EGYPT
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The Sphinx continues to ask riddles
Oedipus solves
the riddle of the Sfingo.
Drawing from an ancient Greek vase.
IV century BC
Facing the east with a thoughtful face, a stone Sphinx — lion with a human head reclines on a high pedestal in front of the high pyramid of Chephren.
Here, in Egypt, on the edge of the desert, the most grandiose sculpture ever made by man has been erected.
Its height is more than 20 meters, and its length is 57 meters.
But what strikes with its boundless mystery is that there is not a word about it in the ancient papyri dating back to the era of the construction of the great Pyramids.
Hieroglyphs brought to us not only the names of the builders of the pyramids, but also the degree of their engineering talent.
The names of skilled architects who created the funeral temples of the pharaohs are known.
But the authors of the Sphinx are unknown to science.
Only 400 years after Khafren, hieroglyphic texts suddenly appear with the name of this Egyptian monument — “shepes ankh”, which means “a living image”.
Science has not found a logical explanation for this.
Even later, the Egyptians suddenly began to identify the giant Sphinx with the god Harmachis.
A legend is born that tells that this huge predator is always awake, guarding the peace of the pyramids.
He sees better at night than during the day.
The guarantee of his power is the cosmos…
In another myth, the Sphinx is entrusted to monitor the sunrise and the rotation of the planets.
He is also obliged to keep an eye on Sirius.
For all this, he should make sacrifices...
In the era of the New Kingdom, that is, from about 1500 BC, a new cult of the Sphinx was born for no apparent reason.
A lion with the head of a pharaoh has become the most frequently encountered image in Egyptian art.
Two small sculptures dating back to the era of Amenhotep III have been decorating the embankment of the Derzhavnaya Neva near the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg since 1832… ..
The Sphinx of Naxos.
560 BC
The sculpture was found by archaeologists on the island of Naxos in the Aegean Sea.
At the same time, the image of the mysterious Sphinx began to cross the borders of Egypt.
In ancient times, the gods and demigods freely roamed from one nation to another.
So, the Romans brought the Asian Astarte to Europe from their military campaigns, not to mention the rich pantheon of ancient Greek gods and goddesses.
As for the Greeks, they really liked the Egyptian Sphinx.
He entered many legends, fairy tales and legends of Hellas, however, in transformed forms.
Originally, the Egyptian Sphinx in ancient Greek myths and fairy tales retained the features of a lion with a man's head.
He wandered along the roads near Parnassus and devoured passers by.
If there were not enough of them, he would approach the city gates and demand victims with a monstrous roar.
Folk fantasy made him the brother of the Lornean hydra, Cerberus, Nemean lion and other monsters.
However, he entered the classical code of ancient legends in a different way — he became a winged monster with the head of a woman, and was called a Sphingo.
This winged lioness lived near Thebes and strangled passing travelers who could not answer the riddle: "Who walks in the morning on four legs, at noon on two, and in the evening on three?”
The Greek Oedipus, passing by the rock where the bloodthirsty Sphinx woman sat, listened to the insidious question and calmly replied that he knew the answer from childhood.
According to one version of the legend, he learned the answer from a wandering storyteller, and according to another — from the river muses.
Anyway, Oedipus answered correctly.
It was about a person at different ages — in infancy, adulthood and old age, when he leans on a crutch.
Out of frustration, Sfingo threw herself off the cliff and crashed.
By the way, this outcome was predicted by the gods of Olympus.
For the liberation from the sinister Sphinx, the Greeks made Oedipus king of Thebes.
He jumped off and went into the desert
The profile of the Sphinx.
The Sphinx is disfigured more by people than by time: in fact, its head, floating above the sands, was even used by the Mamluks as a target for their artillery.
The face of the Sphinx has a height of 5 meters and a maximum width of 4.2 meters, the stump of the nose is almost two meters.
the false beard, attached by Thutmose IV, is now in the Cairo Museum.
Now let us turn to Herodotus ' notes on Egypt.
The father of history in 445 BC told about the smallest details of the great pyramids and ranked them among the first wonders of the world.
He wrote how long the giant pyramid mountains of the pharaohs were built and how many slaves worked on the stones.
He scrupulously listed how many garlic, radishes, and dry tortillas were delivered to them.
But in his” History“, in which he wrote down” everything that he saw and heard in Egypt", the Greek did not mention a single word about the Sphinx.
But Herodotus was not blind, like Homer!
I couldnot help noticing a giant lion in front of the pyramids, could I?
However, he didnot see it!
Before Herodotus, Hecateus of Miletus was gaining wisdom in Egypt, and after him — Hecateus of Abder and the famous geographer and traveler Strabo.
Their notes are detailed, but for some reason they do not mention the Sphinx.
A conspiracy of silence?
But there were already myths about the Sphinx in the Greek epic at that time!
What is the matter?
The mystery becomes even more mystical if we remember that Egyptian officials - servants of the pharaohs meticulously recorded all the expenses associated with the construction of pyramids and religious buildings, took into account workdays, the weight of stones and the length of roads to the valley of the pyramids.
