American Research Center in Egypt

And this is where the debate around the age of the Sphinx becomes extremely interesting, because the monument has attracted researchers who arrived at much earlier dates without beginning from Sitchin's Anunnaki chronology.

Between 1979 and 1983, Mark Lehner worked with the American Research Center in Egypt on an architectural, archaeological, and geoarchaeological survey of the Sphinx, using photogrammetry and conventional surveying to produce detailed elevations and reconstruct the monument's ancient form.

Lehner placed the main carving of the Sphinx in the Fourth Dynasty, within the Giza pyramid-building period, and his work tied the monument closely to the Khafre complex.

But then Robert Shoke, a geologist from Boston University, became involved in the early 1990s after writer John Anthony West invited him to examine the weathering of the Sphinx enclosure.

Sometimes the old thing got painted over, and sometimes the old thing continued under a different name or god.

I used to live in Egypt studying this exact thing as a postdoctoral researcher at the American Research Center in Egypt, and I'm very excited to share my knowledge and experience with you all with our very first Religion for Breakfast tour to Egypt, The Religious Landscapes of Egypt 2027.

It'll be from January 19th through the 26th.

A lot of tours to Egypt are basically a monument checklist.

It is not a chronographic record and it never claimed to be.

The American Research Center in Egypt states directly that the temple king lists served a cultic rather than historic function and should not be treated as literal chronological lists.

Then this 30,000-year figure comes from adding up the reign lengths assigned to the divine and semi-divine sections of the Turin list.

Egyptologists are aware of those figures, they address them, and they note that these entries operate in mythological time, not historical time.