripped apart, they’re thinking that might be the source. It could be in the Antarctic.

There were no glaciers on Earth at this time, so it could be the entire Antarctic was degassing with all this permafrost. Could be wildfires. it’s been suggested that it was at least set off by a comet, nobody’s really sure, more than likely it’s more than one source and some sort of reef reinforcing cycles. So this is a picture of what Alaska would have looked like during the PETM. That’s not a Photoshopped image. So this was taken by Ira Block. People in this room might know him. He was actually a photographer for the Wisconsin State Journal for a while, and these pictures have been in like Smithsonian and National Geographic, and I asked him if I could use them for this presentation and he said yes. So you can see that Alaska looks very different, that you’ve got warm poles and it’s not hot at the equator. And this is a picture of what Wyoming looked like.

So Wyoming was much wetter. There are alligators that can survive in Wyoming throughout the year. The biggest difference is, so it’s wetter, but you also didn’t have the cold continental interior winters like we’re about to experience, that didn’t happen during the PETM. Oh, and that person by the way is Scott Wing and he studies the PETM at the Smithsonian. So what happens when you warm up the planet like that? What happened? Well, you can see in this plot here, this is a plot of genetic diversity through time, and this dip over here is the demise of the dinosaurs, and then not much happens until the PETM comes along and suddenly you get a burst in genetic diversity, all sorts of species up here where they never would have been seen before. Horses, rhinos, pigs, hippopotamus, all sorts of different things appear. Primates are a big one, an important one. And then you’ve got– The only extinction that it caused was benthic foraminifera, particularly the nummulites. And they quickly recovered after this extinction event.

And it isn’t due to plate tectonics, because you’ve gotta both think, well of course, maybe North America was closer to the equator and that’s the reason that you had the warmer winters and the rainforests extending all the way to the Arctic Circle. No, I mean, when you look at this you can instantly recognize that that’s Earth. It looks pretty much the same as now. There’s a couple of differences, big one would be– There is a gap between North and South America, and Africa is an island, so you can envision some sort of ocean current cutting through those areas and keeping the planet somewhat more temperate. But it’s instantly recognizable that that is in fact Earth. And it turns out that the PETM was not the only one, that this happened more than once. You’ve got the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2, the Eocene Thermal Maximum 3, the early Eocene Climatic Optimum, the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum, the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum, and there are more, and I’m sure there’s more yet to be found. My favorite one is the Elmo. (laughing) And not because of the character on Sesame Street, but because it stood for Eocene Layer of Mysterious Origin, because they didn’t know what they had when they found this.

And it’s now called the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2, so I like Elmo. So what does this have to do with the Sphinx? I’m supposed to be giving a lecture on the Sphinx. So I was spending my time looking at all these hyper thermals going, this is the coolest thing, I never knew anything about hyper thermals, why have I never heard anything about this? And I then I was like no, I’m supposed to be doing research on the Sphinx, so I went back and I pulled out some really old photos before the Sphinx is repaired and I looked at the head and I said oh my, the head’s a hyper thermal. (chuckles) I just looked at this photo and I just said yeah, because you can see in these cores here there’s this dissolution horizon associated with the acidification of the ocean, so instead of depositing limestone, the limestone’s eroding away, and then you get this clay rich layer that’s darker and it’s far more weather resistant and I looked at the neck here and I’m like that’s a hyper thermal. I thought this was such a crazy idea, I didn’t even look into this for months. I mean for one thing, the head is about nine meters thick and typical hyper thermal is only about one meter thick. When I started looking and I realized it was the MECO. The MECO turns out to be eight and a half nine times longer than all the other hyper thermals, and I’m like oh. So I actually went to Boston and I met with Mark Lehner and I explained what I was doing. I got to this point and he was very interested in this, and he said well, who would know more? Oh actually, oh let me– I’m getting ahead of myself.

So when looking at this, yeah, some of that is. So I said well, Scott Wing at the Smithsonian, he knows all about hyper thermals. Well he wrote back and he said, “What a very intriguing possibility.” And he also wrote back and he said that the MECO is an SBZ 17. And I’m thinking SBZ 17 or 18, whatever it takes. I’m channeling Mr. Mom. I have no idea what SBZ 17 is. But it didn’t take me very long to find this paper, and in it, there’s a particular– In it, it lists fossils, and if you find those fossils you’re dealing with very specific small divisions in geologic time, so this is SBZ 14, 15. Here’s SBZ 16, 17, 18, 19. So there’s a particular fossil Nummulites Gizihensis, named after the Giza Plateau, and Mark Lehner mapped it here in the Sphinx.