So not a single economic document of the era of the construction of the great pyramids related to the Sphinx has been found by archaeologists.
Is it an accident?
Or is there something else here?
The answer, meanwhile, is found in the work of the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder “Natural History”.
He tells in a narrative tone that in his time the Sphinx was once again cleared of the sands deposited from the West from the desert
Once again!
How many were there?
It turns out that Herodotus, Strabo and other Greeks simply did not see the Sphinx with their own eyes.
He was under a layer of sand.
The mystery is partly explained in the old legends, spread first among the Egyptians, and then among the Arabs.
The Sphinx is a living being, a demigod, a guardian of order.
When he does not like something in the behavior of people, for example, their strife, wars, predatory raids on neighboring tribes or heretical hobbies with other people's idols, he jumps off the pedestal, goes to the Libyan desert at night and buries himself deep in the sand there...
The real essence of the mystery is that from time to time a huge sculpture is covered with sand above the head.
But this happens at the place where it was erected.
The sands from hot Libya are carried by a huge mass even today.
Previously, they did not know how to build barriers, forest strips, as now, and the Sphinx, when the Egyptians suddenly remembered about it, had to be dug out with wooden shovels.
At the end of the last century, a stele was found in Egypt, the text of which was compiled in the XV century BC during the reign of Thutmose IV.
Hieroglyphs say that the pharaoh had a sign in a dream: if he cleans the Sphinx of sand, then his reign will be prosperous.
And the sculpture was once again dug up, having spent almost a year on it...
In the XII century BC, after the liberation of the Nile Valley from the next conquerors, the sculpture was dug up again.
And since that time, a whole epoch in the art of Ancient Egypt has begun, associated with the production of thousands and thousands of small stone lions with a human head — from talismans for wearing on the gru to the size of a live African lion.
Guy gantov is not the case.
The Egyptians built a whole alley of granite sphinxes near the temple of Queen Hatshep Sut.
And such alleys were then arranged at the funeral temples of all subsequent pharaohs.
Recently, information has been discovered that the great Sphinx was dug out of the sand during the reign of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, then under the Roman emperors and Arab rulers in the Nile Valley.
After prolonged sandstorms, it is necessary to clean the monument today, although there is less sand now than before.
By the way, it was the cleaning work that helped the employees of the Department of Antiquities of the ARE to make an amazing discovery.
A bulldozer between the Sphinx and the pyramid of Khafren accidentally uncovered traces of an urban settlement — one of the very first in Egypt.
In the times preceding the great pharaohs, its inhabitants angered their king with something, and he ordered it to be leveled to the ground.
The traces of the city are so blurred by time and people that it is still difficult to determine its origin.
One thing is clear: it is much older than the pyramids.
Already the first comparisons of all these phenomena, facts, historical records and legends made scientists doubt the well established opinion that the Sphinx was erected in the era of Djoser, Chephren and Cheops.
What is the Egyptian Sphinx sick with?
The Great Sphinx of Giza.
Increase
This giant lion with a human face, carved out of a rock, reaches a height of 21 meters, and a length of about 73 meters.
According to Herodotus, there is a temple under the Sphinx, also rocky, connected by a long tunnel to a lake and an island with sarcophagi hidden inside the rock on which the pyramid of Cheops stands.
The monument was restored more than once, but the sand again hid it, sometimes up to the throat.
The most famous restoration was undertaken by Thutmose IV, who, during his rest in the shade of the colossus after hunting gazelles, was visited in a dream by the god of the Sphinx Horem Akhet, or "Mountains of the Horizon", who commanded him to perform this pious deed.
After clearing the Sphinx, Thutmose, as promised in the dream, received the Egyptian throne.
The stele between the lion's paws reminds of this story.
The restoration of the stone blocks was carried out already in the Ptolemaic period.
The Romans also took measures to free it from sand and erected an altar at the great monument.
The last sand clearing was started in 1926; restoration work continues to this day.
Napoleon Bonaparte, and before him the Arab sages, struck by the sight of the Sphinx against the backdrop of the majestic pyramids, expressed the idea that the stones processed by the hands of the ancient Egyptians are timeless.
Yes, thousands of years have spared these monuments.
But the people themselves damaged them.
The cladding from the stepped pyramids was stripped off by the Arab Caliphs for their palaces.
One of the rulers of Egypt ordered to beat off the nose of the Sphinx.
At the beginning of the XVIII century, another tyrant fired at the face of the sculpture from cannons.
Napoleon's soldiers fired into the eyes of the Sphinx with rifles.
The English lords recaptured the stone beard and took it to the British Museum...
Nowadays, the acrid smoke of Cairo lime kilns penetrates into the pores of the statue.
They are corroded by stones and car engine exhausts.
The Sphinx is clearly ill now.
In 1990, a consultation of specialists from Egypt, the USA, France, and Germany gathered.
The team consisted of geologists, chemists, ecologists, restorers of antiquities.
The very idea of such a comprehensive examination arose after a large stone piece broke off from the Sphinx's neck on a summer night in 1988 and fell down with a crash.
