So how old do I look?
The Great Sphinx stumps the experts again

BY JAMES M. PETHOKOUKIS

The riddle of the Great Sphinx is well known: What animal walks on all fours in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs at night? (The answer is man, of course.) But that's not the only Sphinx-teaser. Is the sculpture thousands of years older than the pyramids, as controversial geological evidence suggests? If true, that means it was built at the end of the Stone Age, when mud buildings were the height of human achievement.

Mainstream Egyptology says the Sphinx was carved from bedrock during the reign of Khafre (2520-2494 B.C.) as a self-tribute to the pharaoh. Then an unlikely agitator shook things up. In the 1979 book Serpent in the Sky, amateur archaeologist and Egyptian tour guide John Anthony West proposed that the Sphinx was far older than the pyramids–and that its severe weathering and erosion were caused not by winds and blowing sand, but by rain. Ipso facto, the Sphinx must have been built thousands of years earlier, back when arid Egypt was all wet.

Given West's lack of scientific credentials, the "old-Sphinx theory" attracted little interest until 1990 when he brought in Robert Schoch, a trained geologist and Boston University professor. Schoch found rock fissures in the Sphinx that suggested creation by running water or rainfall. He concluded that the front and side dated from 5000 to 7000 B.C. (although no one disputes that it was later recarved as a royal totem). But if Schoch is right, a cruder yet still impressive "proto-Sphinx" was carved in the even more distant past.

Egyptologists attribute the Sphinx's weathering to wet sand from Nile floods, or morning dew that condensed and expanded natural salt in the rock, causing layers to flake off. "But none of us can prove our point," admits James Harrell, a geology professor at the University of Toledo and a "wet sand" proponent. Both sides spin out analytical articles.

Who carved it? Call the geological argument a draw. But if the Sphinx were built millenniums earlier, where are the traces of the culture that carved it? "Perhaps all their pots got washed away," West says. "If you pin these guys down, they really think these people were refugees from Atlantis, the Lost Continent," Harrell scoffs. West calls Atlantis the "A word" and claims to use the name only as shorthand for the mystery civilization. "I really don't care what their passports said," says West, who hopes more digging at Giza might reveal the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx's age.