I darkened that column to show where he’s identified that that fossil exists. And so when that species goes extinct, that puts you into SBZ 17. And I was like, you’re kidding. I actually found then another fossil in the formation above, so I bracketed this, and yeah, the MECO appears to be in that in the actual head of the Sphinx. And it starts at the chin, so the MECO starts at the chin, and I’m not sure what’s going on between the extinction of the new Nummulites Gizihensis and the MECO. It might be an onset. It’s very soft rock, so it might be the ocean acidification, maybe it tells us something about the onset of the MECO. So I wanna make sure I covered everything here. So eventually though, the Eocene comes to an end, and it ends with this thing, and Tom, you would know the correct enunciation of that, it’s a French term.

– [Tom]: (Inaudible) Excuse me? (laughing) Grande Coupure, I’m gonna call it that. What it means is the great change in continuity, and so something, again, something happened, something big, geologists have identified that there is something different between the Eocene and the Oligocene. What is that? Well, this is what Earth looked like at the end of the Eocene. And again, it looks pretty much like now. You’ve still got North and South America are detached, Africa is still an island. Probably the biggest difference here is you’ve got India is beginning to ram up into Asia, and when it does it creates the Himalayas, and with the Himalayas, the rock gets pushed up into the atmosphere, that causes increased weathering, and that weathering decreases carbon dioxide levels, so the Earth is going to cool, because the Himalayas have gone up and you’ve got all this increased weathering. So maybe that’s what’s going on. Then you have a couple of craters, again, dated to exactly at the end of the Eocene. You’ve got the Popigai– if I’m pronouncing that correctly– crater in Russia, it’s 62 miles across.

It is the fifth largest known crater on Earth. Then you have the Chesapeake Bay crater. It is 53 miles across. It is the ninth largest crater on Earth, and then there’s another one off of New Jersey called Tom’s Canyon, 14 miles across, not ranked, but all dated to exactly at the end of the Eocene. So whatever happened in the Grande Coupure, it caused temperatures around the world to drop. That caused an extinction event, and the temperatures dropped. Antarctic glaciation starts, that draws ocean levels down, that exposes the rock where the Sphinx is, that has been an area that it’s been in the ocean, now it’s exposed as land, and weathering starts and soon the early Nile River begins to flow. About 10 million years ago, the Tethys Ocean closes the eastern end of the Mediterranean, forming the Mediterranean Ocean. At about 6.5 million years ago, the Mediterranean gets pinched off by Gibraltar and Spain, and it’s called the Messinian Salinity Crisis.

It sounds like they ran out of salt, but what actually happened is that the Mediterranean dried up and became a huge Death Valley. It was about five kilometers deep at its deepest, pressures were about 1.7 times that at sea level, and there were temperatures of 80 degrees C, it’s estimated about 175 degrees Fahrenheit at the bottom of the of that Death Valley. So what happened is that all the rivers that are flowing into the Mediterranean now are cutting canyons, because they’re gonna cut, depending upon how high they are, what’s the amount of relief. I’m sure the first geologist who ever saw this said that can’t happen, you cannot cut, a river cannot cut below sea level, it’s just completely impossible. I’m sure they were looking at this going, you either have to raise Africa a couple miles into the air or you have to drain the Mediterranean, like either one’s ever going to happen. Well it was the Mediterranean, and so it’s a huge Canyon formed here, and you can see where Cairo is, so if the Sphinx were there it’d be looking, it’d be having a great view looking down into this canyon in front of it. Then you have the Zanclean Flood at about 5.3 million years ago. What happened is the Atlantic Ocean cut open by Gibraltar and started filling the basin. It took it about two years.

