Science / Medicine : Scrambling to Save the Sphinx : Archeology: A researcher spent two years measuring the deteriorating monument. The data, now computerized, will be used to help preserve it and to determine how it was built.
The Sphinx and the Great Pyramids on the Giza Plateau across the Nile River from Cairo are among the oldest monuments known to humans, enduring and mysterious edifices that symbolize our links to the remotest civilization.
For 4,600 years, the great stone structures have suffered the ravages of weather, the assaults of foreign soldiers, the depredations of tourists and the insidious attack of air pollutants, slowly losing bits and pieces of their unique identities.
And that process is accelerating. “The Sphinx has deteriorated more in the last 50 years than in all the previous centuries of its existence combined,” said Sayed Tawfik, chairman of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization in Cairo.
Now, in a beachfront architect’s studio in Venice, a unique conservation effort is under way.
After 10 years of crawling around on the surface of the Sphinx and the pyramids, lovingly documenting their precise dimensions, Yale Egyptologist Mark Lehner is working with architect Thomas Jaggers of the Jerde Partnership to store the monuments in computer chips. The chips will provide a permanent record of how the structures look now and provide future researchers with a unique tool to gain insights into the ancient past.
For the short term, Lehner plans to make a precise, computerized reproduction of the Sphinx. In the longer term, he hopes to be able to show where virtually every stone in the monuments came from and how they were assembled, perhaps even recreating the entire construction process in computer animation.
Simultaneously with Lehner’s project, researchers sponsored by the Getty Conservation Institute are monitoring weather conditions at Giza. When all this preliminary work is completed, the Getty institute and the Egypt antiquities organization will prepare a detailed conservation plan. One proposal has been to enclose the sphinx in a clear dome at night, opening it to tourists in the daytime.
“While we cannot completely stop the natural processes that contribute to its deterioration, we can slow them down considerably,” said Frank Preusser, acting co-director of the Getty Conservation Institute.
The techniques to be developed for conserving the Sphinx are expected to be applied to other monuments and archeological sites in Egypt and elsewhere in the world as well.
Lehner’s work “is the cutting edge of archeology in the future,” according to Jerome Berman of the California Museum of Ancient Art. “Archeology is going to be done with computers and models.”
The Sphinx was built 4,600 years ago by Khafre (Chephren to the Greeks), son of Pharaoh Khufu (known to the Greeks as Cheops). The majestic half-lion, half-man, Lehner believes, is a representation of the Pharaoh as Horus, the god of kingship, presenting offerings to the sun god Ra. Before the reigns of Khufu and Khafre, Horus, normally represented as a hawk, had been all-powerful. During their reigns, however, Ra was ascendant and the Sphinx and its temple embodied the amalgam of old and new religious concepts.
The sun’s importance is clearly apparent in the design of the Giza plateau. At the winter solstice, the sun sets exactly midway between the pyramids of Khafre and Khufu, forming a visual analog of the hieroglyphic akhet (which is normally rendered as a sun between two mountains), which means “places where the sun rises and sets.” The Sphinx and Khafre’s pyramid are also precisely aligned so that they point directly at the spot on the horizon where the sun sets at the spring and fall equinoxes.
But the Sphinx was not built like the pyramids or any of the other monuments in the area--it was sculpted like a statue rather than assembled from stones. Khafre’s engineers selected an appropriate site in the plateau and began removing and chiseling out large chunks of limestone to produce the Sphinx. Overall, the Sphinx is 840 feet long and about 66 feet high at its head.
The monument has been deteriorating ever since. Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s great-great-grandfather Tuthmosis IV was the first to repair it, 1,200 years after it was built. Another pharaoh worked on it 750 years later, and the Greeks and the Romans also made attempts at restoration. All of these attempts are still visible today in the intricate mosaic of stone and bricks around the statue’s base that Lehner has carefully documented.
When Napoleon visited the Sphinx in 1798, everything but the head had been buried in sand. Although his soldiers reputedly used the head for target practice, his team of surveyors and scholars produced drawings that became part of a 22-volume set in which all of Egypt was mapped.
“And after that,” Lehner said, “there was no recording from 1798 on. And in fact, until our project started (in 1979), these drawings and modern postcards and touristy photographs were the only kinds of images that existed. There were no scale drawings or architectural studies.”
