AU$10
This book is about a pharaoh that no-one has heard of, ‘King Khasekhemwy’. He is so ancient that records barely remember him, but he has left a trail of breadcrumbs that reveal the incredible things that he did. He conquered, he built, plus, he may well have created the world’s largest sculpture.
The Sphinx was supposedly commissioned by King Khafre, who ruled 200 years after this enigmatic pharaoh. According to Egyptologists, when Khafre created the Sphinx it was out of proportion, left only roughly cut out, plus it had a giant crack splitting it in two. It was only a thousand years later that it was completed! This is absurd, for Giza was the world’s most expensive real estate at the time; it contained the Great Pyramid, a further 10 pyramids, plus this gigantic sculpture.
It was a discovery in the Abydos desert that challenged this story. It was the biggest pharaonic tomb discovered at the time. It caused a stir, but then faded to the background. It turns out that this tomb was a replica of the Sphinx, a to-scale model of that great sculpture, indicating that it wasn’t created by Khafre at all, instead, that iconoclastic king usurped Khasekhemwy’s creation!
A rare find in the Saqqaran desert reveals its origin story and it wasn’t a sphinx at all to begin with. Little wonder that no-one worshipped the Sphinx in ancient times, in fact, there wasn’t even a single mention of it until a millennium later! That’s because it was the first ever ‘sphinx’, a made-up creature that the Egyptians had never seen before; why would they worship a sculpture that had no mythology and had been deformed by Frankenstein Khafre?