Imatge de l'autor

Sobre l'autor

Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D., a tenured faculty member at Boston University, earned his doctorate in geology and geophysics at Yale University in 1983. His books include Pyramid Quest, Voyages of the Pyramid Builders, Voices of the Rocks, Stratigraphy, Environmental Science, and The Parapsychology mostra'n més Revolution. mostra'n menys
Crèdit de la imatge: Robert Bauval (right) and Robert Schoch at the prehistoric cult centre of Belintash (Bulgaria) in 2014. By Filipov Ivo - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34248462

Obres de Robert M. Schoch

Obres associades

Darklore Vol. 1 (2007) — Col·laborador — 28 exemplars

Etiquetat

Coneixement comú

Nom normalitzat
Schoch, Robert M.
Data de naixement
1949-04-24
Gènere
male
Nacionalitat
USA
Educació
Yale University (PhD)
Professions
Associate Professor, Boston College

Membres

Ressenyes

Brilliant! Extremely interesting, well integrated and scientific.
 
Marcat
ElentarriLT | Hi ha 2 ressenyes més | Mar 24, 2020 |
Honestly, I expected a little more! Not that this was a let down, just that having more Appendixes than Chapters and have the Chapters mostly by Buval and the Appendixes mostly by Schoch was not my preferred ideal! While, I have not read ALL of the previous works of either contributor, and did find some of the 'reprinting' of past articles and letters of interest, I would suspect that most avid readers were not so thrilled.
 
Marcat
CassiMerten | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | Mar 22, 2018 |
I’d heard of Dr. Robert Schoch and his unorthodox theories involving the carving date of the Great Sphinx at Giza. Since my information about Schoch and his theories was all from secondary sources, I thought it would be appropriate to read at least one of his books; thus Voyages of the Pyramid Builders.

It’s certainly true that now and then a scientist will make a significant contribution in an area outside his/her primary expertise. However, there’s also a set of scientists who go off the wall trying to do that; examples include astrophysicist Thomas Gold and abiotic oil; astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and Archaeopteryx; biochemist Linus Pauling and Vitamin C; invertebrate zoologist Barry Fell and Precolumbian America, and probably others that don’t come to instantly to mind. So with Dr. Schoch, who is a perfectly good geologist (a paleontologist, in fact; his dissertation on the taeniodonts, a group of Paleogene mammals, was sufficiently good to be published by the Yale University Press). However, like the others listed he enthusiastically goes off the high side on archaeology.

Since Schoch’s original notoriety came from his claim that the Great Sphinx of Giza was significantly older than the established date, I expected most of the book to be about that. Although the first chapter and the appendix discuss dating the Sphinx, for the rest of the book Dr. Schoch is channeling Immanuel Velikovsy. Let’s get the Sphinx out of the way first. Orthodox Egyptological opinion is that the Sphinx was built during the reign of Khafre (±2570 BCE); that the face is the face of Khafre; that an associated structure known as “the Sphinx Temple” is contemporaneous; and that the Second Pyramid at Giza and its associated Mortuary Temple also belong to Khafre. None of these structures have inscriptions specifically listing Khafre as the owner, although a statue of Khafre was found buried in the Mortuary Temple.

As mentioned in that Archive link above, the Great Sphinx is in sort of an alcove on the eastern edge of the Giza plateau. This is usually called the “Sphinx enclosure”, which is somewhat misleading since “enclosure” implies something built up around the Sphinx while it’s actually the result of digging down and removing everything that wasn’t a Sphinx; it’s also called the Sphinx quarry, which is somewhat more accurate. Schoch’s original contention was:

* The west wall of the enclosure (at the back as you look the Sphinx in the face) showed evidence of running water erosion.
* There were no rainy periods between the Old Kingdom (conventional date of the Sphinx) and now.
* Therefore the running water erosion in the Sphinx quarry must have occurred much earlier, sometime between 7000 and 3000 BCE.
* Therefore, the Sphinx quarry must have already been excavated (and presumably the Sphinx carved) long before the conventional date.

