It was much rainier in Egypt circa 2000 B.C., which caused the water erosion of the Spinx quarry, noted by Schoch and others.
Wrong!
Even staunch Egyptologists who oppose Schochs' conclusions on the age of the sphinx insist the amount of rain needed to produce the weathering patterns on it could only have fallen thousands of yrs before 2000-2500 B.C .The time they originally believe it was built. Recent evidence suggests it is MUCH older.
Another excerpt from the same source:
Something, clearly, was worth investigating here. West knew, of course, that most Egyptologists believed that the Sphinx was built in 2500 BC in the time of the pharaoh Chephren (of Khafre), who is identified with the Second Pyramid at Giza. He also knew that this belief was now so entrenched that it would take an intellectual bulldozer to tug it out. Yet his study had shown him that this believe was more a dogma than any-thing else. He asked himself if a proof-positive identification between Khafre and the Sphinx would stand in an 'open court' under public scrutiny?
The answer was no. The reason was, quite simply, this. There was no inscriptions - not a single one - either carved on a wall or a stela or written on the throngs of papyri that identified Khafre (or anyone else, for that matter) with the construction of the Sphinx and its nearby temples. As for the proximity of Khafre's pyramid to the Sphinx (in fact it is 1700 feet away) this did not prove that both monuments were built as one complex nor, more relevantly, at the same epoch. By such standards future generations of archaeologists may one day allocate ownership of the Sphinx to the builder of the Sound & Light theatre because of its proximity to the Sphinx complex or - as someone else has put it - attribute St. Paul's Cathedral to General Gordon of Khartoum just because his statue was found in it. In short, Khafre may well be the quintessential 'Kilroy was here' of antiquity. So could the Sphinx be much older than the reign of Khafre, as West had long suspected it was? Could this hypothesis explain, for example, the strange vertical weathering on the statue?
In 1991 John West rounded a crack team of scientists who were not hampered by an ingrained Egyptological consensus, and took them to Giza. Along came Dr. Robert Schoch, a prominent geologist and professor from Boston University to examined the unique weathering patterns on the Sphinx and its enclosure. His conclusions, which came after several months of analysis, was to convulse the world of archaeology. The vertical weathering patterns on the Sphinx and its enclosure, Schoch argued, were not caused by wind effect, as had previously been thought, but by water - water from torrential rains and pouring down in sheets over these ancient structures. But how could this be? Was Schoch saying that such heavy rains only fell on the Sphinx area but nowhere else at Giza?
That was impossible, retorted the Egyptologists. Not impossible, said Schoch, if it is conceded that the Sphinx was built at an epoch when such rains were common in this region but that the other monuments at Giza, however, were built long after these rains had stopped occurring. Again impossible, replied the ruffled Egyptologists; such heavy rains stopped occurring thousands of years before the time of Khafre. Schoch politely shrugged his shoulders. This, he answered, was not his problem.
