Join Randall's community and the live calls: https://www.skool.com/kosmogonia
Recorded live inside Kosmogonia, Randall Carlson's online university, where members join the calls and ask their own questions.
How old is the Great Sphinx? The accepted answer is about 4,500 years, carved in the Old Kingdom. Randall, a geologist, tests that date the way a geologist would: by how fast limestone erodes.
He starts with old gravestones, where a date carved into fresh stone records how much of the surface has weathered away since. Then he takes us into the Sphinx enclosure. Old Kingdom quarries of the same supposed age still show their pick marks. The walls around the Sphinx are rounded and cut into deep vertical fissures, which he reads as the signature of water running over limestone.
From there he works through published measurements of limestone erosion: sea cliffs at La Jolla, California, the intertidal notch at Point Peron in Western Australia, dated tombstones from an 1890 study, limestone cubes left on the roof of the US Bureau of Standards, and boulders that sat 27 years in the Tennessee River. Applied to the Sphinx walls, none of them fits an Old Kingdom date. By the tombstone rate, he estimates about 12,500 years, in the middle of the Younger Dryas. His conclusion: either a great volume of water washed over the Sphinx, or it is far older than the Old Kingdom.
Members ask along the way, including whether the Sphinx once had a lion's head, which Randall connects to the Age of Leo. He closes on flood boulders in the wadis of the Sinai and the same kind of boulders at Swan Falls on the Snake River in Idaho, and asks whether one cause reached both sides of the planet at the end of the last ice age.
0:00 What gravestones reveal about erosion
3:58 The quarry walls around the Sphinx
6:11 Robert Schoch and the age of the Sphinx
7:19 The Sphinx and her riddle
12:56 Pick marks in dated quarries
14:22 The eroded walls of the Sphinx enclosure
18:58 Was the head once a lion?
22:47 Limestone eroded by nature
26:17 How fast do sea cliffs erode?
38:57 More water or more time
42:18 The tombstone rate: about 12,500 years
44:35 Limestone cubes in Washington
46:18 Boulders in the Tennessee River
51:49 Egypt's wetter past
55:42 Flood boulders in the Sinai
1:04:49 Swan Falls, Idaho: the same signature