Then they weighed it and were horrified — as much as 350 kg!
After that, UNESCO became concerned.
A field laboratory with various analyzers and a powerful computer was installed next to the monument.
The French began their work by scanning the damaged head with ultrasonic emitters.
There were dangerous cracks inside.
German Professor F. Proyser found traces of the 1966 repair — external cracks on the neck, sealed with poor cement, prone to rapid erosion.
The Americans were saddened by the state of the Sphinx's paws.
What conclusions did the council draw?
The opinion of experts is as follows: hundreds of millions of dollars are needed to save the sculpture from destruction, and for the first time it is necessary to close the monument with a plastic cap and prohibit tourist buses from approaching it.
During the XX century, it was damaged more than in the previous 4000 years...
Having made such a conclusion, the members of the council went home.
They couldnot get the money.
The Egyptians began to restore it on their own.
Large cracks were sealed with new synthetic compounds, the pedestal was strengthened, the fallen fragments were found and put in place.
The British were required to immediately return the beard and put it in place to strengthen the 900 ton head of the Sphinx.
The state of disrepair and the repair of the ancient sculpture that has begun have aroused a new interest of science in the mysteries of the Sphinx.
Unexpected and sometimes precocious hypotheses appeared.
But without them, as you know, it is impossible.
According to one of them, the ritual essence of the Sphinx is to be the guardian of the necropolis, founded even before the construction of the great pyramids.
Traces of such a necropolis have been found, but have not been investigated due to the lack of funds.
Then the assumption was born that the pharaoh's beard was attached to the head under the Rameses in order to give the rounded non Egyptian facial features a resemblance to the pharaohs of the XIX dynasty.
And yet: it is suggested that in ancient times the stone lion was painted with ochre, which means that it was erected before the arrival of the Egyptians in the Nile Valley.
No one disputed the presence of ochre on the statue, but a discussion broke out about the age of the sculpture...
Meanwhile, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture has drawn up a master plan for the restoration of the Sphinx, designed for ten years.
When some travel companies allocated funds for repairs, they decided to spend them on protecting the pedestal from brackish subsurface waters.
A group of foreign hydrologists and geologists was invited.
And then a new mystery of the Sphinx began...
He is a contemporary of Atlantis
About a year before the arrival of hydrologists in Egypt, a cavalcade of orange vans drove up to the foundation of the sculpture.
People in sunglasses, tropical helmets and overalls with hieroglyphs on the back quickly poured out of the cars.
However, these were Japanese letters.
Tokyo archaeologists led by Professor S. Yoshimura enlightened the array of the pyramid of Cheops with echolocators, after which they decided to examine the stones of the Sphinx.
And after three days, the Japanese came to a stunning conclusion: “The stones of the sculpture are older than the blocks of the pyramid.”
Let's make a reservation: the Japanese experts did not mean the geological age of the rock from which the lion with the human face is made, but the age of the sculpture, that is, the time of processing of natural stone.
Then Tokyo scientists announced a second sensation: electronic equipment under the left paw of the stone statue discovered a narrow tunnel leading towards the pyramid of Khafren.
It starts at a depth of two meters and goes downhill obliquely.
It is impossible to trace it further.
Professor S. Yoshimura promised to create a new device specifically for the study of this structure.
This confirmed the rumors that had long been circulating among the Arabs, who claimed that there was a tunnel dug by the Egyptians under the Sphinx, through which water could be let in during an attempt to rob the burial chamber in the pyramid of Chephren...
After a while, a team of hydrologists settled down at the pedestal of the ancient lion.
And a new sensation: at the base of the pedestal, traces of erosion from a large flow of water were found.
As soon as this message was published in the Washington Bulletin on Nature Research by new methods, a statement appeared in the press that the Nile used to be wider and flowed around the rock from which the infinitely mysterious Sphinx was cut down.
How so?
After all, there is a desert all around!
What's the Nile here?
” Most likely, there are traces not of the Nile, but of a flood, "the hydrologists suggested," a mighty flood of water.
And he went from north to south.
It was not a flood of the Nile, but a biblical catastrophe!”
After analysis and consultation with geophysicists, the probable date of the flood was named: eight thousand years BC!
The British, repeating the analysis, pushed this date back to twelve thousand years into the depths of the centuries, and noted that the traces of water erosion fall on the treated part of the rock on which the Sphinx is based.
French archaeologists have noticed that the dating of the Egyptian flood coincides with the date of the death of the legendary Atlantis according to Plato...
No, nothing is new under the moon.
Back in the XII century, Europeans got acquainted with the Arabic legend, according to which the pyramids were built to save the Egyptians during the flood, and the Sphinx was built to warn people in advance about the possibility of a catastrophe.
It is no accident that his eyes are not only wise, but also eternally alert...
And yet... the Sphinx has a third eye directed into Space!
The mystical Sphinx has been looking at the sunrise of the eternal luminary for several millennia.
But he is not silent.
He continues to ask riddles and waits for the Oedipus of the next century.
We will wait and hope!
Source: Unknown
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