Pyramid Quest by Robert M. Schoch Page B

but different races. Khafre had a distinctly European face, yet the Sphinx looks African, with a heavier jaw positioned at a different angle and a wider nose.
    While the other lines of evidence ascribing the Sphinx to Khafre are marginally better, it remains the case that there is no direct, unassailable, physical evidence linking the monument to that particular pharaoh. Indeed, my own research into the best physical evidence available, and corroboration from other scientists, indicates that the Great Sphinx of Giza is much older than the Fourth Dynasty and even the Old Kingdom. It all comes down to how weather affects rock and when that weather happened.
    As the Alsatian mathematician and philosopher René Aor Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961) first noted, the monuments of the Giza Plateau are subject to two kinds of weathering. In Egypt the wind blows steadily during certain parts of the year and propels sand that scours and wears. Wind-driven sand often weathers stone unevenly, abrading away the softer layers and leaving the harder ones, sometimes yielding a pronounced steplike profile. Water from rain and runoff weathers stone differently, typically creating a rolling, undulating surface that gives the rock a coved appearance, often with pronounced vertical fissures that are wider at the top than the bottom.
    Different monuments at Giza display different patterns of weathering. For example, structures dated unambiguously to 2600-2300 B.C.—the early and middle Old Kingdom—and built from the same limestone as the Sphinx show prominent weathering by wind and relatively little by water. That pattern fits with the current Egyptian climate, in which arid, windy conditions are broken only by rare, scant rainfall.
    The Sphinx too shows wind weathering, particularly on the head, which lies above the level of the plateau and receives the full force of every breeze and gale that blows in off the Sahara. Below that level, on the body of the Sphinx, there is little wind weathering. However, weathering by rainfall, with its striking coved appearance and deep vertical fissures, is marked and obvious on the walls of the surrounding Sphinx enclosure, particularly the one to the west. This was the anomaly that caught Schwaller de Lubicz’s eye.
    Assume for the moment that the Sphinx and its enclosure were excavated at the same time as the indubitably Old Kingdom structures, and you’ll realize that something very strange must have been happening at Giza. Some structures weathered one way, and others weathered another, both at the very same time. That just doesn’t make sense—unless, of course, different structures were built at different times under different climatic conditions.
    Further evidence that this could be the case comes from the Valley and Sphinx temples, which are situated in front of the Sphinx. It is absolutely certain that the limestone blocks used to build the Sphinx Temple were quarried from the enclosure when the body of the Sphinx was first carved, and highly probable that the limestone blocks of the Valley Temple were as well. The temple limestone blocks were subsequently faced over with an outer layer of granite ashlars marked with Old Kingdom inscriptions dated to the approximate time of Khafre’s reign. Interestingly, the ashlars are weathered very differently from the underlying limestone blocks. The granite shows only minimal wind weathering, yet the limestone beneath reveals the uneven surface to be expected from long-term exposure to rainfall. Egyptian stonemasons actually fitted some of the ashlars to the wavy surface of the limestone to make a smooth and esthetically pleasing outer layer. Clearly, the limestone had been subject to rainfall weathering much like the Sphinx, and then was repaired with the granite outer layer at a later date—possibly during the reign of Khafre.
    The words Egypt and rain do not usually appear in the same sentence, yet Egypt has not always been the desert it is today. When