WEIRD Secrets and techniques of Historic Egypt’s Sphinx
Uncovering Secrets and techniques of the Sphinx After many years of analysis, American archaeologist Mark Lehner has some solutions in regards to the mysteries of the Egyptian colossus
When Mark Lehner was a teen within the late Nineteen Sixties, his dad and mom launched him to the writings of the famed clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. Throughout certainly one of his trances, Cayce, who died in 1945, noticed that refugees from the misplaced metropolis of Atlantis buried their secrets and techniques in a corridor of information below the Sphinx and that the corridor could be found earlier than the tip of the twentieth century.
In 1971, Lehner, a bored sophomore on the College of North Dakota, wasn’t planning to seek for misplaced civilizations, however he was “on the lookout for one thing, a significant involvement.” He dropped out of faculty, started hitchhiking and ended up in Virginia Seashore, the place he sought out Cayce’s son, Hugh Lynn, the top of a holistic medication and paranormal analysis basis his father had began. When the muse sponsored a gaggle tour of the Giza plateau—the location of the Sphinx and the pyramids on the western outskirts of Cairo—Lehner tagged alongside. “It was scorching and dusty and never very majestic,” he remembers.
Nonetheless, he returned, ending his undergraduate schooling on the American College of Cairo with help from Cayce’s basis. At the same time as he grew skeptical a few misplaced corridor of information, the location’s unusual historical past exerted its pull. “There have been hundreds of tombs of actual individuals, statues of actual individuals with actual names, and none of them figured within the Cayce tales,” he says.
Lehner married an Egyptian girl and spent the following years plying his drafting abilities to win work mapping archaeological websites throughout Egypt. In 1977, he joined Stanford Analysis Institute scientists utilizing state-of-the-art remote-sensing tools to investigate the bedrock below the Sphinx. They discovered solely the cracks and fissures anticipated of abnormal limestone formations. Working intently with a younger Egyptian archaeologist named Zahi Hawass, Lehner additionally explored and mapped a passage within the Sphinx’s rump, concluding that treasure hunters doubtless had dug it after the statue was constructed.
No human endeavor has been extra related to thriller than the massive, historic lion that has a human head and is seemingly resting on the rocky plateau a stroll from the good pyramids. Happily for Lehner, it wasn’t only a metaphor that the Sphinx is a riddle. Little was identified for sure about who erected it or when, what it represented and exactly the way it associated to the pharaonic monuments close by. So Lehner settled in, working for 5 years out of a makeshift workplace between the Sphinx’s colossal paws, subsisting on Nescafé and cheese sandwiches whereas he examined each sq. inch of the construction. He remembers “climbing all around the Sphinx just like the Lilliputians on Gulliver, and mapping it stone by stone.” The outcome was a uniquely detailed image of the statue’s worn, patched floor, which had been subjected to at the very least 5 main restoration efforts since 1,400 B.C. The analysis earned him a doctorate in Egyptology at Yale.
Acknowledged at this time as one of many world’s main Egyptologists and Sphinx authorities, Lehner has carried out discipline analysis at Giza throughout a lot of the 37 years since his first go to. (Hawass, his pal and frequent collaborator, is the secretary common of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and controls entry to the Sphinx, the pyramids and different government-owned websites and artifacts.) Making use of his archaeological sleuthing to the encircling two-square-mile Giza plateau with its pyramids, temples, quarries and hundreds of tombs, Lehner helped affirm what others had speculated—that some elements of the Giza complicated, the Sphinx included, make up an enormous sacred machine designed to harness the facility of the solar to maintain the earthly and divine order. And whereas he way back gave up on the fabled library of Atlantis, it’s curious, in mild of his early wanderings, that he lastly did uncover a Misplaced Metropolis.
