Ancient World Review

Roman Legionaries In China? (UPDATE)

Comment: This theory is speculative, but the idea that Roman soldiers ended up in China isn't totally implausible. The general scenario of how it could have happened goes like this:

In 53 BC, the Roman politician and general Marcus Crassus (115-53 BC) was killed at the Battle of Carrhae when he led his army into a trap during his ill-advised invasion of Parthia, an empire which bordered on China:

"At its height, the Parthian Empire stretched from the northern reaches of the Euphrates, in what is now central-eastern Turkey, to eastern Iran. The empire, located on the Silk Road trade route between the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean Basin and the Han dynasty of China, became a center of trade and commerce." (Wikipedia)

This map shows the location of Parthia when it was part of the Median Empire around 600 BC. Parthia is in the upper part of the yellow region just to the right of the Caspian Sea.

Crassus' invasion of Parthia was a complete disaster:

"In a slaughter known as the battle of Carrhae the Romans lost nearly their entire army and Crassus was killed. [The story is that the Parthians captured Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat.] The remaining 10,000 or so Roman legionaries were captured." Source: War History Online.

The Parthians apparently used their Roman prisoners as border guards along the eastern frontiers:

"The Parthians had a standard practice of employing captured soldiers as border guards. By transferring the 10,000 legionaries to the eastern borders they prevented any realistic chance of escape for the Romans who likely would have simply accepted their new lot in life. Record of the soldiers vanish for about 17 years when the battle of Zhizhi was fought as a Chinese army under Chen Tang assaulted a border town known today as Taraz, located in Kazakhstan near the border of Kyrgyzstan." (War History Online)

According to the story, some of these former Roman soldiers and Parthian border guards fought as mercenaries at the battle of Zhizhi. They were either captured or defected to the Chinese, who were impressed by their fighting abilities and -- like the Parthians -- stationed them in a border town to guard the frontier:

"Anywhere from 100 to 1,000 or more soldiers established themselves in this town that was known by the Chinese as Liqian/Li-Jien, which is pronounced as 'legion'." (War History Online) "...It seems these Romans lived peacefully in Liqian, and 2,000 years later we have DNA evidence that over 50% of the villagers in modern day Liqian have Caucasian ancestry including green and blue eyes, increased average height and other distinguishing characteristics such as distinctly Roman noses."

If this story is true, then these Roman soldiers who fought under Crassus at Carrhae (and their descendants) had an extremely wild and strange destiny, to say the least. But is the story true?

First of all, there's no doubt that the inhabitants of the region of Liqian, China, have some kind of European ancestry. According to Wikipedia, "The area of the former Liqian city is known for the distinctive physical appearance of its inhabitants. The population has higher frequencies of traits prevalent in Europe, such as aquiline noses, blonde or light-colored hair, blue or green eyes, and relatively fair skin tones."

Who were these Europeans and where did they come from? The idea that they were Roman soldiers or their descendants isn't all that farfetched, but it's still controversial:

"A hypothesis by the sinologist Homer H. Dubs, according to which Roman legionaries clashed with Han troops during the battle and were resettled afterwards in a Chinese village named Liqian, has been rejected by modern historians and geneticists on the grounds of a critical appraisal of the ancient sources and recent DNA testings of the village people. However, this hypothesis has been supported by prominent scholars like Lev Gumilev."

There's also a theory that the people of Liqian may be descended from some of Alexander the Great's soldiers, but it seems more likely that their ancestors were Caucasoid Indo-Europeans who lived in the region long before the Romans:

"People with normatively Caucasoid traits and/or who spoke Indo-European languages lived in areas that are now part of Gansu and Xinjiang centuries before the Romans, including the Yuezhi, Wusun, Basmyls, Tocharians, and some prehistoric Siberian populations." (Wikipedia)

You can always trust the experts to mess up a good story, but I've got to admit that some of these Chinese do look like they have Roman ancestry. The people in Liqian are trying to use their supposed relationship with the Romans to boost their tourism industry and who can blame them? Whether the story is true or not is a different matter altogether.

A Case Of Murder In The Paleolithic?

Whoever picked the music here should have their skull caved in with a stone axe.

"New analysis of the fossilized skull of an Upper Paleolithic man suggests that he died a violent death," according to Science Daily.

