Scientists: The Great Sphinx of Giza was created not only by people

Scientists have been arguing for many years about what the Great Sphinx of Giza might have looked like before it was processed by the Egyptians - and whether they set the shape themselves, or whether nature provided them with the “blank”. A team of American physicists conducted a series of experiments to find out - and reported the results in a new article in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

The theory was that the huge sculpture was not created from scratch by carving the figure of a lion into stone. Instead, over the course of thousands of years, fast wind currents with sand hewed away a block of limestone - and the Egyptians only noticed the resemblance to a lion in the resulting shape and modified the details.

The authors needed to prove that it was possible to obtain a similar shape using the wind. Of course, there was no way to watch a piece of limestone for 4,500 years, so they used materials that allowed them to get results much faster.

Instead of lime, they took pieces of clay, inside which a harder and less susceptible to erosion material was placed - simulating the difference in the density of the material of the Great Sphinx itself. This clay was then washed with a rapid stream of water - simulating hundreds of years of exposure to strong winds.

This simulation made it possible to achieve a shape similar to a sphinx: a piece of denser material from which the clay came off became the head, and the hewn material below became the “neck” and “paws.”

The theory that this is how the main form of the Great Sphinx could have appeared is indirectly confirmed the existence of yardangs in the Egyptian White Desert are bizarre limestone “sculptures” formed erosion. The uneven ridges, angles and curves of the texture are the result of differences in the strength, direction and frequency of wind gusts that have chiseled them over thousands of years. The composition of the stones also influenced the shape: the softer parts of the rock collapsed faster, leaving harder parts of arbitrary shape, which were then modified by the wind.

Scientists have known about these yardangs for a long time, but the public is not so interested in them - after all, the ancient Egyptians did not turn them into a monumental work of art in their time.

Natalia Kopylova

17 minutes ago

0 / 0

Well, of course. The participant sometimes spent the night in conditions of mass... hmm, research, when the experiment participants fell asleep wherever they could, and in order to get out they had to step over them. Participants in the control group did not know that they were being stepped over, and they still grew. Also, as part of the study, experiments were carried out on a small group of children who were given the promise that they would be overstepped and they would not grow. The researchers then reported that the step-over had been accomplished, although this claim was false. The experiment participants believed, cried, but still grew. However, given the sparse data, there is a need to synthesize the data and publish a meta-study.

Natalia Kopylova

8 hours ago

+5 / 0

Small group studies suggest that the effect of stepping on height may not be statistically significant. Thus, the only participant in the study whom the experimenters stepped over still demonstrated height above the population average and significantly above the average in his gender group.