How old is the Sphinx?

I didn’t make many changes in my edits today. That’s a good sign, of course. So I thought I would talk instead about the age of the Great Sphinx of Giza. No one denies it’s very old, but it’s hard to put a precise date on it because it’s mostly carved from natural bedrock that has been there for millions of years. Its ‘precise’ age (give or take a millennium or two) is crucial to the plot of The Sphinx Scrolls. I’ll let my archaeologist protagonist, Ruby, explain the theories – as taken from the chapter I edited today (the other voice is that of President Orlando):

‘…there’s evidence to suggest that the Sphinx in Egypt is far older than people originally believed. Its pharonic head has confused Egyptologists into believing it was built by Pharoah Cheops four thousand years ago, but the latest thinking is that Cheops only discovered the Sphinx with its original leonine head at that time, and had it re-carved in his own image. When Cheops found it, the Sphinx was already eight thousand years old. So rather than the Sphinx marking the beginning of mankind as an advanced, technological race, it may actually mark the end of its first advanced period, the Age of Leo.’

‘What is the evidence for this?’ His voice was cool, assessing, no longer the soft cadences of a would-be lover.

‘The Sphinx was carved out of an outcrop of natural rock, so there’s no certain way of dating it. But geologists studying the erosion of the stone noticed that most of the fissures were vertical, caused by rain, rather than horizontal from wind and sand. And yet there hasn’t been a rainy climate on the Giza plateau for seven thousand years… There are other clues to its age, besides the weathering. If it was built twelve thousand years ago, that was the Age of Leo. The eyes of the Sphinx at that time would have been looking straight at the constellation of Leo. The constellations have since moved around the sky. It’s as if the Sphinx was built as an eternal marker for that point in history.’

The geology she describes is real. The movement of the constellations is real (usually referred to by the catchy phrase ‘precession of the equinoxes’). The conclusion that the Sphinx dates from the Age of Leo, however, is a theory. It is not widely accepted in academic circles due to lack of conclusive evidence. That’s fair enough, but for the purposes of this story I’m running with the idea of the Sphinx being 12,000 years old, a symbol of a lost common ancestry we didn’t even know we had. As the novel progresses it is revealed that other traces of this lost civilisation have survived right under our noses, undetected or misunderstood for thousands of years. It is only when a full understanding of our forgotten past is achieved by the lead characters in the novel that they are able to equip themselves to deal with the sinister legacy they are about to inherit.