The abc link (below) shows the sphinx in a hole
sphinx in a hole:
https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/archaeologists-discover-ancient-sphinx-egypt-57857407
“Egypt hopes such discoveries will spur tourism, partially driven by antiquities sightseeing, which was hit hard by political turmoil following the 2011 uprising.”
Radical Islam has ruined the tourism industry in places like Egypt.
That is incredible. Handsome man
Beautiful.
And so well preserved.
“Egypt hopes such discoveries will spur tourism...”
Right.
Everyone’ll show up to get their *sses shot off.
Not in this lifetime, Mohammed.
The interesting thing about this (to me) is that there’s long been speculation that the face now on the Great Sphinx isn’t the original. That it kept getting recarved into something still recognizable as the original face wore down. One of the theories was that it originally was the face of a lion, which was converted into the face of a human after the desert winds wore the muzzle too short to be a lion any more. The fact this newly discovered Sphinx has a human face isn’t proof but it would seem to be an indicator.
One of the cities considered in the PBS miniseries, “Ancient Invisible Cities” was Cairo. They did millimeter-prefect laser scans of many of the city’s more famous features, including the Great Sphinx. And they compared the digitized face of the Sphinx to the digitized faves of surviving statues of the Pharaoh Sneferu, who the face long was believed to represent, or his son, Khufu, who commissioned its creation. And their comparison of the scans showed the face of the Great Sphinx is significantly closer to Khufu than to his father. Which would mean it wasn’t created to honor the dead king but out of sheer vanity.
But of course they are presuming that the sculptors were accurate enough in the details of their statues to make the comparisons valid. And it also presumes that the “alternate face” theories are incorrect. It also presumes de Lubicz’s water erosion theory is incorrect because it requires the Great Sphinx to be much older than the accepted date, before 3100 BC, because de Lubicz claimed the pit walls surrounding the Sphinx show evidence of water erosion, and Egypt hasn’t had sufficient rainfall to cause such erosion in almost 5000 years. Which would mean Khufu couldn’t have commissioned its construction because he wouldn’t be born for several centuries yet.
