The Sphinx and the Problem with Deep Time: How Old Is the Great Sphinx? A Sceptic Weighs the Water-Erosion Evidence (The Ancient Sceptic)

How old is the Great Sphinx of Giza?

Everyone has an answer. The textbooks say 2500 BCE, carved for the pharaoh Khafre. The documentaries say 10,500 BCE, the relic of a lost civilisation. They cannot both be right — and the gap between them is eight thousand years.

The Sphinx and the Problem of Deep Time refuses to pick a side and sell it to you. Instead it does the harder, more interesting thing: it lays out the mainstream case at full strength, then weighs the six genuine anomalies that pull at it — the strange weathering, the drainage no one can quite explain, the head that seems too small — and asks, of each, what the evidence will actually bear.

This is the ancient-mysteries book for readers who have watched the documentaries and come away unsure what to believe. No sensationalism. No sneering. Just a clear-eyed guide to what is known, what is guessed, and how to tell the difference — a toolkit you can carry to every claim about the ancient past.

The first book in The Ancient Sceptic series.