The Great Sphinx Hoax

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 6, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 18.

The Great Sphinx Hoax

RECENTLY there was published in a reputable English periodical, the Sphere, and subsequently republished in many American journals, a circumstantial account, with illustrations, of the “remarkable discoveries” made by Prof. G. A. Reisner, the Harvard archeologist, within the Sphinx. Professor Reisner was represented as having “unveiled a series of hidden temples within the natural rock of which the Sphinx is formed,” one of them in the very head of the sculptured effigy.

It happens that at the time of the alleged “discoveries,” Professor Reisner was making archeological investigations in Dongola, remote from Egypt. In his own words, he “never excavated in or at the Sphinx, never intended to excavate in or at the Sphinx,” and has “no intention of doing so.”

His categorical denial brands the “Sphinx temple” story as the baseless fabric of a dream. But it will persist, like other exploded myths, and doubtless some day the very ritual in use in the temple to an unknown divinity will be published.

Where do such hoaxes originate? In what fertile imagination are they conceived, and by what means are they given currency until they take on the appearance of authenticity? Archeology, too, has its Munchausens who tell their tales of prehistoric anthropophagi; and considering the wonder tales archeologists themselves devise out of a sun-baked Babylonian brick or a few potsherds from a Cretan dust-heap, it is not astonishing that the public should accept fiction along with fact.—Thrice-a-Week World.