Long-lost sphinxes of Egyptian king Amenhotep III unearthed at Luxor | Hacker News Reader

Long-lost sphinxes of Egyptian king Amenhotep III unearthed at Luxor

arstechnica.com

99 pointsdiodorus17 comments

The crack on Amenhotep's face gives him a fitting expression for an immortal king contemplating his legacy from the netherworld:

"I spent 40 years building Egypt into a fortress against enemies internal and foreign, and then my hippie son just throws it all away by smoking some weed with the sun-worshipping Aten cultists, becoming a monotheist, and moving into the freaking desert to get a better tan."

It’s fair to say Akhenaten’s reign sparked a reaction.

Anyway it was a massive gift to archaeologists.

There is a theory floated by some UnchartedX, that many of the monuments and artifacts in Egypt were built by a far older, unknown civilization, and the carving of names in them was essentially appropriation by the Pharos.

Every time some new thing is found, I check to see if it fits or refutes this theory and adjust my probability of it being true. This particular story doesn't really shift the odds for me.

So while I enjoy that theory, I feel like it's pretty much a more gentle form of the insane mud flooding theories that all buildings are older than we think. We have plenty of contemporary texts confirming construction of these buildings. Nobody else seriously challenges their legitimacy in history other than recent conspiracy theorists.

Proponents of this theory consider the Great Sphinx as one the best bits of evidence for it precisely because there is not a a single contemporary inscription attributing its construction to Egypt/Khafre.

Yes, you don't put up a stele claiming credit for repairs to something you built in the first place.

Circumstantial evidence for tunnels found in and under the Sphinx is intriguing, and not prima facie implausible. (The Egyptians did love tunneling!) If true, one wonders why authorities continue keeping them secret. Perhaps there will be a big reveal someday in a way calculated to benefit someone's reputation, but it may be that any such reveal could only ever embarrass.

The big, empty, precisely-machined boxes in Saqqara with painfully crude exterior surface decorations are another big mystery. Again, one wonders what more authorities know about them than is yet published. All we may be certain of is that the official line is bollocks.

Personally I think Hancock et. al. go too far, jumping to the lost civilization theory. However I also think the egyptologists are too conservative. The first thing anyone notices when they look at the Great Sphinx is that the head is too small. So then you look into it and find the egyptologists don't have any evidence it was built by Khafre it starts you asking questions, like did Khafre recarve the head in his own image?

Lost civilizations, as such, are entirely plausible. Anything older than the Pharaohs might be knowable today only from stone and ceramic work, and there is no inherent need for a civilization to devote much effort to those. Anyway if they did, a later one might be able claim credit for the remains. (Cf. the copious pre-dynastic stone dishware.)

We now know Amazonians were domesticating trees at least 10kya, known today only from their major earthworks and from genetic traces in plant genomes.

Professionals can discuss any of that only in the context of evidence found and revealed, which might not be forthcoming for any number of reasons, past and present.

The tens of thousands of dishes carved from stone as hard as quartz and corundum give pause. The ones found in tombs could have been made any time earlier than the tombs they were found in. But anyway I think most are officially pre-dynastic. Certainly the suggested method of manufacture is implausible on its face.

Suggestions that Egyptians melted and molded granite are obviously wrong, because the grain size seen in their products is achievable only with centuries- or millennia-long undisturbed cooling, possible only in nature.

The plural of "sphinx" is "sphinges".

Only if you care about someone's version of correctness above that of being understood

Sphinxen

Sphinxers

> plural sphinxes or sphinges

Looks like either is correct, but I learned a new word!

I wonder if the noses on Mount Rushmore faces will fall off in the next millennium.

We can but hope.

On my schedule for demolishing ill-conceived stonework, that cliff face in Atlanta is top of the list.

I have read suggestions that the nasal obliteration we see in classical sculpture is deliberate sabotage by successors and, more comprehensively, by general orders under Islam's stricture against figurative representation. I don't know how much credence to put in it, vs. natural tendency for cantilevered bits to fall off. But it seems like noses fare strictly worse than other projections.

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