b. 1957 · A portrait
A Boston University geologist argues weathering on the Great Sphinx points to rainfall, not wind, pushing its true age back thousands of years before Egypt's traditional timeline. Egyptologists and most geologists reject the redating.
The line above is how his claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.
Invited by independent writer John Anthony West, he examined the Sphinx enclosure in 1990 and identified vertical, rounded weathering grooves he read as centuries of rainfall, not the wind and sand typical of Egypt's dry climate.
He presented the redating, pushing the Sphinx's origin to before roughly 5000 BCE, to the Geological Society of America. It drew wide press coverage but no support from Egyptologists, who saw no room for it in the site's known chronology.
Geologist James Harrell argued the weathering was better explained by centuries of wet sand filling the enclosure than by rainfall. Archaeologists Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner countered with architectural and stratigraphic evidence tying the Sphinx firmly to the Fourth Dynasty.
He continues teaching at Boston University and defending the redating in books and talks. Most geologists and Egyptologists still reject it, and no new excavation or dating evidence has shifted the Sphinx's accepted Fourth Dynasty age.