posted November 11, 2011 08:48 PM
The Sphinx: not who you might think! http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/louxsie/sphinxrant.html
The Great Sphinx, which stands guardian to the pyramids at Giza in Egypt, is as inscrutable as the Pyramids themselves. Keeping watch over the necropolis attributed to Khafre (alleged builder of the second pyramid), it gazes into the path of the rising sun in the east, and has done so for thousands of years.
Conventional wisdom states that this massive limestone beast - 240' long, 65' high and 46' wide - was built by Khafre around 4500 years ago, but many investigators of the more mystical and alternative history of Egypt claim it could be as much as 9000, or even 12,000, years old. The dating of the Sphinx has been a notorious hotbed of alternative speculation for years, since Professor Robert Schoch lent credence to the theory by stating categorically that it shows clear signs of water weathering - something which cannot possibly have happened in Egypt for at least 7000 years.
In their analysis of many ancient sites around the globe, alternative researchers such as Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock suggest that the Sphinx and Pyramids could be part of a lost civilisation dating to the 11th millennium BCE, with monuments being globally constructed in around 10,500BCE in honour of some kind of stellar cult, possibly a survival from sunken Atlantis. This is incredible stuff, whether true or not, and will certainly keep the archaeologists busy for the foreseeable future, attempting to find evidence to refute such claims.
What do we know categorically to be true about the Sphinx? We know that it is made of fairly soft limestone, and was, when originally built (whenever that was!), encased in tougher limestone blocks much as the Pyramids were. These in time were lost or stolen to build the houses of the growing city of Cairo.
The word 'sphinx' is Greek, and comes from the Egyptian word 'shespankh' meaning living statue. Its Arabic name is Abu el Hol, or Father of Terror. It is widely accepted as being a combination of lion's body and man's head, with many suggestions over the years as to whose head it might be. Khafre, say those who believe that Sphinx and Pyramids were built by the same man. Several studies have been undertaken to find the identity of the Sphinx, including comparisons with known statues of Khafre, and some leading archaeological figures and other specialists in anatomy have stated quite categorically that Khafre and the Sphinx are structurally incompatible - they cannot be the same face. Suffice it to say that, thanks to Science's control over what people read and learn, the assumption that its head sits on a lion's body has universally been accepted for centuries.
The history of the Sphinx is peppered with mysterious tales. The Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmoses IV (fl.c.1400-1390BCE) apparently had a dream in which the Sphinx appeared to him begging to be released from the sand which covered it. It was certainly neck deep in sand when Napoleon came to Egypt in 1798, and in 1925 the French archaeologist Émile Baraize had to clear away the sand in order to study the animal in all its finery.
Since then, weather, pollution and botched attempts at restoration have taken their toll on the beast, and it is not almost always covered in scaffolding. The fabled story of how the Sphinx lost its nose - that it was shot at during target practice by one of Napoleon's men - is utter myth. It is reported that a 14th century Mameluke took offence at it, and decided to wipe the 'pagan smile' from its face by hacking away its nose.
The so-called 'Sleeping Prophet', Edgar Cayce, prophesied that in the last decade of the 20th century a secret chamber would be discovered between the Sphinx's paws which would contain sacred scrolls from the long lost island of Atlantis. There is a chamber beneath the Sphinx whose purpose is as yet unknown, and the authorities are being very cagey about letting anyone near enough to speculate. Since 1999, most of the 'heretical' Egyptologists - Hancock, Bauval, Alan Alford et al - have reputedly been banned from even entering the country!
These then are the very few facts which pertain to this most mysterious of Egyptian symbols; what of the speculation which has been rife for thousands of years as to the identity and meaning of the guardian beast?
As stated above, it has been widely accepted for many centuries that the Sphinx is a human face atop a lion's body. This ties in nicely with Bauval and Hancock's ideas of a global community around 10,500BCE, as at this time the sun would have appeared in the east (the direction the Sphinx faces) in the constellation of Leo, the Lion. However, it should be noted that though Hancock subscribes to an earlier than accepted date for the Sphinx's building, Bauval merely speculates that it could have been designed around 10,500BCE, and not built until around 2500BCE, which is a far more acceptable date to most Egyptologists.
And of course if it was built at the time of the sun being in Leo, then it makes perfect sense for it to be modelled on a lion. But, despite the lion's reputation in our times as the king of the jungle, it will have been noted by even the stubbornest of archaeologists that there is no jungle, and indeed no indigenous lion population in Egypt, and that there is no particular reason why the lion should have been venerated to any especial degree in ancient times.
There are lion-like deities in the Ancient Egyptian pantheon, but these are to the best of my knowledge all female (making the Sphinx's Arabic name something of a misnomer!), and not of the kind of temperament that one would normally associate with a guardian. In her fierce form of Pasht, the cat goddess Bast is sometimes depicted as a lion, but the more familiar form of a lion is given to Sekhmet, the fearsome warrior daughter of the sun god Re who slaughters men to drink their blood, and to appease whom the custom began of sacrificing a member of the family over the crop fields at the time of sowing to ensure a bountiful harvest, free from Sekhmet's fierce and crop-withering gaze.
Now it doesn't take much imagination to see that such fierce cats would make singularly poor guardians of the dead. And who ever heard of a 'guard cat' anyway? It seems more logical to us now, and no doubt would also have done to the Egyptians of the past, to use a tamer, more passive animal to protect the bodies of their dead. Yes, you guessed it, a guard dog.
