John Henry West is an unlikely character to be creating a new riddle of the Sphinx for scientists to ponder.
He is a self-proclaimed mystic who believes in astrology, a mentality not likely to garner respect among the lab-coat set. Worse still, West has no scholarly credentials, and academics are notoriously deaf to suggestions from well-meaning amateurs.
Yet twice in recent months, he has had the satisfaction of seeing major scientific gatherings debate his pet theory.
West thinks archeologists have greatly underestimated the age of the Great Sphinx, the famous Egyptian monument that sits among the pyramids at Giza, not far from Cairo.
If he is correct, publishers should institute a mass recall of their history textbooks, which report that the Sphinx, a colossal statue of a lion with a human head, was built by Pharaoh Khafre about 2500 B.C.
West estimates that the Sphinx is at least twice-maybe even three times-that old. He hopes eventual vindication of his theory will set cash registers ringing at his Sacred Sites/Sacred Science Tours in Saugerties, N.Y., from which he regularly leads excurisons to Giza specially tailored for devotees of the occult who think the ancient Egyptians possessed a storehouse of mystical and scientific knowledge contemporary scholars stubbornly refuse to acknowledge.
”It`s a breakthrough just having my ideas discussed at this kind of forum,” West said in Chicago after a panel discussion at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
”Geologists are not a bunch of New Age crystal gazers,” he said, pointing to members of the panel.
Nor are they normally likely to poach on another discipline`s territory. The academic world is governed by an implicit non-aggression pact, with geologists refraining from criticizing the work of archeologists, etc. But last October, when West`s chief scholarly ally, Boston University professor Robert Schoch, presented his theory at the Geological Society of America`s meetings in San Diego, 70 geologists signed up to help with further efforts to prove their archeological colleagues wrong about the Sphinx`s age.
At the panel discussion in Chicago, Schoch stated his case with a slide show. His grand finale was a shot of West, bearded and wearing a pith helmet appropriate for the desert sun, squeezed into a deep vertical crevice in a wall enclosing the Sphinx. Like the statue itself, that wall was carved right out of the bedrock of the Giza Plateau, a limestone formation about 5 miles west of the Nile River, after the surrounding stone had been quarried and used in the construction of nearby temples.
Any geologist worth his salt, Schoch observed, recognizes that kind of crevice as the classic weathering pattern rain produces as, over long periods, it etches grooves into a rock formation. Indeed, looking at Schoch`s slide, a layman could imagine torrents of storm water cascading and splashing down the Great Sphinx`s sides.
The only problem with that mental picture, Schoch noted, is that the monument stands in a region where little rain now falls. Moreover, after the age of the pharaohs had passed, sand from the surrounding desert was often allowed to pile up around the Sphinx, until it was finally removed when the Egyptian government realized Giza`s value to the tourist trade.
Drawings and photographs made by 18th and 19th Century travelers show the Sphinx buried virtually up to its nose in sand dunes.
Schoch argued that, given the area`s paucity of rain, plus the limited time the Sphinx stood fully exposed to the weather, a birthday of 2500 B.C. just doesn`t allow enough time for those vertical crevices to have appeared. He calculates that the Sphinx had to have been built much earlier, somewhere between 7000 and 5000 B.C. During that era, the Sahara wasn`t yet fully formed and Egypt enjoyed a greater annual rainfall.
Time to start digging
The opposition`s case was presented by Mark Lehner, a University of Chicago archeologist who spent a decade studying the Great Sphinx firsthand. He noted that Schoch and West`s theory flies in the face of the scholarly world`s long-established chronology of Egyptian history.
The carving of the Sphinx out of a single, massive piece of rock obviously was a major technological achievement, Lehner noted. So it couldn`t have been accomplished before the dawn of civilization, which archeologists date to about 3000 B.C.
In the prehistoric period to which Schoch and West attribute the Sphinx, Egypt was still inhabited by nomadic hunters who lived by a simple Stone Age culture, Lehner argued.
”For the Sphinx to have been made when Schoch thinks it was, there would have to have been a civilization in Egypt much, much older than that of the pharaohs,” Lehner said. ”Yet where is the evidence for that high culture? We are asked to believe in the existence of an ancient civilization which seems to have produced the Sphinx and not one thing more. We haven`t found so much as a single piece of pottery in Egypt dating back 10,000 years.”
Responding to Lehner, Schoch shrugged off the objection that archeologists have no evidence of a civilization in Egypt before the pharaohs. ”As a geologist, that`s not my problem,” Schoch said.
