I have seen a suggestion that the "thunderbolt" (as usually translated) that damaged the Sphinx, as mentioned on the "Inventory Stela", was a meteorite, which seems more plausible than the usual interpretation as a lightning strike. Ancient Egyptians understood that meteoritic iron, thus meteorites, came from the sky, although I don't think we know how they knew. Finding a meteorite to have knocked off part of the Sphinx would be pretty convincing to them.
Note that the dating of the Sphinx, implied by the Inventory Stela, as older than Khufu is pretty universally discounted by egyptologists as historical revisionism. I.e., when the stela was carved, apparently c. 1500 BC, its authors sought to mislead about events a thousand years earlier to make the Isis temple seem older than it was.
> Ancient Egyptians understood that meteoritic iron, thus meteorites, came from the sky, although I don't think we know how they knew.
The oldest evidence for this comes from a variety of very old texts carved into the tombs of the pyramids (called the Pyramid texts). The Egyptians conceived of the sky as being made of iron, above which was water. The oldest text, for instance, says that Unas (the Pharaoh), "will acquire the sky and splits its iron." But there are lots of other examples in the texts where the Egyptians make clear that the sky was made of iron.
For what it's worth we know that the Egyptians had meteoric iron and considered it to be valuable. King Tutankhamun, for instance, was buried with a dagger made of meteoric iron.
One of the more intriguing features around Egypt is the Gebel Kamil crater, which is an impact crater from a meteor 1.3 meters large that landed around 3000 BC, a few hundred miles to the west of the Nile in southern Egypt. It would easily have been visible to the ancient Egyptians in the sky when it fell. Amazingly, the site is so remote and meteorologically stable that it is the best preserved impact crater of its size on the planet, and it wasn't discovered until 2008 when someone stumbled across it on Google Earth.
[Shameless plug: if anyone is interesting in learning more, I recently wrapped up a three-episode series about Egyptian astronomy on my podcast about the history of astronomy: https://songofurania.com/episode/030]
Fascinating, I'd never heard of this belief in an iron heavens. Very interesting that the biblical Daniel foretells an empire of iron as the last empire to follow Nebuchadnezzar's. Would Daniels original audience have read this as a "kingdom from the heaven's" with this Egyptian context in mind?
I'm not sure whether the original audience would have interpreted that as meaning Egypt or not. But by the time of Christ that verse was interpreted to mean the Roman Empire, which is one of the reasons there was so much messianic fervor around that time.
Yes the "Opening of the Mouth and Eyes" ceremony used a tool shaped like a constellation it was made of meteoric ion. I think it or any meteoric iron in general was referred to as "Ra's semen" or something like that. It is an adze but I don't even think it has a name or at least nothing in English other than adze. I've seen it described as simply "nw" or "stp". Many ancient languages didn't use vowels.
The written forms of some Afro-Asiatic languages often did not (and still don't) include vowels, as they didn't provide any information that couldn't be gathered through context. The actual languages did have vowels.
Coptic, the descendant of Ancient Egyptian used by liturgical purpose by Egyptian Christians uses vowels, while very distantly related Arabic and Hebrew (part of the Semitic branch of Afro Asiatic) don't use vowels except in rare cases.
It's hard for me to comprehend the odds that a meteorite would hit the Sphinx on the nose.
I know that the probability is higher that a meteorite would hit something of great cultural significance, and that perhaps the broken nose led to some of that significance. But it still seems really, really unlikely.
Isn't it a lot more likely that something routine cause the damage, and that a story was made up afterward?
I don't think anybody believes the thunderbolt, whatever it was, knocked off the Sphinx's nose. (Or are you speaking figuratively?) The stela cites the back of the headdress.
It is common to blame Napoleonic cannoneers for damage to its face, but apparently that is slander. We know that early Christians were very fond of knocking the nose off of anything that might attract offerings. I don't know of any surviving drawings that show the nose intact.
Another option is simple vandalism. Wikipedia mentions one archeologist thinks so:
> Mark Lehner says that while it is not known when or by whom the Sphinx's nose was broken off, careful examination shows that somebody used long rods or chisels to purposefully do so.
Knocking noses off statuary was a favorite pastime of early Christians. Without a nose, the spirit occupying the statue would be unable to take in the smoke from the offering. They also broke off right hands for similar reasons. The activity is called "iconoclasm". These early Christians ardently believed in such spirits, which they considered demons, and meant to deprive them of sustenance; and more importantly, to deprive competing priests of places to operate.
Ancient Egyptians also vandalized more-ancient statuary, but they usually preferred to chisel out the attached name and carve their current king's name in its place so his ka would get the benefit of offerings. Ramses II was especially known for "tagging" ancient statuary; egyptologists, oddly, routinely accept such tags as proof he was responsible for the item.
