<HTML>Mike Brass… and everyone else (thanks for the interest…) -
Mike, your point is very well taken. History and the dating of things should stay ‘open’, in the sense that credible evidence can show up to challenge an established chronology or date. Further, I find it refreshing that people such as yourself hold such a position. Absolute ossification is troubling for sure, but at no time have I ever intended to lump you into this category of thought. Your correspondence with me has always been instructive, and I hold you in great respect…
The question that I am asking, I think, is a larger (or simply different) question than you are addressing in the previous post. I am not really asking if we should leave the question of the Sphinx open to any credible challenge, as I think your post said we should do. My question only applies to the present dating on its own merits, irrespective of any potential challenges. I’d say that my question is far more Rholish than Hancockish in perspective. It is more a challenge to the present view to definitively lay out its case, justifying that reasonably compelling evidence exists for its position as "history" that we would hold ‘open’ in the sense that your post refers. Can we, for example, responsibly put in a textbook that the Sphinx IS a 4th Dyn. Monument? What is the case for that? This, you see, is where the question lies. To say the 4th Dyn. is our best guess is not adequate for me. In my mind, saying that we think that Khafre built it is a far cry from saying that we know that Khafre built it. We clearly know that Khafre was associated with the monument and the adjacent temples. We know that there was 4th Dyn activity in and around the site. However, this fails, in my view, to be enough to claim that the monument (at its origin) belongs necessarily to Khafre. We don’t have anything written contemporaneously with the carving of the monument (at its origin) to link Khafre to it (to my knowledge). We only have (again, to my knowledge) the Dream Stella, and this is something that I have continually argued to be absolutely unreliable as a historical ‘document’, in so much as it seems clear (to me) that by the 18th Dyn. the AEs had really lost knowledge of the Sphinx’s origin.
It is not my intention to make a case for any particular theory at this point. Further, my question is not intended to prop Schoch’s, Reader’s, or anyone’s theory. My question is only an honest response to my own review of the evidence. I would like to avoid charging ahead with words that might be construed as inflammatory, so I am going to tread lightly. However, were I to ask, say, Hawass the question, "Who carved the Sphinx?" I think that he would reply, "Khafre." I don’t think that he would say, "Well, that’s a tough question… We think that it might be Khafre, but we are not absolutely sure." And I am not so sure that the second answer is not the most ‘truthful’. That is what I am saying. I am simply asking if the rationale for the conventional date is overstated.
Implications?… I don’t know. Maybe it is nothing. Or maybe the question is an impossible press. Maybe it is possible to, as Reader does, place an older Sphinx in the context of the present macrochronology and avoid any substantial revision. All that I hope to gain is an assurance that the conventionalists (whatever that label might mean) are not ideologically holding onto ‘history’ that might be better described as the currently most popular theory. To me, this is not splitting hairs. This is a subtle - yet substantial - difference…. But, all and all, it is just me testing the limits.
I won’t go into all of the arguments on the tread… others are far better than I (like Colin, for example… thanks for the post… and I am wondering how you respond to Lehner’s position in a KMT article that PI weathering does not exist under the granite that is still in place on the temples…). I’m just going to stick to my point… Is it not finally time that we say that we really do not know who originally carved the Sphinx?
Michael Layne</HTML>