"...The fossilized skull of a Paleolithic adult man, known as the Cioclovina calvaria [skull cap], was originally uncovered in a cave [the Cioclovina cave] in South Transylvania and is thought to be around 33,000 years old. Since its discovery, this fossil has been extensively studied. Here, the authors reassessed trauma on the skull -- specifically a large fracture on the right aspect of the cranium which has been disputed in the past -- in order to evaluate whether this specific fracture occurred at the time of death or as a postmortem event."

Related: Distinguishing between ante, peri and post-mortem bone fractures.

The researchers believe that the man was murdered. According to Live Science, "the locations of the injuries also revealed clues about the murderer. It appears that the murderer was face-to-face with the victim during the assault and likely a lefty, because the injury was on the skull's right side, 'although the possibility of [the murderer] holding the object with both hands cannot be dismissed,' the researchers wrote in the study."

Prehistoric Ireland

"Ireland's early history is dominated by the end of the last Ice Age. It has been mooted that perhaps in South West Ireland some hunter-gatherers remained in occupation during the Ice Age [1].  However apart from that the first evidence we see for occupation appears in the River Bann area in North Ulster (Mountsandel - Toomebridge - Ballymoney). Such occupation -- per land-bridge or by water from West Scotland -- has been dated to around 7000 BC. It is interesting to note that these early arrivals lived in quite substantial houses, and as well as being hunter-gatherers and fishermen practised a basic form of agriculture. " Source: Nowth.

[1] See Animating Irish Ice Sheets During the Last Glacial Period. If this simulation is accurate, Ireland would have been completely covered with ice until around 20,000 years ago. The Last Glacial Period is thought to have ended around 11,700 years ago, by which time most of Ireland was clear of ice again, so it's possible that hunter-gatherers could have been living there before 7000 BC.  Vaguely Related: Glacial Deposits in Ballycotton Bay, Co. Cork, Ireland.

The dating is uncertain and confused, but my impression is that the megalithic period in Ireland is thought to have started around 4,000 BC. There may be some (or many) older monuments - I'm not really sure. "In Europe megaliths are, in general, constructions erected during the Neolithic or late stone age and Chalcolithic or Copper Age." (Wikipedia). This covers a time period of between app. 10,200 - 1500 BC.

According to The Sacred Island, "[t]here are four main types of megalithic monument to be found in Ireland. These are chambered cairns (also known as passage tombs or passage graves) with perhaps 300 - 500 in the country. Court cairns, (court tombs), about 400, dolmens (portal tombs or cromleacs), some 190 examples and wedges, again around 400 monuments. A fifth type or category are unclassified monuments of which there are at least 200. There is a sixth much smaller group, called Linkardstown cists, not very common."

There are thousands of prehistoric megaliths in Ireland.  "The NW European megalithic era is represented in Ireland on a very big scale." (Nowth). "The passage mound building dates in Ireland would appear to be from around 3500 BC. (That is -- in their present form -- they would have even earlier beginnings) ..." and the dolmens and circle stones probably first appeared later, around 2000 BC.

Note: The chronology given by Nowth seems to contradict the information on other sites I've found. According to The Sacred Island, for instance, "[c]ourts and dolmens are thought to be the oldest types, dating to about 4,000 BC, followed by passage graves, 3,800 BC onwards and wedges on the threshold of the bronze age." Some of this confusion may be due to the fact that it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between the different types of monuments.

By 4000 BC the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was apparently well underway in Ireland. If it's true that megaliths first started to appear on the island around this time, it would seem that there is a connection between the rise of farming and the construction of stone tombs and other monuments. Maybe a new form of religion began to evolve, but my guess is that the settled lifestyle of these prehistoric farmers made it more feasible for them to undertake what must have been major construction projects.

Video from 2011.

Evidence has been found suggesting that the prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Ireland were burying their dead a long time ago:

"Ireland's oldest human grave has become even more exceptional for one of its contents: The oldest polished ax on record in Europe was likely created solely for a burial, archaeologists say." Source: Live Science (2016).

