Month: April 2008

There is an article on the Discovery channel website about sea shells embedded in the stones of the Sphinx, pyramids and other monuments in Egypt

I mentioned this in one of my recent posts when we were scrambling around the Sphinx.

There is an hypothesis that the stones that built the pyramids (among other large monuments) were cast in place like cement. It is not a highly regarded hypothesis.

Zahi Hawass (Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities) vehemently denies the possibility that the blocks were cast. He views it as an insult to ancient Egyptian in that it insinuates that they were incapable of building the pyramids by moving the blocks. I don’t necessarily share that opinion. It would seem to give the ancient Egyptians some great credit for figuring out cement all those years ago. [shrug]

And if Zahi Hawass is unhappy with you, you will never get another permit to dig or explore in Egypt while he draws breath.

And if Zahi Hawass were to say something like “write an article that refutes this nonsense about cement casting the stones of the Pyramids” to another archaeologist or geologist, it happens.

[I recently attended a lecture at the SCA that was “requested” by Zahi Hawass to “clarify” some statements made on a BBC documentary about the town of Armana. Someone had dared to say that the people that built the city of Armana worked hard and suffered hardships. Preposterous! All Egyptians have always been healthy and happy and whistled while they worked. This misinformation had to be stopped!]

This article seems at least partially aimed at refuting the casting hypothesis. Perhaps by request?

For the last few weeks I have been spending some time doing some basic computer networking/repair/upgrade/de-virus-ing at the offices of one of the archaeological groups here in Cairo.

The group is responsible for the Giza Plateau Mapping Project(opens in new window). The director of the project is Mark Lehner.

The work isn’t particularly challenging, but it is great to have some non-AUC social contact. They are a very bright, hard working group of people. And they are interesting to talk with and listen to. An interesting mix of nationalities and disciplines.

One of the big benefits (to me) of working for them, is that I get invited on tours of the sites that they give to new arrivals to the project.

Mark Lehner has been in town the last few weeks and has given a couple of tours. One was a Sphinx tour.

I was a horrible host and deserted our house guests to go to this. I felt rather guilty for going. But I got over that once we started our tour. [A big thanks to Kaddee, who convinced me to go].

One of the interesting things that Mark talks about is the geology. He ran into a geologist, Tom Agner (now head of geology at Tubington) at Giza some 30 years ago. Mark tells the story something like this:

I saw this guy with a geologist’s pickaxe being frog-walked out of the area by a whole bunch of policemen. He had been picking at the ground and the walls of the sphinx enclosure with his pickaxe and examining what he pulled out. The police wasted no time in arresting him.

I told him I would try to get him out of trouble if he came to work for me. I did and he did.

Mark goes on to talk about what he learned from this geologist. No one had ever before really looked at the Sphinx or the rest of Giza geologically

.

The entire area was on the ocean bottom 50 million years ago or so. You can see in one of my photos the coral reef exposed near the base of the Sphinx. Oyster shells, tube worm holes and other shells are easily visible in the rock here if you just look.

The head of the Sphinx is a different composition than the shoulders and the lower body. Many people think that the head was attached to the body, but it is one big hunk of rock. The sea ebbing and flowing left mixed layers of soft and hard deposits. This is perfect for quarrying, you can cut the soft layer and pick off a large hunk of hard layer rock.

It seems that there was a huge lagoon/harbor that stopped a few meters from the base of the Sphinx. This is based on long ramps that have been found (and are now reburied) that go down about 20 meters from current ground level, to heavy, thick effluvial mud flats.

After our mini-geology lecture, we moved to the Temple of Amenhotep II and then on to the Stela between the paws of the Sphinx.

The Stela tells the story of Tutmoses’ dream. At the time of Tutmoses, the sphinx was buried in sand up to its head. Tutmoses fell asleep under the head and dreamed. The sphinx came to him in the dream and told him to “free my body from the sands and I will make you king”.

Tutmoses did as he was told and became king. There is some speculation that there was an older brother that was slated to be king. This brother disappears from the record and Tutmoses became king. Perhaps Tutmoses used this story to legitimize his reign. Who knows.

What is visible now of the sphinx’ body is covered with cement to keep it all together and prevent further weathering.

We looked at the elevation documents that the project has compiled over the years and walked around the entire sphinx.

There were many stories that Mark told. He would be a great guy to have a beer with, I would imagine.

My photos.