> These early Christians ardently believed in such spirits, which they considered demons,
I’m not arguing about the wide scale vandalism. But this bit seems almost entirely like conjecture and generally nonsensical given in Christianity that widespread belief in demons/witches/etc. was a late middle ages/reformation period development. It’s existence wasn’t really compatible with early Christian theology and worldview.
Belief in demons and the supernatural (except the Christian god of course) was mainly a relict of paganism at that point e.g. pagan Romans were really into witchunts and the like (which is something the early church tried to crackdown with varying and in many cases not that great degree of success). From the Church’s perspective believing that demons can or exist was almost as bad as worshiping them.
Maybe you don't recall Jesus evicting demons from pigs? The gospels that report the event are fiction penned between c. 80 - 120 AD, which first-millennium Christians believed implicitly. Medieval belief in demons absolutely relies on biblical authority. Witch hunts and delusions of Satan worship are a different phenomenon. Disbelief in demons is very, very recent, and still far from universal. Christianity (like Judaism) in no way demanded disbelief in spirits, but only primacy of YHVH over the rest.
In any case, even a Christian priest who personally disbelieved in spirits occupying statuary would resent competition from pagan priests performing sacrifices. Making the statuary unserviceable was good for business, and being seen doing it with no divine retribution was good theater.
I also heard that white Europeans knocked the noses off because they had African noses. At the time the westerners thought of Africans as savages and didn’t believe that people of African descent could build such cultural attifa y’a so they would lop the noses off before shipping back to Europe. I think Akala talks about this in his Oxford address.
None of your links are to actual scholarship on Christian treatment of pagan infrastructure. If a person asks for a citation about a historical claim, it’s polite to point to something from a university press, instead of mere popular-journalism articles which are hardly more trustworthy than an HN comment.
One reason I've read is that people (graverobbers?) were superstitious and afraid of statues, and breaking the nose off meant it couldn't 'breathe' and thus had no more life force:
- "What's the probability that a meteor hits an object of cultural significance?" -> vastly lower than the probability that the meteor hits something of non-cultural significance.
- "What's the probability that a meteor hits a given object of cultural significance?" -> Proportional to object size + age.
Maybe the sphinx isn't a bad candidate for the only object of cultural significance impacted by a meteor? Still seems unusually improbable however.
Right. A meteorite strike on the Sphinx is both extremely unlikely considered as an explanation for damage, and also entirely possible given evidence that it occurred.
The same reasoning applies to two UUIDs or Git hashes matching by accident: of negligible probability, yet easily proven if it happens.
Nothing compelling that I know of. Other meteorite strikes being described using the same language might count. A record of having used the particular meteorite in religious apparatus, more so. It is the sort of thing that would have been recorded, but records are spotty.
I think the headdress was supposed to have been covered in gold leaf, which might have attracted lightning strikes. Just cracking from normal weathering and falling off is the most likely cause, though. It seems like a thing that they would have liked to blame on something dramatic like a thunderbolt.
There are a lot of monuments that would feel similar if they got hit (the Taj Mahal, Notre Dame cathedral, the Statue of Liberty, Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, large parts of the Vatican, the Forbidden City, ...), and the odds of any one of them getting hit should be quite a bit higher. The Sphinx is on the smaller end of qualifying monuments, but it had a lot more time to get hit than most. A meteorite striking the site of Notre Dame in 1000 B.C. wouldn't have had the same ... impact.
When you're looking at hindsight, it is the "somewhere" that matters here, so it's not unlikely at all. There are a massive number of interesting things around the world that would be "surprising" to have been hit by a meteorite. If one of them was in the past, this isn't as unlikely as it seems.
Regardless, I realize other posters linked to pretty good evidence that this isn't what happened.
The whole point of this comment thread is that there does seem to be some evidence it happened. The evidence is just being written off here because the odds are low.
Spatial flux studies show they are a little more likely to hit the equatorial rather than polar regions due to the elliptic distribution of the source material.
At the Field Museum in Chicago, there is a display about meteorites. One part of it shows a meteorite that hit a garage, went through the roof, through the roof of a car parked inside, through the floor of the car, then bounced back up and lodged in the rear seat. Extremely unlikely, but it happened.
Every specific real thing that happens is as equally unlikely as everything else. It's just our interpretation that makes certain things seem unusual, when, in fact, they're as usual as everything else.
