Secrets of the Sphinx – Part One
Some fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, a young Egyptian prince embarked on a hunting expedition on the west bank of the river Nile. Stopping to rest from his exertions, he soon fell asleep in the shadow of a giant stone head that was buried up to its neck in sand.
While he was asleep, he had an unusual dream. He dreamed that the stone head began to speak to him, saying that it was choking from the sand that surrounded it. It went on to say that if the young prince was able to clear away the sand, he would become the next Pharaoh.
This young prince went on to become Thutmose IV, the 8th Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, and ruler of the Kingdoms of both Upper and Lower Egypt. But his most celebrated accomplishment, for which he is remembered to this day, was the excavation and restoration of the Sphinx at Giza.
The Dream Stela erected by Thutmose IV between the two front paws of the Sphinx
In fact he went further. He placed a carved granite tablet between the two front paws of the Sphinx, on which was inscribed the story of his dream. This tablet, or Stela, which came to be known as the Dream Stela, can still be seen in front of the Sphinx today.
Despite the fact that for most of its existence the Sphinx has been almost completely buried in sand, it has still suffered greatly from the ravages of time. In fact, the nature and extent of its eroded flanks has sparked heated debate among scholars over the true age and history of the Sphinx.
Although early Egyptologists were unable to find conclusive evidence of the origin and purpose of the Sphinx, the consensus view among modern scholars is that it was built around 4,500 years ago by the Pharaoh Khafre, who is also believed to have built the second of the three great pyramids at Giza.
They base this view on the fact that the surrounding temples and funerary complex at Giza display the same architectural style as that attributed to Khafre, and the fact that a small Diorite statue of Khafre was discovered in the debris found at the Valley Temple nearby.
However, as the Egyptian scholar Selim Hassan, who spent much of his career supervising the excavation of many ancient Egyptian tombs during the early part of the 20th century, noted in his book The Sphinx: Its History in the Light of Recent Excavations, published in 1949:
“Taking all things into consideration, it seems that we must give the credit of erecting this, the world’s most wonderful statue, to Khafre, but always with this reservation:
“That there is not one single contemporary inscription which connects the Sphinx with Khafre; so, sound as it may appear, we must treat the evidence as circumstantial, until such time as a lucky turn of the spade of the excavator will reveal to the world a definite reference to the erection of the Sphinx”.
Even the Dream Stela erected by Thutmose IV has not clarified the matter. For when the Stela was first discovered, much of the lower portion of the stone tablet had eroded away completely. Of those lines that could still be read, there was an incomplete line that made reference to the word Khaf.
It was this line that led Egyptologist Thomas Young to speculate that the word Khaf was incomplete, and that it was originally meant to refer to the Pharaoh Khafre. Unfortunately, when the Dream Stela was re-excavated in 1925, even this line of text had flaked away from the stone tablet.
It is hardly surprising therefore, that later researchers have come to different conclusions regarding the origin and purpose of the Sphinx. One of these was the American author John Anthony West, who together with Boston geologist Dr. Robert Schoch, came up with a provocative new thesis.
They argued that the Sphinx was significantly older than Egyptologists had previously thought, perhaps dating back as far as 9,000 BC, and that possibly some kind of catastrophe was responsible for wiping out evidence of a far older civilization that pre-dated the Egyptian Pharaohs.
They also claimed that the main type of weathering evident on the Great Sphinx and its surrounding walls could only have been caused by prolonged exposure to water, rather than wind and sand, and that the climate around Giza must have been very different at the time that the Sphinx was built.
As Dr. Schoch explains on his website:
“In 1990 I first traveled to Egypt, 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.
Contrast between water and wind erosion
“On the body of the Sphinx, and on the walls of the Sphinx Enclosure (the pit or hollow remaining after the Sphinx’s body was carved from the bedrock), I found heavy erosional features (seen in the accompanying photographs) that I concluded could only have been caused by rainfall and water runoff.
“The thing is, the Sphinx sits on the edge of the Sahara Desert and the region has been quite arid for the last 5000 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 5000 B.C., and maybe as early as 7000 or 9000 B.C.), a time when the climate was very different and included more rain.”
But archaeology and geology are not the only disciplines available to humanity for investigating the riddles of the past. There are occult methods as well. One of the people who recognised this was the British Theosophist and spiritualist Raphael Hurst.
Raphael Hurst
Hurst was born in London in 1898. Although originally trained as a journalist, he subsequently devoted his life to the investigation of Oriental Mysticism, and achieved a world-wide following due to a series of books he published under the pen name Paul Brunton.
One of his early works was titled A Search in Secret Egypt. In this book Hurst described his visit to Egypt in which he experienced visionary insights into the origin and purpose of the Sphinx, as well as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Being an accomplished practitioner in esoteric mysticism, Hurst undertook an unusual experiment. He chose to spend an entire night meditating in front of the Sphinx. It was during the course of this meditation that he had a visionary experience that he later described in his book.
“And I rested a while in the serene languor which comes when thought is suspended. How long I remained thus I do not know, but a moment arrived when the colours disappeared from my vision and a great open landscape took their place. It was weirdly lit up with a silvery light, as a landscape might be lit up under a full moon.
“And all around me there moved throngs of dark figures, hastening to and fro, some carrying loads in baskets set upon their heads and others climbing up and down frail poled scaffoldings fixed against a huge rock.
” Overseers there were among them, issuing orders to the labourers or carefully watching the efforts of men who worked with hammer and chisel upon the rock, the while they chipped into pre-designed pattern. The air rang with the sounds of their repeated blows.
