Four Of Six Control Quarries Show The Same Fissures. One Is 26th Dynasty.

NAZLET ES-SAMMAN, Egypt — Quarry face 4 lies eleven kilometres south of the Sphinx, cut into the same limestone bed, and it carries a hieratic dedication dated to the fourth regnal year of Psamtik II. That is 591 BC.

Two geomorphologists who were not told what they were looking at scored its weathering profile at 8.0 on a ten-point scale.

They scored the west wall of the Sphinx enclosure at 8.4.

The gap is smaller than the two scorers' average disagreement with each other.

What was never in dispute

The enclosure walls are rounded at the top, deeply fissured vertically, and undercut at the base in a way that wind abrasion does not produce. This newspaper accepts that as measured fact and has never printed otherwise.

Water made those profiles. Nobody serious argues the point.

The argument has only ever been about which water, and when.

The control nobody had run

The profile has been read as a clock since the early 1990s: this much rounding needs this much rainfall, therefore this many years. A clock needs calibrating against faces of known age in the same rock, and in thirty-five years of argument nobody had surveyed one.

So we commissioned surveys at six quarry faces within eleven kilometres, all cut into the same member, three of them securely dated — one by inscription, two by mason's marks.

One operator, one scanner, 0.1mm resolution. The cross-sections were printed at identical scale, stripped of site names, shuffled, and posted to two geomorphologists who were not told that the Sphinx was in the set.

Four of the six

Four controls scored above 6.8. Two scored below 2.5 — both faces standing more than three metres above the local water table, both draining freely.

And at quarry 4 the fissures do not stop at the inscription. They run through it, truncating three sign-forms mid-stroke.

Whatever cut those fissures was working on that face after the text was cut. After 591 BC.

What the profile does track

Not age. Against any estimate of how long a face has been exposed, the blind scores correlate at r = 0.11, which is nothing.

Against chloride in the surface twenty millimetres, r = 0.88. Against height above the local water table, r = −0.79.

That is salt weathering, and it is not exotic. Groundwater wicks up through the pore space, evaporates at the face, and leaves halite crystallising in the voids. The crystals grow along bedding planes and joints, which is why the damage comes out vertical, rounded and undercut. It is the commonest destructive process in dry-country masonry on earth.

One point four millimetres a year

We registered three surveys of the west wall to the same eleven control points: stereo plates shot in 1978, a terrestrial laser scan from 2011, and a scan we flew ourselves in March 2025.

Between 1978 and 2011 the wall lost a mean 0.6mm of surface a year.

Between 2011 and 2025 it lost 1.4mm a year.

Over the same period Nazlet es-Samman roughly trebled in built area without a mains sewer. Local monitoring wells put the water table about four metres higher than in the early 1980s. The water arriving at the base of the Sphinx enclosure is, in large part, septic seepage.

The scheme that was funded, and the wall that came out of it

A dewatering scheme for the plateau was funded in 2008 at $8.4m: well points, a collector main, and a boundary polygon drawn around the enclosure and the causeway.

In 2011 the package was value-engineered. The revised polygon saved $1.9m. The west wall fell outside it.

Ing. Hoda Mansour-Delacroix, who was the project engineer, kept the minute and gave us a copy.

"The west wall was the cheapest thing to remove, because there is no visitor route on it and nobody counts it in the footfall model," she said. "That is the whole reason. It is not a secret. I have said it in three meetings and it has been minuted twice."

What this desk takes from it

The profile is not a clock. It is closer to a hygrometer, and what it is reading is now.

Professor Ellingsen-Attia's reply runs below, unedited, and he is right that we overreached: what we have shown is not that the clock is wrong but that it was never calibrated, which is a duller and more durable finding.

Here is the one this desk cannot put down. The oldest monumental sculpture on the plateau is dissolving at one and a half millimetres a year because a village grew faster than its drains, the fix was costed, funded and then trimmed, and the argument about whether the thing is four thousand years old or twelve thousand has absorbed most of the attention anyone has paid it since 1991.

The west wall was not in the polygon. Nobody hid that. It is in an appendix, and it has been public for fifteen years.