So you can see that there’s water rushing in at A. There’s water rushing in from the Atlantic and it’s first filling this basin, and after it fills this part of the basin it comes down over here and it starts filling the other part of the basin, refilling the Mediterranean. So now this Sphinx has an ocean view. If it were there. Then you get the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period. So that’s about 3.3 to three million years ago, carbon dioxide around pretty much like we’ve got today, a little bit higher, a couple degrees of warming, sea level rises to 25 meters, so the Sphinx is at only 20 meters, so this thing is swimming in the Mediterranean, if it were there at this point. There’s a narrow gulf that reaches all the way to Aswan, which is this A on the map right here. So it’d be kind of like a fjord kinda thing, it would look like. Then on top of all of this you’ve got the Pleistocene, so we know about that here in Wisconsin.

You look out the doors here and you can tell that we had continental glaciation and that’s been going on for about the last 2.6 million years and it just ended about 11,700 years ago. There’s ice on the continents between 1500 to 3000 meters if not even more. What happens when you lock up all that ice into the continents, ocean levels drop. So this would cut out– The Nile would have quickly cut a canyon, so something on the order of say Devil’s Lake. The Sphinx would be looking into nothing all that deep. So what causes that? Well that’s orbital forcing, so that’s differences in the tilt, so the upper one is showing you how far the Earth is tilted, so it switches between or varies between about 22 degrees and 24 degrees, and goes back and forth like that. The shape of the Earth’s orbit changes being tugged on by other planets and other things and so that the shape of the orbit changes and then you also have the precession of the equinoxes, so sometimes the Earth is leaning towards the Sun, the northern hemisphere in the summer, and sometimes it’s leaning away from the Sun on its closest approach. So right now it’s actually leaning away from the Sun in its closest approach, so we’re getting warmer winters and cooler summers. What happens– And the last time that happened was about 5000 years ago, so Europe leans towards the Sun and you get increased warming over Europe.

Well that causes increased air hot air rising, that sucks the monsoons further north over Africa and it creates the Green Sahara. So northern Africa has been swinging back and forth between green and desert Sahara for about for something like 20 million years. There are 230 separate green Saharas that have been mapped out over the last eight million years. I’m thinking this has a lot to do with human evolution. When John Hawkes is here he’s talking about the places that they haven’t looked in Africa. Well this is a big place where people haven’t looked, mostly because it’s too hot right now and in some ways very dangerous. What happened is that all the precipitation falls over northern Africa. The higher flows make the Nile Valley completely uninhabitable, all this water is being channeled down through into there. The Sphinx limestone is going in and out of the Nile River as the water levels go up and down.

You’ve got precipitation also falling on the ground and you’ve got this acidic groundwater is forming these karst limestone areas, so caves and things of that sort. So this has been going on for 20 million years. The last of the green Sahara periods– Its people are just learning, and this is all like in the last 20, 30 years that people are learning these things, so the last one they call the African Humid Period and so the Sahara was densely populated with people and animals, and it’s considered the world’s largest open-air art gallery. There’s artwork all over in in the Sahara. This is just one of the depictions. If you’ve ever seen the movie “The English Patient” where they start out at the beginning. They show that– That’s the painting, that’s the cave of the swimmers, and that artwork is dated to about 10,000 years ago. So all that water was forced into the Nile, so the Nile is the longest river on Earth and there’s three basic rivers to it. So you’ve got the Blue Nile, which is coming in right here from Ethiopia, the White Nile that comes from the South here, and there was another major tributary called the Yellow Nile, today it’s called Wadi Howar, and that just means it’s a dry river valley.

But that used to be a major contributor to the Nile River. And when the Sahara dried about 5500 years ago people and animals had to leave. It just became so inhospitable that they could not stay there. As they migrated people first domesticated animals and then plants. As they started migrating south they were intercepted over here by the Yellow Nile, so they’re migrating out, then they’re finding it’s very nice in the Nile, in the Yellow Nile, there’s the river flowing there. And then as the climate changed they got forced down the Yellow Nile and into the Nile Valley. So it became the Silicon Valley of its day. People were brought in from all over with all sorts of different ideas from different places, and they were all concentrated on that narrow little strip, and that’s the start of the Egyptian civilization. It all relates to climate change.

