THE SPHINX

West and Schoch's treatment of the evidence tying the Sphinx to Khafre's pyramid complex is incorrect. They point to the two-stage construction of the Khafre temples, but never cite the detailed architectural studies of this kind of construction at Giza. There is no doubt that the large limestone blocks of the core mid the granite blocks of the casing of the temple walls were built at the same time. In both the Sphinx Temple and Mortuary Temple of Menkaure's Pyramid there are frozen moments where the builders left the work incomplete. Even today you can see where one team was trimming back the rough limestone core walls while another, working several yards behind, was fitting the granite casing. The limestone blocks are not weathered under the intact granite casing on the Khafre Valley Temple. Where the granite casing remains in situ, the original face of the limestone core block behind it is preserved.

Vest and Schoch perceive that the south and west walls of the Sphinx ditch are eroded more at the top than at the bottom--the effect, they say, of rain water beating back a rock face that was originally vertical.

But looking.at the eastern end of the south wall, where much of the original face is still preserved, it is clear that the ancient quarrymen cut the face at this slope in the first place. Regarding the west wall, West and Schoch seem to get tangled in their own argument. Selim Hassan, who excavated at the Sphinx in 1936, pointed out that the drainage channel along the north side of the Khafre causeway opens into the southwestern corner at the back of the Sphinx ditch. This suggests that the ancient quarrymen formed the Sphinx ditch after the Khafre causeway. Schoch, however, believes that Hassan's point is "negated" because "the back of the Sphinx enclosure" was excavated by Khafre five millennia after the time of the mysterious Sphinx builders. Accordingly, the back wall should not show rain weathering because in West-Schoch logic that would date it thousands of years before Khafre. Why, then, do we see Schoch in the Mystery video patting that same back wall of the Sphinx ditch and calling it a "classic textbook example of what happens to a limestone wall when you have rain beating down on it for thousands of years"?