Now who out of the Egyptian deities best typifies this notion of a guard dog? Why, it's our old friend Anubis, jackal-headed god of mummification and the Underworld. In a move bound to upset the fragile balance of Egyptology even further, Alan Alford - fresh from distressing Biblical scholars - wrote a further tome in which he proclaimed the all too evident concept that the Sphinx is a representation of Anubis.
Let's just refresh our memories a bit here: Anubis the god of burial sites, the guardian of the Underworld, the vital link between the soul of the dead man and his eternal life in the realm of the dead, the god who sacrificed himself so that the slain and dismembered Osiris could be reborn as King of the Dead. Anubis who is most often to be found (in statuary) lying on his belly staring forwards into the middle distance! D'oh!
Anubis can be seen as the most important of the Egyptian deities. Re rose and fell out of favour with new developments in religion, Osiris and Isis became part of a holy family and were honoured by all for a time, but the one constant figure to whom all Egyptians looked at the point of their death was Anubis. For a society obsessed more with the life to come than the present life, being able to pass through the trials of death was vital, and as the guardian of the gates of the Underworld, Anubis was responsible for leading the dead man into the hall of Ma'at to receive divine judgement. He is seen in many temple inscriptions aiding Thoth and Ma'at in the Ceremony of the Weighing of the Heart, in which the dead man's purity of soul was tested.
If there is one certain thing in life, it is death - and at the point of death, Anubis was the guy you wanted on your side! Who better then to look after the many dead souls in the necropolis beneath the Pyramids? Anubis really is the best dog for the job! It is said that he was the son of the priestess/goddess Erishkigal in Ancient Mesopotamia, but since the Mesopotamian theocracy and priesthood were solely for women, he sought his fame elsewhere. He settled in Egypt, and quickly established himself as a vital link between the living and the dead, knowing as he did the secrets of mummification and rituals for the preservation of dead tissue.
In Egypt, this Cult of the Dead rose to pre-eminence early and maintained its hold over the popular imagination for centuries. The part he played in the mythical cycle of Osiris made him the ultimate protector and faithful servant of all those who are pure of heart; the perfect symbol of justice and honourable defence. It is said that Anubis even shed his own skin to wrap around the dismembered parts of Osiris to bring him back to life, thus sacrificing his own life for his King. For his loyalty he was rewarded with deification himself.
Anubis is not strictly speaking a dog, but nor is he really a jackal, though he is most often referred to as the jackal-headed god because of portrayals of him in ancient statuary and sacred texts. It is truer to say that it was the semi-wild dogs of Ancient Egypt that provided his birth as an Egyptian totemic deity. These dogs are certainly related to the jackal, but are not entirely the same species. Jackals are not particularly renowned for their care for humanity, but the dog, the domesticated form of proto-jackal and semi-wild dogs, certainly is. Anubis' position as divine guard dog becomes more established the more you look into this.
For the Sphinx to be a representation of Anubis certainly makes more cultural sense for Egypt, because of his role with protection and guidance after death, and because of his importance in the divine hierarchy. Lions, when they appear in Egyptian cultural references, tend to be a dualistic concept, and it must be said that there is no evidence of a second Sphinx being built on the Giza site to such a grand scale, something we would expect if it was supposed to be a lion. There are many sphinxes in Ancient Egyptian statuary, and almost always they will be found in pairs, lining the causeway to a temple, e.g. Karnak (ram-headed sphinxes).
If we return to the notion of a stellar cult, it will be remembered that the assumption of the Sphinx being a lion fits in well with the idea of an 11th millennium BCE culture, because of the rising sun in Leo. So if we now assume that the Sphinx is Anubis, how does this fit into the astrological scene?
As well as their obsession with death and the afterlife, the Egyptians were on a more practical level entirely dependent on the annual flooding of the Nile, without which the water could not reach the fields and crops could not grow nor animals be able to graze and fatten. It is perhaps telling in the light of all this 'doggie' talk that the Ancient Egyptians used the rising of one particular star to mark the point in the year when they knew the Nile was about to rise and provide sustenance for the land. And the modern name of that star? Of course, it is Sirius, the 'Dog Star'!
And when you consider also that the start of the Egyptian year was the period knows as Thoth, the association with Anubis and the Cult of the Dead becomes even more unavoidable. The astrological significance of the Nile floods, the rising of Sirius, and the complex divine hierarchy which developed in Ancient Egypt largely dictated the placement of towns along the river, many of which became cult centres to the worship of various animal totems. Whilst each centre might have its special figure - the Apis bulls, the cats of Bubastis etc - the presiding animal god was always Anubis.
Death and life were seen as intrinsically linked to the Ancient Egyptians, and Anubis' role - the part he played in the Osirian mythology, and his own part in the Thoth/Ma'at triumvirate - was that of the way to life through death.
So could the Sphinx at Giza really be Anubis? It gazes east into the rising sun, symbol of renewed light/life after the darkness of night/death; it supervises a vast necropolis; and protects the Pyramids, the ultimate symbols of Pharaonic power. Perhaps that 'pagan smile' the Mameluke lord wanted to destroy was really a long, dog-like muzzle, the last remaining evidence of Ancient Egypt's animalistic deism.
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All my love, with all my Heart
lotusheartone
Lindaland
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posted November 07, 2011 10:03 PM
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posted November 10, 2011 06:48 AM
posted November 11, 2011 09:43 PM