So now we got the recipe to make the Sphinx. We’ve got the overlying bedrock on the Giza escarpment has weathered away during all these African humid periods and other events. The weather resistant MECO’s formed the capstone, that the hard layer that’s formed the Giza escarpment. So if there were no MECO there’d be no pyramids because they all would have washed away long ago. Then you’ve got the Nile is cutting through and creating the Nile Valley and you’ve got the ancient Egyptians having migrated into the Nile Valley. Now we just gotta make the Sphinx. So how do you do that? So I looked at this photo, this is at exactly the same time that I looked at this photo and said wait a minute, there’s a hyper thermal in the head. I went, I know how the Sphinx was made. I just remember that, it was like instantaneous, two things just as fast as I could think of them.

The way that the Sphinx was made is it was pounded back. You have to understand the tools that they used. So the this is– Mark here is holding a two-handed pounder, and it is just what you think, it’s just a rock, and they would take that rock and they would bang onto the surface of the rock and they would flake rock off. Then he also used what’s called a stone hammer. So the stone hammer over here is just a rock, and they cut two grooves in it and they put some sticks on it and they tied the sticks together with leather and then they would take that and they would bang onto the rock again and they’d flake rock off. The final thing that they had was down over here and that is the copper chisel, and they only used that for detailed work, because it’s not that hard a tool. They just used that when they were doing very detailed work. So the Sphinx with this soft rock that’s been weathered in and out of all these green Sahara periods, when they got around to carving it, it was so soft, in fact there’s places it’s so soft you could crumble it in your fingers. That weathering occurred prior to the construction, not since construction.

So what everyone is considering as weathering is not weathering. Part of the evidence is if you look at this fracture here. So this bedrock fracture predates the construction of the Sphinx, and if it were weathered by precipitation that also would have been altered by that weathering, but it’s not, it’s fairly angular, so there’s this is not weathered by precipitation. What everyone has been considering as weathering by precipitation is actually part of the construction process. So I already went through this, so I’m saying that there was a hybrid, so that it was statue and part pyramid, so the head and the rear paws were carved in place but the body, sorry, the head and the paws were carved in place but the body was pounded back and then covered. So that means that these blocks here are original. These are not repair blocks, these are original blocks, some of, at least the first layer of blocks. So I talked about that. So the weathered body is pounded back, covered with harder limestone blocks that they quarried elsewhere and brought in and carve that to form the body.

Mark Lehner speculated on this and his dissertation on the Sphinx and then dismissed it. He didn’t think that this was valid, and he gave his reasons why he didn’t think it was valid. I could give a lot of reasons I don’t have time for right now as to why I think this is very valid. Then you also have people that are trying to use the head to try to figure out exactly who the Sphinx looks like, but one of the things that’s really important to look at here is that, so the MECO is at the base here, at the chin, then you’ve got these bedding planes at the mouth and the nose and the eyebrows, so to some extent proportions of the face were controlled by the geology. This is not a perfect material that you can make anything you want out of, there’s restrictions on it. Nobody even knew what the pharaoh looked like anyways, I’m sure they didn’t, because they didn’t have photography or anything, so unless you met the pharaoh you wouldn’t even know that this doesn’t look like the pharaoh, so I don’t think you can use the proportions of the face to figure out what the age of the Sphinx is in terms of who made it. For the last 4500 years most of the time the Sphinx is buried up to its neck in sand, and I’m suggesting that rather than having been weathered the blocks were looted. The same is true of the of the pyramids. They used to be covered with a white limestone, and all that’s been looted to build the city of Cairo.

So it’s not unusual, looting was a very common practice. So I’m saying there’s very little type of any– Because it’s buried in sand there’s no wicking going on, so there’s very little weathering at all going on for the last 4500 years. As I already kind of mentioned, this means that you have to revise the construction, I mean the repairs. So there’s been, this is not a complete list. There’s been a lot of repairs on the Sphinx, this just takes it up to the Roman period. But most of what has been considered to be repairs is attributed to Thutmose IV, the guy that fell asleep at the at the base of the Sphinx and dug it out of sand, I’m saying no, that most of that, if not all of that, must be attributed to the original construction. I’m not sure how to rework this, I don’t know the details. I’d have to sit and look at it, but I would argue that we have to change the whole history of the Sphinx in terms of its construction, I mean its repairs. So my discoveries are that wicking groundwaters weathering the Sphinx, there were all sorts of different proposals like its dew and wind and various things, that I’m saying no, it’s wicking groundwaters what’s weathering the Sphinx today.