Some of the first glass used in the world came from a zone in the Egyptian dessert where an impact melted the sand and it was basically a kind of jewel in ancient times
This is the first I've heard of anything knocking off part of the Sphinx. That would have be very disconcerting to the folks at the time I guess... Major show of disapproval by the gods, even if you do wind up with some iron.
> A single object made of meteoritic iron has been identified, an arrowhead with a mass of 2.9 g found in the 19th Century in the late Bronze Age (900–800 BCE)
A cool and important finding no doubt, but there are much more impressive examples. Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger is from several hundred years earlier and is longer than your forearm.
I don't know, I personally find this much more interesting a discovery than Tutankhamun's dagger.
While Tutankhamun's dagger is very much consistent with my understanding of history, this discovery pretty much upends it.
Tutankhamun was the king of one of the most powerful kingdoms of the peak of the late bronze age. Him having a dagger made out of meteoric iron does not surprise me in the least, as long as I'm aware that meteoric iron was a thing.
But what we have here is very surprising (for me at least) on two counts. First, it's an arrowhead discovered about 1600 km from its likely source, the place where a meteor fell a good 600 to 700 years prior.
Based on Ni–Ge concentrations and shielding derived from 26Al activity of the arrowhead, the Kaalijarv (Estonia) meteorite with a Bronze Age impact age (∼1500 BCE) appears to be a possible source candidate, implying a transport over ∼1600 km.
That would be pretty much "meh". But, but ... In the middle of this 6 or 7 centuries we have the bronze age collapse. You'd think trade ceased. With this discovery, it looks like trade continued quite ok.
The other thing that I found surprising was the reuse/recycling. When we think of weapons in antiquity we generally don't think of how hard it was to make metal weapons. Until now I didn't ever stop for a second to think what happened to arrows used in battles or hunts. I always assumed the archers would fire their arrows, then go get some other arrows. But with this discovery, I'm now thinking that people were actually going over the scene of a battle and retrieving all the arrows they could (most likely along with whatever other metal things they could find, like swords, shields, axes, helmets, spearheads). One could say that people valued meteoric iron more than the more common bronze, and this is possible. But unlikely. I think people were simply reusing everything that could be reused. And so an arrowhead could still be in use for hundreds of years. At least this particular arrowhead.
My impression is that bronze production was heavily reliant on long trade-routes because although copper could be found all over the place, tin was only found in a few places. There is also arsenic bronze, arsenic often being coincident with copper with is convenient for making bronze without extensive trade routes, but regardless my impression is that Bronze Age and trade routes go hand-in-hand.
For me, the dagger is most impressive because it would have required extraordinary craftmanship to pull off; meteoric iron is much trickier to work than normal iron, particularly if you can't get it up to welding temperatures. From what I've seen in videos of people today trying to work with it, it has a tendency to split apart and crumble when hammered, so smaller pieces are much easier to produce than large pieces. And for an ironworker to be experienced enough to create that dagger, suggests there were a lot more meteoric iron artifacts being made. It was probably an artisan's masterpiece, but there must have been many more works that preceded it.
Isn't basically all iron from the bronze age meteoric? There isn't much telluric iron metal in the world, and smelting iron ore doesn't happen much until the drum roll iron age. If you're a bronze age craftsman looking to make something of iron (why, when you have bronze?), your best (practically only) source is meteoric iron.
The catch is that the iron age happened at different times in different places. When that Egyptian dagger was likely made, people were already smelting iron in India and sub-Saharan Africa. Chemical analysis can rule that out though, lots of nickel and very little carbon indicate that it came from a meteorite.
No. Iron has been smelted in Anatolia since 2500 BC. It was initially believe that this iron must have been meteoric, but isotonic analysis done in the last few decades has shown that much of this early iron is in fact non-meteoric.
I would think a society that has no access to iron except for the extremely occasional meteorite would use it for something less mundane than an arrowhead. Especially if it was transported many hundreds of kilometers from where it was found, this must have been a valued treasure.
It seems that iron smelting preceded the bronze age in the middle east by several hundred years. Early iron wasn’t very good metal and it made sense sticking to bronze as long as you could afford it and had access to tin and copper)
You're absolutely right. Though I don't understand why this idea persists - even in academic scholarship. It has been proven decades ago that non-meteoric iron was smelted in the Early Bronze Age. Though the main reason bronze was used for so long appears to be because it was actually cheaper than iron. Smelting iron required the burning of an absurd amount of trees, which was extremely expensive.
Note that the dating of the Sphinx, implied by the Inventory Stela, as older than Khufu is pretty universally discounted by egyptologists as historical revisionism. I.e., when the stela was carved, apparently c. 1500 BC, its authors sought to mislead about events a thousand years earlier to make the Isis temple seem older than it was.