The drifted sand was partially removed in the 19th Century, but the most extensive repair effort was made by French engineer Emile Baraize in 1925-26. Baraize cleared all the sand away from the Sphinx, exposing its paws for the first time in centuries and excavating temples that were built directly in front of it. He also made extensive repairs around the base of the monument, as well as bolstering the headdress with cement reinforcements. Oddly, however, Baraize did not do scale drawings or leave an extensive written record of his work.
After graduating from the American University in Cairo in 1975, Lehner was able to work on 15 different archeological projects in Egypt over the next 10 years. “My drawings were pretty detailed and meticulous, and people liked the way I drew,” he reflected, adding with some self-deprecation, “and I didn’t need an airline ticket, which is a pretty big item on a budget, because I was already there.”
He retained his strong interest in the Sphinx, and in 1979, he went to the American Research Center in Egypt--a consortium of leading museums and universities--and talked them into sponsoring him in a project to document the Sphinx. The proposal passed muster when submitted to Egyptian authorities “and I started work at the Sphinx in 1979 with a very old Hungarian theodolite and a bunch of tapes and trowels and things.”
Eventually, the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo donated the use of its photogrammetric system, a stereoscopic camera used for making precise measurements of monuments, and their chief photogrammetrist, a man named Ulrich Kapp.
Working with Kapp, “I spent about two years crawling over the monument and drawing all the stones, then going on and doing the temple,” Lehner said. “In addition, I excavated residues of the ancient debris from the time the Sphinx was built, pulled out tools that the Sphinx builders used and basically did a thorough investigation.”
He was also interested in tracing the blocks used in the temples in front of the Sphinx. Because the original limestone from which the Sphinx was carved has distinct geological layers, each with its own unique assemblage of fossils, it is possible to tell where particular stones originated.
A temple associated with the Khafre pyramid, for example, was built with stones from around the head and chest area of the Sphinx, while the temple directly in front of the Sphinx was built with stones taken from layers deeper down in the ditch in which the Sphinx was excavated.
“That’s why I was always interested in computerizing this, doing a model in which we could actually unbuild the Sphinx and the pyramids,” he said. “You could start with the stones of the Great Pyramid, filling up the quarry that was exploited for building it, then proceeding on to the next one. You could experiment with computer models of the ramp, different configurations and so forth.”
Eventually his interests extended to the village where the workmen lived while building the monuments, which he believes to lie south of the plateau. Last year, with a team of 20 researchers, he began excavating in the area and found what seems to be a granary and bakery, “as evidenced by hundreds of pots of a particular kind that were used for baking bread. We don’t know yet that there’s an entire city built around it, but it would be unusual to have a granary and a bakery out in the middle of nowhere.”
They are continuing these excavations because, “if the workmen’s villages are there, then we can bring all the scientific techniques of modern archeology to bear on understanding more about life, climate and the economy at the time the pyramids were built--the type of settlement archeology that most modern archeologists, including those in Egypt, are most interested in.”
About five months ago, Lehner began working with Jaggers as well. Jaggers has been digitizing all of Lehner’s drawings of the Sphinx, tracing the drawings with a “mouse” that enters all of the coordinates into the computer. After all the two-dimensional horizontal and vertical contours were entered, the computer then meshed them to produce three-dimensional representations.
Presently, the pair are filling in some gaps in the drawings Jaggers worked with. They estimate that they will soon have the computer model finished to the point where it can be milled--if they can find an automated milling machine sophisticated enough to reproduce the complicated overhangs and weathering patterns.
When they do find a miller, the first model will be presented to the Egyptian Antiquities Organization on behalf of the Getty institute.
Meanwhile, Lehner decided that he really should have a graduate degree in Egyptology, so he enrolled in graduate school at Yale in 1986. He is now finishing his thesis, which is, appropriately enough, a book about the Sphinx.
He has been hired by the University of Chicago, where he is scheduled to start as a professor this summer after he finishes his degree.
Lehner will lecture on his latest studies of the Sphinx at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Gallery Theater in Barnsdall Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd. For tickets, call the California Museum of Ancient Art, (818) 762-5500. He will also speak Aug. 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the same location.
