[mlmpetert]

Slight tangent:

I watched The Mystery of The Sphinx with Charleston Heston a year or so ago on Netflix. It was from the 90’s maybe even the late 80s. It was pretty difficult to watch and what you would expect/remember from documentaries from back then. However I learned a couple things from it:

1) Egyptologist is not only a real word but its also a real profession. Shockingly left without ownership until 1952, L Ron Hubbard laid claim to the words Scientology and Scientologist, forever making a career of being a scientist without a specialty no career at all.

2) I cant remember when but Westerns are to blame (aka thank) for the Great Sphinx as we know it today. It was covered in sand up to its head and apparently sand is hard as shit to remove in a desert. I believe the same may be true to some extent for the pyramids.

3) The Great Sphinx and the Pyramids are national treasures belonging to the Egyptian peoples. Tourism is one of the biggest factors for the Egyptian economy and their national treasures are a huge part of that.

Now all of the above is obvious, but what was most interesting about the documentary, and perhaps the “Mystery” the title was alluding to, was that the Great Sphinx may not have been built by Egyptians, but rather by black Africans. I believe the Zulus are/were the best guess.

The documentary claimed the Great Sphinx was MUCH older than assumed and was built during a time when the Zulu people where likely in East Africa. Some Geologists, Climatologists and perhaps other “ologists” (with the exception of Scientologists) were making this claim based off of erosion (considering rainfall in the desert), numerous repairs and the materials used for the repairs along with the erosion to those repairs, the quarries the stones came from, the current and suspected previous faces of the Sphinx, the scale of the head to the body, sphinxes in Egyptian culture and a bunch of other stuff.

But these theories are/were shunned by Egyptologist. I think the field of Egyptology is/was very political, as its difficult to suggest to the Egyptian people that they didn’t build their own national treasures now that they believe they have. There may be racial factors as well. And I think once people started questioning the origins of the Sphinx the Egyptian government made it difficult for them to practice their science in Egypt. And an Egyptologist without Egypt is like a Scientologist without science….. wait never mind.

It was a interesting documentary (albeit painful to watch). I tried to cross check a lot of the claims on the internet and there is some things you can find relating to the issue although its not necessarily easy reading.