I looked all over for a date and got everything from “early 1800s” to “late 1800s” but nothing exact, so I had to make an educated guess. The first cameras practical enough to take such a photo were developed around 1840 and the excavations began in 1867.
Born too late to discover ancient ruins.
Born too early to discover urban ruins.
Born just in time to watch the world die.
Imagine being an early explorer and being one of the first people to see it since the fall of the Egypt. I don’t know how close they were to populated settlements, but just… imagine finding a structure no one has seen in hundreds, possibly thousands of years. It’d make the imagination go wild.
They are still discovering ancient ruins all the time. In fact, Lidar makes it easier.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230704-ocomtn-a-long-lost-maya-city-that-was-just-discovered
Yeah but we wont dig it up now cause we don’t have the technology to preserve them
Archaeologists still do lots of digging, and sometimes even leave what’s dug up there, although it’s often reburied. And it is true that archaeology is inherently destructive. But it’s sometimes also necessary to learn anything about the past. Also, in the case of the Maya, it’s often more about clearing away vegetation than it is digging things up. The vegetation is already being destructive, so clearing it is often the best thing to do.
I can’t find a date.
Have you tried tinder?
Why on earth would they need to excavate a balloon?
Is it just a fabrication that Germans in WWII shot off the nose, then? Because it looks as if it’s already missing the nose here.
It’s true. Hitler wanted to move the Sphinx to his base on the other side of the moon. Of course, moving the whole thing would be too difficult, so they only took the nose.
Hah.
Just in case, though, I’ll clarify: what I’d heard was that, when the German army was in Egypt in WWII, some German soldiers used the nose for target practice and pulverized it. No aliens required.
Edit: I’m remembering the story wrong: the target practice thing is attributed to Napoleon’s troops using the nose as target practice for cannon. It’d unsubstantiated in either case; it turns out no one alive really knows.
Crazy that we’re closer to Asterix’s time than they were to when the Sphinx was built.
https://www.smithsonianjourneys.org/blogs/blog/2020/05/20/photo-what-happened-to-the-sphinxs-nose/
It is possible it was destroyed by a Muslim for religious reasons though it is impossible to truly confirm.
As the article is lacking some information, here is a translstion of a part of the German Wikipedia article:
The Arab historian and physician Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1161-1231) from Baghdad described the Great Sphinx and its magnificent nose in the 13th century. In the Middle Ages, the sphinx was still worshipped as a god by some sections of the population, while devout Muslims abhorred this cult. In Arab times, the Sphinx was given the name أبو الهول / Abū l-Haul, which means “father of terror”. In one of his books, the Arab historian Al-Maqrīzī (1364-1442) reports that the devout sheikh of a Cairo Sufi monastery, Mohammed Saim el-Dar (Muhammad Şā’im ad-Dahr, English: “Someone who fasts all the time”), was a fanatical iconoclast who cut off the nose of the sphinx in 1378 and was then killed by the angry crowd.
The Danish artist Frederick Ludewick Norden (1708-1742) produced engravings of various Egyptian buildings in 1738 on the orders of King Christian VI. Among them was one with the buried Sphinx (Tête colossale du Sphinx), which also shows the head without a nose (published in French in 1755). The rumour that either Napoleon Bonaparte’s soldiers or those of the Ottoman Empire destroyed the nose during artillery exercises has thus been proven false. Napoleon was an enthusiast of Egypt, describing the country as the “cradle of the sciences and arts of all mankind” (l’Égypte - le berceau de la science et des arts de toute l’humanité). The scientists who came to the country with him also drew the Sphinx without a nose.
TLDR: As the Great Sphinx still has had its nose around 1200 A.D. and was already noseless in 1738, its nose must have been destroyed in the meantime, supposedly by some furious sheikh in 1378.
Imagine being so furious and pathetic to destroy the nose of a statue 3+ thousand years old.
Couldn’t find the date?
Did you check the EXIF data?
