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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 s

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.

antognini 3y ago
> 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 https://songofurania.com/episode/030]
- dghughes 3y ago
  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.
  - aatharuv 3y ago
    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.
- wddkcs 3y ago
  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?
  - antognini 3y ago
    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.
- j_french 3y ago
  That shameless plug got you a new subscriber here anyway :)
pugworthy 3y ago
It's a fairly common myth that Napoleon and his troops shot the nose off. Here's an article about the myth along with other possible reasons... https://www.napoleon-series.org/faq/c_sphinx.html https://www.napoleon-series.org/faq/c_sphinx.html Also amusingly enough, there is an asteroid named Sphinx (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/896_Sphinx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/896_Sphinx)
chmod600 3y ago
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?
- binarymax 3y ago
  Isn't the probability of a meteorite hitting the Sphynx the same as the meteorite hitting anything else on the planet?
  - robga 3y ago
    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. https://ukantarcticmeteorites.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/new-paper-the-spatial-flux-of-earths-meteorite-falls-found-via-antarctic-data/ https://ukantarcticmeteorites.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/new-p...
  - wthomp 3y ago
    Yes exactly. Which means it's extremely, extremely low. Even though the probably of a meteorite hitting somewhere is high, the probability of hitting somewhere in particular is tiny.
    - dividedbyzero 3y ago
      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.
    - 3y ago
Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
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.
jimmySixDOF 3y ago
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

antognini 3y ago

> 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 https://songofurania.com/episode/030]

dghughes 3y ago
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.
- aatharuv 3y ago
  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.
wddkcs 3y ago
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?
- antognini 3y ago
  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.
j_french 3y ago
That shameless plug got you a new subscriber here anyway :)

pugworthy 3y ago

It's a fairly common myth that Napoleon and his troops shot the nose off. Here's an article about the myth along with other possible reasons... https://www.napoleon-series.org/faq/c_sphinx.html https://www.napoleon-series.org/faq/c_sphinx.html Also amusingly enough, there is an asteroid named Sphinx (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/896_Sphinx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/896_Sphinx)

chmod600 3y ago

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?

binarymax 3y ago
Isn't the probability of a meteorite hitting the Sphynx the same as the meteorite hitting anything else on the planet?
- robga 3y ago
  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. https://ukantarcticmeteorites.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/new-paper-the-spatial-flux-of-earths-meteorite-falls-found-via-antarctic-data/ https://ukantarcticmeteorites.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/new-p...
- wthomp 3y ago
  Yes exactly. Which means it's extremely, extremely low. Even though the probably of a meteorite hitting somewhere is high, the probability of hitting somewhere in particular is tiny.
  - dividedbyzero 3y ago
    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.
  - 3y ago

Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago

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.

jimmySixDOF 3y ago

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