The weathering was turned on by pouring the limestone and creating the Sphinx enclosure, as it’s called. The MECO is exposed in the head of the Sphinx, and the limestone weathered long before construction, so the Sphinx is constructed as a hybrid and most of what’s called weathering is actually part of the construction and you need to rework to the chronology of the repairs. And I’m thinking now I’m done. I’m just this guy working out of his condo here in Madison, Wisconsin. There’s nothing else that I could possibly be contributing to the history of the Sphinx. And then I see this. So there’s Lindsey Graham with his thumbs up standing between the paws of the Sphinx. It turns out this was a US aid project to repair the Sphinx. It’s a several million- dollar project.

And what they’re looking at is there’s puddles of water now that are forming in front of the Sphinx, so this right here, this is the Sphinx temple, this is the Valley temple that I pointed out before. So the Sphinx is just behind over here, and so these puddles here are just forming in the desert where there’s never been any puddles before. And nobody’s really sure where they’re coming from. You no longer have the annual floods coming because the Aswan Dam has been there since I think 1970, so that’s not the source. So where is all this water coming from? So AECOM was hired by US Aid to do a groundwater model of the Sphinx and design a system to draw the water table down, and also try to some extent to figure out where all that water is coming from. So they were saying it was leaking sewers, but if it’s sewers you’d end up with nitrates in the water, and there’s no nitrates. So it’s not nitrates. It’s been assumed that it, one of the other ideas is that it’s municipal water supplies. It’s possible, I mean it is on the higher end of the range of what you’d be expecting for loss from a municipal water supply system, but it is possible.

There’s a canal that– I’ll show you a picture of that in a second– There’s a canal that is maybe a quarter-mile away, not even that, from the Sphinx, runs north-south, so perhaps that’s the source. All of these have merit, and and you need to evaluate them, but what they did, they did groundwater modeling, a MODFLOW model if anybody’s familiar with the technique. So it’s a real high end numerical model, and they said that the water is coming from a golf course. Believe it or not there’s a golf course right there. (laughing) And they also installed a multi-million dollar dewatering system. Interesting enough, I mean this has relevance, they were trying to figure out what do you do with all this water? If you’re gonna be pumping all this water out of the ground, what do you do with it? And so they were thinking of putting it into an evaporation pond and letting it evaporate. But they didn’t do that because they’re like well, what are we gonna do with all the salt that we’re gonna be accumulating? So they’re well aware of the fact that evaporation rates are really high. When I looked at this report I was like yeah, they get it. Here it is capillary rise, this is what got me into this all in the first place.

They actually put in a series of test pits and they actually measured the capillary rise. You can see the color change here between this being a little darker and that being lighter, because the groundwater is wicking up into that rock. And I was like, yeah, they get it. But no. They didn’t simulate it. Remember what got me into all this? The geologists and engineers don’t understand this process. Well, they didn’t understand the process. They didn’t include it in the model, and I think they really missed it because this is what the area used to look like, and there you can see the canal coming through, up here, and I don’t know how long that’s been there? I’m thinking about 100 years. The Sphinx would be located behind this pyramid, about in this general area, but you can see this is all farmland.

This was all farmland. It doesn’t look like this today. This is what it looks like today. It’s a different perspective. The Sphinx is down over in here. I think that’s it right there. And you’ve got this– It’s urban. Here’s the golf course, by the way. Right over here, that’s the golf course.

So I’m looking at this going, yeah. I mean it took me a while to figure this out and I did do the modeling too, but it’s again, what happened here is that all the water, all the groundwater used to evaporate at the rate of about one and a quarter meters per year. It would evaporate into the atmosphere. It’s now paved. We think of pavement here as stopping the ability to recharge groundwater with the rain falling on it. Well here it stopped the ability of the water to evaporate out. It’s trapped underneath, it has no place to go. The Sphinx is actually staring, you can go online and see this, at a KFC Pizza Hit. (laughing) It’s not very far, and you can actually take pictures with Pizza Hut written backwards because it’s on the window, and there’s also my favorite picture if somebody has a photo of a slice of pizza and they’re holding it up to the horizon creating another pyramid.

