Giza — the Sphinx, the 'Hall of Records' and the Atlantis theories

OVERVIEW

The Giza pyramid complex and the Great Sphinx, built mostly under the 4th Dynasty (c. 2500 BC), have drawn speculation since antiquity: Pliny recorded locals' belief that the Sphinx was hollow and held a king's tomb; medieval Islamic legends spoke of passages beneath the pyramids and of a pre-Flood king, Surid, who built the Great Pyramid to save his people's knowledge.

HISTORY

Edgar Cayce, the American 'sleeping prophet', said in readings of October–December 1933 that refugees from Atlantis, destroyed around 10,500 BC, built a 'hall of records' between the Sphinx and the Nile with an entrance near its right paw. His Association for Research and Enlightenment backed searches: in 1978 with SRI International, whose radar anomalies near the paws proved natural fissures when drilled; in 1991 on Robert Schoch's survey, when a seismic 'chamber' was claimed under the right paw. Schoch and John Anthony West argued the Sphinx's weathering showed rainfall and a date far older than Khafre; Robert Bauval's Orion correlation theory (1989) matched the three pyramids to Orion's Belt as it stood around 10,500 BC; Graham Hancock combined them in Fingerprints of the Gods (1995). In 1998 a permitted test drilling near the Great Pyramid found a natural cavity and further drilling was refused. In 1999 Zahi Hawass had the flooded Late Period 'Osiris shaft' west of the Sphinx pumped out and fully explored.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Nothing matching Cayce's description has ever been found. Egyptologists date the Sphinx to Khafre: its temple stands on the foundations of Khafre's Valley Temple, luminescence dating of both temples gives the mid-to-late third millennium BC, limestone cut from the Sphinx enclosure went into nearby buildings, and geologists attribute the weathering to Nile floods and rains that continued into the Dynastic period. 'Pyramid power' — models that keep food or sharpen razor blades — began with the dowser Antoine Bovis in the 1930s (who never went to Egypt); there is no evidence it exists. HEARSAY: Wikipedia's list of haunted locations reports visitors seeing a man in early-20th-century clothes, rumoured to be Howard Carter's ghost, and an orb 'pharaoh' floating toward the Valley of the Kings. Filed UNVETTED.

VISITING

The Giza pyramid complex, on the edge of Giza. Visiting arrangements are not recorded in these sources.