<HTML>On his site Hawass has this:
<i>When the 18th- Dynasty excavators uncovered the Sphinx, I believe they found a situation much like that found by Baraize in the course of his excavations, when he cleared the statue completely for the first time for the Egyptian Antiquities Service in 1926. In Baraize's case, the sand had buried the statue nearly to the top of its back. As his men hauled away the sand and debris that had accumulated over the ages, they found many large and small restoration blocks that had gradually fallen off the curves of the lion's body, down to about one third the height of the north side of the body, and to about two thirds the height of the body on the south side. Baraize simply took many of these stones, including the large ones of the phase I restoration, and cemented them back into place on the Sphinx's body.
Thutmosis IV's workmen seem to have done something very similar. On the upper part of the body we found old kingdom blocks, of the same quality used to face the causeway of Khafre, reset against a badly weathered old kingdom core. As the dream Stela of Thutmosis IV shows that this was the first time that the Sphinx ever spoken and hence won its freedom from the sand, it is clear that there was plenty of time between Chaffer and Thutmosis IV, i.e, 1119 years at least, for the old kingdom casing stones to have fallen off, and for the weak stone of the Sphinx body to have weathered to the condition that we see it under the phase I restorations of the upper Sphinx body. This weak stone weathers very quickly even today in a process of flaking and powdering that leaves freshly fallen stone flakes and dust at the base of these layers in the side of the Sphinx ditch. </i>
I take casing stones not to mean repair work... but to be actual casing stones (like on the pyramids) ..... I've never seen before where Hawass said it was repaired in the OK (but I'm not as up as you are on the Sphinx).
In The Complete Pyramids (page 132) Lehner puts this first restoration work as 18th dynasty... or NK.
Kat</HTML>