“The faces of all these men were long and hard, the skins tinted reddish brown, or greyish yellow, and the upper lips, also, were noticeably long. And when their work was done, lo! the outcropping rocky escarpment had turned into a gigantic human head set upon a huge lion body, the whole figure resting in a great artificial hollow cut out of the plateau.
“A broad and deep magnificent stairway led down to the hollow. And upon the top of the figure’s curious headdress, whose wide folds stood out behind the ears, there was set a disk of solid gold.
“The Sphinx!
“And the people disappeared and the landscape became as quiet as a deserted grave. Then I noticed a vast sea which stretched its waters over the whole country on my left, its shore-line being less than a league away.
“There was an ominous quality in the silence which I could not understand until a deep rumbling sound came from the very heart of the ocean, the earth shook and trembled underneath me, and with a deafening roar an immense wall of water rose into the air and dashed headlong towards us, towards the Sphinx and me, and overwhelmed us both.
“The Deluge!
“There was a pause, whether of one minute or of one thousand years I know not; and once again I sat at the feet of the great statue. I looked around and saw a sea no longer.
“Instead a vast expanse of half-dried marsh, with here and there large patches of white salty grains drying in the sun, could alone be seen. And the sun shone fiercely over the land until the patches increased in size and number.
“And still the sun threw its merciless fire upon everything, hunting the last drop of moisture from the marsh and turning all into soft dry land, which was burnt to the colour of pale yellow.
“The Desert!
“Still the Sphinx gazed out at the landscape; its thick, strong, unmutilated lips shaped as though they were about to break into a smile, itself apparently content with its solitary existence. How perfectly this lonely figure fitted in with its lonely surroundings!
“In this calm Colossus the very spirit of solitude seemed to have found a worthy incarnation. And so it waited until one day a small fleet of drifting boats stopped at the riverside and disembarked a group of men who came slowly forward and then prostrated themselves with glad prayers before it.
“From that day the spell of silence was broken and henceforward habitations were built on the lowland not far off, and kings came with their priests to pay court to one who was himself the courtless king of the desert.
“And with their coming my vision went out, as the flame goes out of a wick when there is no more fuel.”
After describing this meditative vision in his book, Hurst went on to interpret it in the following words:
“Had I turned a leaf in Egypt’s pre-history which had rarely been turned before? Who dares to measure the age of the Sphinx? Once its Atlantean origin was accepted, who could affix a date to it ?
And I saw no reason why such an origin, pictured so briefly in my vision under the stars, should not be accepted. Atlantis was no longer a fiction of Greek philosophers, Egyptian priests and American Indian tribes:
“Individual scientists had collected a hundred proofs of its existence, and more. I saw, too, that when the Sphinx was first carved out of the rock, the surrounding lowlands could not have been covered with sand; for then the rocky escarpment itself, which stands at the foot of a hill whose summit is topped by the Pyramids, would also have been under the sand – a position full of obstacles which would render the work hardly possible.
“No, it was much more likely that the statue had been cut ere the sands had made their appearance, and when the Sahara was a gigantic sea, beyond which lay the great and tragic island of Atlantis.
“The men who had inhabited prehistoric Egypt, who had carved the Sphinx and founded the world’s oldest civilization, were men who had made their exodus from Atlantis to settle on this strip of land that bordered the Nile.
“And they had left before their ill-fated continent sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe which had drained the Sahara and turned it into a desert. The shells which to-day litter the surface of the Sahara in places, as well as the fossil fish which are found among its sands, prove that it was once covered by the waters of a vast ocean.
“It was a tremendous and astonishing thought that the Sphinx provided a solid, visible and enduring link between the people of today and the people of a lost world, the unknown Atlanteans.
“This great symbol has lost its meaning for the modern world, for whom it is now but an object of local curiosity.”
So here we have a description of the origin of the Sphinx provided by Raphael Hurst that bears a striking similarity to the theory advanced by Dr. Schoch and John Anthony West, and which can be summarised as follows:
Many thousands of years ago, an ancient civilisation existed on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, that was known as Atlantis. When it became known that their civilisation was doomed, some of those who were forewarned left their ill-fated island and travelled to what is now Egypt.
There they set to work to create the Sphinx, together with its accompanying temple, the Great Pyramid. These two monuments were constructed on a rocky plateau that flanked the vast ocean that stretched out towards the western horizon.
Hurst described the workers as “dark figures”, but then went on to elaborate that “the faces of all these men were long and hard, the skins tinted reddish brown, or greyish yellow, and the upper lips, also, were noticeably long”.
It is perhaps worth noting in passing here that one of the striking features of the carved heads on Easter Island, is their stern mien combined with wide, thin lips. Could these mysterious stone statues perhaps be linked in some way with the lost civilisation of Atlantis?
Hurst then went on to describe how he heard a deep rumbling sound that seemed to emanate from the very depths of the ocean, followed by an “immense wall of water” that completely submerged the Sphinx. He referred to this as “the deluge”, which others might call the flood of Noah.
After a period of time which Hurst suggested could have been “one minute or one thousand years”, the sea drained away leaving in its place “a vast expanse of half-dried marsh”. This in turn was dried up by the Sun to form the desert that surrounds the Sphinx to this day.
So here we have a visionary tale about the origin of the Sphinx that would account for the variety of geological features reported by Dr. Schoch, together with weathering patterns in the rock attributed to long periods of exposure to water and to wind.
The night that Raphael Hurst spent in solitary meditation generated visionary insights into the origin and history of the Sphinx that were without parallel at the time he wrote A Search in Secret Egypt. Yet not content with that, he then undertook an even more stupendous challenge.
He decided to attempt something that was unlikely to have been done before, and almost certainly has never been done since. He decided to try and persuade the Egyptian authorities to grant him permission to spend an entire night locked up alone inside the Great Pyramid of Giza.