He argued that if Egyptologists haven`t found the ancient culture responsible for the Sphinx, that could be because they haven`t looked hard enough or dug deep enough. So, Schoch said, they need to unpack their shovels and start excavating again-a friendly suggestion not likely to endear Schoch to his archeological colleagues.
Wait until tenure
Indeed, Schoch became something of a persona non grata with Egyptologists as soon as he started championing West`s ideas about the Sphinx. When reports of his presentation at the Geological Society of America filtered through the academic world last fall, archeologists rushed to their local newspapers to denounce Schoch`s views.
A fellow Boston University professor even suggested (and in the faculty newsletter, to boot) that Schoch had fallen under the spell of ”charlatans and sensation seekers.”
”I kind of sensed that reaction was coming,” Schoch says. ”Colleagues had advised me not to get involved with the Sphinx, but to stick to my academic specialty until I had tenure.”
Schoch, who was introduced to John Henry West by a mutual friend in December 1989, followed that timetable closely. In April 1990, Schoch, who has a doctorate in geology from Yale, was informed by his dean that he had received tenure, academia`s equivalent of a lifetime job guarantee. Two months later, he flew to Egypt and joined West`s crusade.
Schoch was the scholarly ally West had been seeking since undergoing his own intellectual conversion from rationalist to mystic.
West, who grew up in White Plains, N.Y., majored in economics in college, then went off to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza to become a writer.
”In the 1950s, Ibiza was still a bohemian paradise,” West says. ”One of my fellow novelists was also a practicing astrologer. When I pooh-poohed astrology as unscientific, he loaned me some books, saying I shouldn`t knock it until I`d tried it.”
West cast his own charts and did, indeed, become a convert. Subsequently, an editor asked him to write a book on astrology (he had already published novels and short stories). While working on that project, West discovered the writings of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, a maverick Egyptologist and occult philosopher.
”Schwaller`s books were out of print, and he`s difficult to read anyhow,” West says. ”So I became his Boswell.”
A sentence stands out
In his book ”Serpent in the Sky,” West describes how Schwaller de Lubicz, a French mathematician, went to Egypt in the 1930s and had a religious experience at the great temple of Luxor. Convinced that the ancient Egyptians knew the innermost secrets of the universe, Schwaller de Lubicz spent 20 years demonstrating his ideas.
Carefully measuring the country`s ancient monuments, he argued that the pyramids and temples were built according to carefully constructed geometric ratios. That number symbolism, Schwaller de Lubicz argued, derived from the ancient Egyptians` sacred science, a body of mystical knowledge superior in many ways to modern science.
West spent a year in London`s British Museum reading Schwaller de Lubicz`s books and, one day, a line seemed to leap right off the page.
”Schwaller had written, `The Great Sphinx of Giza shows indisputable effects of water weathering,` ” West says. ”Since Egypt has been dry for a long time, it meant the Sphinx has to be much older than scholars think. So I took a second look at ancient Egyptian mythologies that speak about a civilization even older than the pharaohs.”
Until Schoch joined his cause, it was virtually impossible for West to get an audience for his theories because they challenge academic orthodoxy. Since then, West has been fast learning how to meet scholars on their own ground.
He explains that traditional archeologists ascribe the Sphinx to the Pharaoh Khafre, who ruled about 2500 B.C. and also built one of the pyramids at Giza. The ancient text that makes that identification is damaged and difficult to decipher. But conventional scholars say the textual evidence is supplemented by the fact that a portrait statue of Khafre has come down to us. While the Sphinx`s face was badly damaged in medieval times, archeologists think they see a likeness of Khafre on the monument.
Calling in forensics
West, though, says their visual guesswork needs to be put to a scientific test. So he hired Detective Frank Domingo, the senior forensic officer of the New York City Police Department.
One of Domingo`s regular duties is to reconstruct portraits of crime victims whose bodies have decomposed. But once before, he had consulted on an archeological mystery when excavators uncovered fragments of portrait sculpture of Alexander the Great and asked Domingo what the Macedonian king looked like.
”I got some mugshots from a police precinct in a Greek neighborhood and used their features to fill in the sculpture`s missing parts,” Domingo says. Last October, Domingo and West flew to Egypt so the detective could take measurements of the Sphinx`s surviving facial features. Then they visited the Cairo museum, which houses Khafre`s statue, to take similar measurements.
Now Domingo is carefully comparing the two sets of data. Soon he will issue his verdict on whether the Sphinx looked like Khafre, as archeologists think, or whether it is a portrait of another, much older Egyptian ruler, as West believes.
”I got a hunch which was the case when we were standing there in the Cairo Museum,” Domingo says. ”But I don`t want to say anything until I`ve analyzed the data. This thing should be decided on the basis of science, not emotion.”