(laughing) So I did my vadose zone modeling, and as I just said, it’s, it’s the restriction of evapotranspiration. If you were to remove the pavement somehow, I’m not saying this is what they should do, but I’m just saying if you were to remove it, based on my modeling, the water table would drop three meters in the first year alone. So the other question is, is their system doing anything? I’m not sure, because based on my modeling, because they didn’t they don’t have a depth where they’re saying I know that if I get below this depth, the Sphinx is protected. Because they’re not even looking at that wicking. They just have some idea that lowering the water table will make it better, but it may not, or they might be pumping more than they need to. They don’t know what that criteria is. The other thing is, it took me a long time to realize this, but this is gonna be happening elsewhere. Sea levels rise, and you’ve got more, you know, temperatures rise, and you’ve got more urbanization, this is gonna become more and more of a problem all around the planet. So I can add to my list of discoveries that urbanization restricts evapotranspiration so the groundwater rises.

So then I have to come back to, at least for a little bit, to the conspiracy theorists or whatever you want to call them, the people are saying that the Sphinx is older, because they always tell you what they don’t want you to know. So I’m going to tell you what they don’t want you to know. They, they talk about how this precipitation has weathered the Sphinx. Well the rain didn’t just fall on the Sphinx, it fell over all of northern Africa. It was funneled past the Sphinx. It would have made the area uninhabitable. It would have been green. It wouldn’t have been a bare desert. Totally unrealistic to think that the rain just fell on the Sphinx and then went into the Nile.

as it looks today. The Nile Valley itself was uninhabitable because of all this high water flow that was coming through there, and the Sphinx would have been underwater for at least part of the year. Even today the Hall of Records is permanently underwater. That’s why we have this dewatering system that’s going on there. There was never enough harder limestone to make a larger head, so that’s not possible. The lost civilization, this is probably the strongest point they had is yes, there was this huge disconnect between the Egyptian civilization and other areas in Africa. We now know they came from the African humid period, the green Sahara. There’s no evidence of weathering by precipitation. I’m saying that’s all part of the original construction.

And sorry, no reason to rewrite prehistory, it’s all good as it is. So what of the future? What’s gonna happen? Well with global warming we’re gonna get sea-level rise, so without question at some point the Sphinx is gonna end up in the ocean. Or maybe not. We could create a dam at Gibraltar and restrict the Mediterranean. You can then set the Mediterranean at any level you choose. So Venice doesn’t have to go underwater. This is a depiction of somebody who’s proposed this some time ago, we’d increase all this land we could then use for farming, so Sicily for instance is now attached to Italy. But it’s a 10-mile gap that you’d have to fill, and you could put this dam in and it would generate huge amounts of power. And as sea levels continue to rise you’d be generating more and more power.

But eventually you’re gonna get the next green Sahara. When that happens, the Sphinx and the city of Cairo and everything in the Nile Valley is gonna get washed down into the Mediterranean in about 5000 years. Nothing you can do to stop that. And Africa is also going to continue to move northward. At some point it will pinch off at Gibraltar and the Mediterranean will dry up again and become another Death Valley. So now we can answer the riddle of the Sphinx, which is, “Do I look old to you?” (laughing) And the answer is, “You don’t look a day over 4500.” (laughing) I want to thank people. I mean, so I’ve actually met with Mark Lehner, Matthew McCauley, and Glen Dash. They’re all people that went to study the Sphinx or are currently studying the Sphinx. Ira Block who gave those really cool photos for me to use.

The Smithsonian Institution, Scott Wing for coming back with what a very intriguing possibility. Neville Agnew is at the Getty Conservation Institute. I’ve spoken with him on the phone and exchanged a few emails. He’s very interested what I’m doing. Here in Madison, Jean Bahr and Marie Dvorzak. She’s at the library. They’ve helped me out. You’ve got the anthropology department. Henry Bunn, I spoke with him on some of these ideas.

And you got the libraries here with the research. If you want to find something, it’s here. I mean, and if it’s not here, the people are really nice and they go, “I’ll get that for you. I can get that from this other library.” So the ability to come up with this information, and of course Tom, because I’m not one of the professors here, I’m just some guy working out of his home, for letting me come in here and doing this presentation. (applauding)