Surveying the sands of Giza, the great Sphinx has stood guard since about 2500 B.C. The greatest monumental sculpture in the ancient world, the Sphinx is carved out of a single ridge of stone 240 feet (73 meters) long and 66 feet (20 meters) high. It represent the body of a lion with the head of a king or a god.
The Great Sphinx is located in Egypt on the Giza plateau, situated about six miles west of Cairo. This area is part of the necropolis of ancient Memphis, the seat of power for the pharaohs.
Badly eroded, it has undergone numerous restorations over the millennia, beginning with one conducted about 1400 B.C. by the pharaoh Tuthmosis IV, who dreamt that the Sphinx asked him to clear the sand around it in return for the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. The Sphinx has recently undergone a major modern restoration.
Further support for this vast age of the sphinx comes from a surprising sky-ground correlation proven by sophisticated computer programs such as Skyglobe 3.6. These computer programs are able to generate precise pictures of any portion of the night sky as seen from different places on earth at any time in the distant past or future. Graham Hancock explains in Heaven's Mirror that, "computer simulations show that in 10,500 BC the constellation of Leo housed the sun on the spring equinox - i.e. an hour before dawn in that epoch Leo would have reclined due east along the horizon in the place where the sun would soon rise. This means that the lion-bodied Sphinx, with its due-east orientation, would have gazed directly on that morning at the one constellation in the sky that might reasonably be regarded as its own celestial counterpart."
The foregoing discussion means that the monumental sculpture of the Sphinx may have existed at a time when (according to prevailing archaeological theory) there were no civilizations on earth and humans had not yet evolved beyond hunter-gatherer lifestyles. This matter is so radical that scholarly reticence in acknowledging it is understandable. If the Sphinx is indeed this old then contemporary assumptions regarding the development of civilization must be entirely reworked and the mystifying question of Plato's Atlantis should be given very serious consideration.
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