Egyptologists fell all over themselves with armwaving explanations involving things like wet sand or Nile floods to explain the putative “running water erosion”. This seemed to me to be mostly a case of “physics envy”; since Schoch came from a “hard science” field his opinion held weight in a “soft science” field like Egyptology. My personal counterargument starts with the idea that the null hypothesis hasn’t been refuted yet; Schoch’s contention that the Sphinx quarry shows running water erosion is based on visual examination only. (I’ve been to the Sphinx quarry and looked at the exposure in question; you can’t do that anymore as the quarry is closed to tourists. You know what? It looks like running water erosion to me too.) However, there are no numerical data to back this up. If Schoch could show (this is a hypothetical example, I don’t know if such a thing could actually be done) that the surface of the outcrop has been leached of water soluble minerals by an amount that could only be explained by X years of running water, then he would have something – but all he’s got is “it looks like running water erosion”. Even if the running water is granted, Old Kingdom Egypt, while not tropical, was wetter than Egypt is now; some Old Kingdom structures have downspouts and rain channels. Finally, when it does rain in Egypt it rains hard; running water can erode things pretty fast if there’s a lot of it. I see no reason why the “running water” erosion couldn’t happen in one or two hard rainstorms and there is plenty of time for that. Schoch’s counterargument is the Sphinx quarry was full of sand after the Old Kingdom and therefore no running water could occur. Well, it was certainly full of sand in Moslem time, and it was full of sand at the start of the reign of Thumose IV in the New Kingdom (there’s a stela where he explains how he dug it out – so if you believe him it was empty for at least a few years then). However, it was sand-free in Roman times, since that’s when the paws and tail were added (and, presumably, you wouldn’t go to the trouble of adding features to a statue that was mostly buried). Thus there’s no firm evidence for the Sphinx quarry being sand-filled or empty for the bulk of history, but there are a few times when it was known to be filled and a few times when it was known to be cleaned out. All it would take is one heavy rainstorm during a sand-free period to see the kind of erosion Schoch is talking about.

Schoch has since come up with a couple more arguments for his “old Sphinx”. One is that the associated structures – the Sphinx temple and the Khafre mortuary temple – have limestone cores faced with granite; the limestone cores are, according to Schoch, also water eroded (and thus these temples were built very early and later appropriated by Khafre). Don’t know for sure as I’ve never closely examined either but the “water eroded” claim has the same basis as the Sphinx quarry – visual inspection. Finally, Schoch conducted some seismic reflection surveys in the Sphinx quarry which lead him to believe that in-place weathering was much deeper than could be explained by exposure since the Old Kingdom. Haven’t seen the original data so I can’t comment; however other geologists have claimed Schoch misinterpreted other features as weathering. That leads me to another comment; for a book by a professional geologist, there’s very little geology and what’s there isn’t very convincing. For example, Schoch describes the Sphinx as built from “competent” limestone. The Sphinx – in fact, the whole Giza plateau and the bulk of all the monuments on it - are Mokattam Formation, which is interbedded limestone, siltstone, claystone and sandstone with varying degrees of intermixture – i.e., silty sandstone, sandy limestone, and every other possible combination. Some of the beds make fairly good building stone; some crumble to the touch. Pictures of the Sphinx show the head is from one of the more solid limestone layers but the body is much more irregular – and not what I would describe as “competent”. In fact, one of the conventional explanations of why the Sphinx is there is that the Pharaonic quarrymen left the bulk of it behind because the stone was too poor quality to use in a pyramid, then somebody noted this remainder looked more or less like a sphinx and decided to carve the rest of it that way. The paws are ashlar stone masonry dating from Roman times, although there may have been similar masonry paws earlier that were removed and replaced.

Well, after the Sphinx we get the whole rest of Schoch’s book – which, as I mentioned, seems to channel Velikovsky (in use of evidence, not in conclusions). Schoch’s basic idea is that there was once a great human civilization, originally centered in the Sunda archipelago, that was driven out of their homeland by rising sea level at the end of the Pleistocene glaciation and eventually spread all over the world. Then (or during this diaspora, or both) there were a bunch of comet and/or meteorite impacts that convinced the ex-Sundans to build temples to the sky gods to appease them, and those temples take the form of pyramids. Thus the Borobodur temple in Java and the Mexican pyramids and the Egyptian pyramids and the Mesopotamian ziggurats and Silbury Hill and various conical or pyramidal mounds around the world. But this “angry skies” cult goes back even further, and was somehow associated with the constellation Taurus, thus any depiction or worship of bulls is also somehow related (including the Pleistocene cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira).

This is what I mean by Schoch channeling Velikovsky. Velikovsky’s approach was to take any mythology from anywhere in the world and somehow make it a description of the Exodus (which, in turn, was caused by the “comet” Venus being ejected by Jupiter and making multiple close passed by the Earth, stopping the Earth’s rotation, raining frogs, blood, and manna, and killing off all the firstborn as required). The astrodynamical impossibility of all this was dismissed by armwaving; the chronological inconsistencies were disposed of by claiming that radiometric dating doesn’t work. Schoch doesn’t dismiss radiometric dating, but gets around the problem of chronologic inconsistency by mostly ignoring it; thus Mexican pyramids built around year 0 are somehow related to Egyptian ones built around -2500 because – well, he never really explains how. Schoch also seems to take every woowoo book ever written at more or less face value as long as it somehow relates to his thesis; thus authors like Graham Hancock, Eric von Daniken and John Anthony West are quoted when they “fit” but not when they don’t. Although the book has an extensive bibliography, there are no footnotes; this makes it impossible to track down sources for many of Schoch’s claims. For example, he say the bones of a bull were found in the Second Pyramid (Khafre) at Giza; that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of that but he provides no source so I can’t check it out. The bull bones are possible, I suppose; the Second Pyramid was explored sometime early in the 19th century and excavation reports then were less than thorough so they may have never made it into the more recent Egyptian history books.

