According to the Thunderbolts web site Robert Schoch is a recent recruit to the Electric Universe theory and the idea of plasma playing a destructive role in the past history of the Earth, and he is going to be a speaker at the upcoming January EU Conference in Las Vegas (see www.thunderbolts.info). Robert Schoch is most famous for his association with John Anthony West and others, who dated the Great Sphinx thousands of years earlier than orthodoxy. At one stage he embraced features of the Clube and Napier comet scenario in order to explain some mysteries of the past but it seems he now sees plasma as having a role – and several pages at his web site outline his views on the Great Sphinx, Easter Island, Gobekli Tepe and the glass castle of Arthurian Romance. For example, at www.robertschoch.com/geodatasphinx.html he outlines his theory on the sphinx and the geology involved – rather, dating the weathering of the block of limestone from which the sphinx was cut. In orthodox chronology the Great Sphinx was built at the same time as the pyramid of Chephren and a series of temples abutting the sphinx. The Great Sphinx is thought to represent Chephren (Khafre), the body of a lion and the face of pharaoh. Chephren/ Khafre lived around 2500BC in orthodox chronology, or possibly a little earlier, and while Schoch does not dispute that the sphinx may have been reworked at that time he claims the original figure goes back thousands of years earlier. He actually places the original core body of the sphinx as having a date as early as between 7000 and 5000BC – which we may note here coincides with the catastrophic event around 6200BC. The head of the sphinx, he assures us, has been reworked from whatever was there previously while the rear of the sphinx was also carved out somewhat later. This may sound like having your cake and eating it but over the course of 20 pages he explains his reasons. Basically, the case stands or falls on dating the weathering. It hardly rains in Egypt so the weathering of the sphinx should be due to wind and sand storms but according to Schoch it is weathered by water action – rain. It hardly ever rains over Egypt, a situation thought to be largely true since at least 2300BC. Even then there was not a lot of rain and it is necessary to go back prior to 3000BC, or possibly even 4000BC, until we reach a period when precipitation levels were very high. At that time the Sahara was green and Neolithic farming communities had colonised the Nile valley. This was in essence the Mid Holocene Warm Period, as it is known in North America, or the Atlantic Period in NW Europe, when climatic regimes over a large part of the world were strikingly different to what they are now. Basically, the temperate zone expanded further north, towards the tundra, and further south, towards the tropics, shrinking the regions now occupied by the Sahara and Arabian deserts in the process. What was going on is usually explained within the context of the Milankovitch theory, small shifts in the orbit of the earth around the Sun, and the monsoon system. However, catastrophic events mark its beginning, the event of 6200BC, and its disappearance, the 3100BC event and the 2300BC event. The weather in NW Europe, for example, was markedly more agreeable than it is nowadays – and early farmers exploited the Western Isles and the Orkneys etc. In contrast, the very wet weather and the build-up of peat and boggy zones in Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia appears to have accelerated at boundary points – around 3000BC, 2300-2000BC, and during the early Iron Age and post Roman periods. It is not certain that wet weather was a feature of Egypt at the same point in time as the period 2300-2000 is generally associated with drought and famine in Egypt and across the Near and Middle East. The question revolves around the possibility that there were brief very wet phases of climate in Egypt at such points in time – followed by drought. This is what Lawton and Ogilvie-Head in their book, Giza; the Truth, were inclined to say in their critique, or claimed debunking of Schoch, which was a best seller – especially popular amongst those looking for the authority position on the subject.
It is something that could perhaps be toyed with as in the Harris papyrus the impression is given that in the reign of Ramses III the land was verdant and green – which required rain and high Nile floods. However, this might be an euphemism for something else – there was peace in the natural world, emphasized by the verdant flora, as the text is also at pains to demonstrate Ramses III established peace and harmony in the human world too, causing his enemies to quiet from violence and establishing the refugees and migrants on the western delta and in SW Canaan. In other words, prior to Ramses III, there had been disharmony in the natural world and this had caused the refugees and migrants to invade the territories of Egypt in Africa and in the Levant. The natural world had stilled, we might presume, and Ramses III had quelled the potential invasion of his lands. We don't know if it included a heavy rain incident. It might have – but could a few months of heavy rain really weather the sphinx to the degree claimed by Schoch? We do know that in the late reign of Ramses III there was drought and famine and civil unrest.
We might also bear in mind that revered areas of the landscape very often had a greater antiquity than imagined by archaeologists in earlier generations. We might compare the Giza plateau to the situation of Stonehenge in the UK. The landscape was important to people as early as 7000BC – thousands of years prior to the henge, dating from 3000BC, and the stone circle and uprights (2500-2000BC). There is nothing intrinsically wrong in suggesting the Great Sphinx is a reworking of an older monument.