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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.
I always heard this thing was used as target practice by the Nazis in WW2 and is why the nose is all fucked up; but this seems to contradict that. The nose is all fucked up here and it's at most 100 years before WW2 started.
Is it weird that I love this photo a lot more than I feel anything at all for the statue itself?
From a quick glance the pic looks a bit like the sand cruiser they used to throw Luke into the sarlacc pit.
I too was trying to find the date of this photo this week. To narrow your time span, the first aerial photograph (also from a balloon) was taken in 1858 in France. So this photo had to have been taken after that point.
Couldn't find the date?
Did you check the EXIF data?
The exif data is all in hieroglyphics.
What year was 🕊️🕊️🌊☀️🦉?
Fits-sits rule.
I thought it was a scifi spaceship at first
It is based on Goa'uld technology...
It's too small for a spaceship but it does have 40k spaceship vibes.
Por que no los dos?
I find it a bit amusing that the sepia toning effectively colourised the image.
I can't find a date.
Have you tried tinder?
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.
Post reminded me of Machu Picchu, before and after. It was practically completely grown over.
If memory serves, there were locals in the area that knew vaguely of an old ruin on top of the hills, and I think some had even gone there to look around, but the knowledge of how extensive the structures were and how much was still intact were completely lost to time, along with the original name.
When it was rediscovered to the outside world in the early 1900s, there were a couple of families living in the ruins, and inscriptions and evidence that other people had also made use of the ruins over the centuries.
Later, anthropologists realized from older writing that the site had been rediscovered and forgotten several times by the outside world.
i was getting ready for forty winks
when, lo, up popped this post on the Sphinx;
that ensued in a long stroll
down the wikipedia rabbithole
and a whole host of now-purple hyperlinks.
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.
The Germans never got even close to where the sphinx is located in WW2. The Allied stopped the Axis advance in North Africa hundreds of kilometres west of there.
It looks like a monkey face in these two.
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.
Strangely the recent documentation doesn't mention that.
recent documentation
uploaded 15 years ago
I hate to break it to you, but this information is heavily outdated.
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.
Indeed. However, somehow one can understand his furor, without condoning the destruction, as the people were worshipping the Sphinx as a god.
As well, similar things still happen even today:
In 2001, we could see in TV as the Taliban were destroying the Buddha statues in Bamiyan, which were about 1500 years old or in 2015, as the barbarians of Daesh were demolishing the ruins in Palmyra, a remainders of a city almost 2000 years old. These rages happened despite nobody was actually worshipping the statues, just because they did exist.
As far as I know, that is a myth. It fell off in antiquity.
Cocaine or a Michael Jackson thing?
Allegedly, it happened around 50 B.C.
Crazy that we're closer to Asterix's time than they were to when the Sphinx was built.
Yes, the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx have the aura of eternity.