The book is full of difficult claims like this; another example is the Köfels “impact event” in Austria. Schoch takes this at face value as an asteroid impact in 3123 BC, including the claim of a relationship to Sodom and Gomorrah; however, it isn’t clear if the supposed Akkadian reference refers to an impact or if the supposed “crater” in Austria has an extraterrestrial source.

Obviously not recommended; the exception being if you want to be prepared to confound the standard woowoo dismissal “Well, you haven’t read his book”.
… (més)
½
1 vota
Marcat
setnahkt | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | Jan 1, 2018 |
Written in a cogent, easy to follow, and yet daring manner, the renowned scholars, Shoch and Bauval, are at it again. In Origins of the Sphinx the authors challenge Egyptology at its core: at the Great Sphinx.

Methodically, the authors sift through a wide assortment of data, which seeks to ascertain a more precise dating of the ancient monument.

Split up into two parts, the first half of the book covers seven different topics, which includes an epilogue, while the latter half covers nine different appendixes that finalize the last half of the book.

Each of the initial seven parts is written solely by one of the two authors. At first this choice seemed odd, but it probably was best in order to differentiate who’s bringing about what particular commentary and argument.

Sampling a wide data set, the authors take a cursory glance at the architecture, which includes the Valley and Mortuary Temples, with multi-ton megalithic blocks, as well as more. A gander is also taken at a few of the visitors and researchers that excavated and sampled the sight, such as Colonel William Howard Vyse and Giovanni Battista Caviglia, who had a penchant for the mysticism, the occult, and more. But the authors don’t stop there. Also covered are issues with the fragments of the beard of the Sphinx, geophysical techniques to view below the surface of the Sphinx enclosure, considerations on water erosion on the Sphinx, as well as an in-depth analysis of the Sphinx’s possible construction date.

Regarding the date, Shoch, after some extended analysis in the chapter Sands Of Time, infers:

“…using a linear “conservative” calibration and assuming a date of 4,500 years ago for the western end (which in my assessment is a minimum date; it could be older), then the original core body of the Sphinx is minimally 2.7 times older than 4,500 years ago, giving a date after rounding of circa 10,000 BCE. All in all, I suspect that the proto-Sphinx was in existence prior to the end of the last ice age (that is, prior to 9700 BCE) and was contemporaneous with other structures, such as the oldest portions of Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. Put simply, the seismic data are compatible with an initial date of circa 10,000 BCE (or even a bit earlier) for the core body of the Sphinx. There is no doubt in my mind that the seismic data alone, independent of any other evidence – such as the surface weather and erosion, which I discuss in chapter 7 – strongly support the hypothesis that the origins of the Great Sphinx predate dynastic times by many millennia.”[pp.78-79]

Such an assertion will undoubtedly send shockwaves through the orthodox Egyptology communities. Then again, such a hypothesis will not surprise many of those exploring other avenues of research in the alternative research community.

Be that as it may, another salient component of this mystery discussed by Bauval is whether Khafre couples with the Sphinx as conventional Egyptology dictates, or whether some other theory might make more sense. Also discussed is what took place with the Dream Stela, the inscription of the Great Limestone Stela of Amenhotep II, the Edfu Temple Texts, and much more.

This book really features a lot more intriguing information than that mentioned. The authors are not only erudite in their research, but make the information accessible for the lay person. That also doesn’t even begin to delve into the nine appendices, which also give a deeper glance that’s a bit technical, but helps shed light onto the situation. Each of the appendices is essentially its own article, and yet couple to the rest of the book rather seamlessly.

If you’re looking for an open-minded foray into the mystery of the Sphinx, that’s meticulously researched while also offering the tools for incisive individuals to come to their own conclusions, hesitate no longer. The approach taken by the authors, although unorthodox, should be considered at length, for if what they say is true, then the history that we’ve been brought up with is drastically different than what we’re being told. Time will ultimately tell, but my bet’s that the authors are pulling on a thread that goes a lot deeper than merely the Sphinx.

___________________________________________________________

Footnotes:
[1] Robert M. Schoch Ph.D. and Robert Bauval, Origins of the Sphinx – Celestial Guardian Of Pre-Pharaonic Civilization, pp.78-79.
… (més)
 
Marcat
ZyPhReX | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | May 30, 2017 |

Premis

Potser també t'agrada

Autors associats

Estadístiques

Obres
13
També de
2
Membres
369
Popularitat
#65,264
Valoració
4.0
Ressenyes
8
ISBN
23
Llengües
3

Gràfics i taules