"The finding sheds new light on the beliefs and complex funerary rituals of the early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived in Ireland about 9,500 years ago, from about 7530 B.C., the researchers said." (Emphasis added)

The dates are all over the place, but the basic outline of Ireland's prehistory is straightforward enough. As the glaciers retreated, bands of hunter-gatherers migrated to the island, perhaps across a land bridge. As the centuries went by, they developed agriculture and began to build thousands of stone tombs, standing circles and other monuments which can still be seen today. There's no great mystery about why people would construct tombs to memorialize their dead, but their religious beliefs are still unknown and probably always will be:

"There are no extant textual sources from the Neolithic era, the most recent available dating from the Bronze Age, and therefore all statements about any belief systems Neolithic societies may have possessed are glimpsed from archaeology." (Wikipedia)

Iraq Drought Reveals Ruins Of Ancient Palace

"A 3,400-year-old palace has emerged from a reservoir in the Kurdistan region of Iraq after water levels dropped because of drought." Source: CNN.

"The discovery of the ruins in the Mosul Dam reservoir on the banks of the Tigris River inspired a spontaneous archeological dig that will improve understanding of the Mittani Empire, one of the least-researched empires of the Ancient Near East, the Kurdish-German team of researchers said in a press release."

The Mitanni Empire (~1500-1300 BC) is known only through "Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian sources, as well as inscriptions from nearby places in Syria." (Wikipedia) This is truly a lost civilization:

According to Livius, "If ever the cliché 'forgotten empire' could be applied to an ancient state, it must be Mitanni, which is, in fact, hardly more than a name and a handful of archaeological and linguistic hypotheses ... It is almost certain that the heartland of Mitanni was situated somewhere along the upper Khabur in Mesopotamia, the country between Euphrates and Tigris. The capital of Mitanni, Waššukanni, and the important cities Kahat and Taide have not yet been identified, but it is reasonably certain that they must be sought somewhere in the southeast of Turkey or east of modern Syria."

Comment: The re-emergence of this ancient palace is like something out of a story by H.P. Lovecraft. It'll be just our luck if archaeologists exploring the site discover a trapdoor leading to the underground lair of some hideous Great Old One that will proceed to destroy the planet.

Book Review: The Secret History By Procopius

Some books are dangerous. For various reasons, they're dangerous to read or to possess and their authors sometimes take huge risks to write them. Books can be dangerous because of the knowledge they contain, e.g., the medieval grimoires of black magic, and some books, like the illegal English translations of the Bible before the English Reformation, are dangerous simply because they exist. Back in the medieval world, the people who wrote or read these books were often persecuted and sometimes executed in grisly ways.

Some books are dangerous because they expose the crimes and moral degeneracy of the powerful. The Secret History by Procopius is a good example of this kind of forbidden book. At the time it was written, it was probably the most dangerous book in the western world. If not, it was certainly dangerous to its author, who would have almost certainly been put to death after prolonged torture if his masters, the rulers of Byzantium found out what he was writing about them.

"Having dutifully written the official war history of Justinian's reign, Procopius turned around and revealed in The Secret History the other faces of the leading men and women of Byzantium in the sixth century. Justinian, the great law-giver, appears as a hateful tyrant, wedded to an ex-prostitute, Theodora; and Belisarius, the brilliant general whose secretary Procopius had been, is seen as the pliable dupe of his wife Antonina, a woman as corrupt and scheming as Theodora herself." -- Procopius, The Secret History, Penguin Classics.

Procopius goes relatively easy on the general Belisarius, who comes off as a hapless cuckold easily manipulated by the treacherous Antonina. Most of The Secret History is devoted to a detailed survey of the lurid crimes and personalities of the emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora, the absolute rulers of the Christian Byzantine empire. Both of these admittedly accomplished monsters are now considered saints by the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Procopius describes Justinian and Theodora as literal demons in human form, bloodthirsty psychopaths who committed bestial murders, betrayed their loyal friends and supporters, seized businesses and property in order to enrich themselves and corrupted the state for their own benefit as a matter of routine. The emperor was "dissembling, crafty, hypocritical, secretive by temperament, two faced..." Theodora was a deranged, power-mad slut, cruel and scheming, a former dancing girl and whore, intelligent but "malicious in the extreme."

Procopius writes: "In view of all this, I, like most of my contemporaries, never once felt that these two were human beings: they were a pair of blood-thirsty demons and what the poets call 'plaguers of mortal men'. For they plotted together to find the easiest and swiftest means of destroying all races of men and all their works, assumed human shape, became man-demons, and in this way convulsed the whole world." -- The Secret History, p.102.

In The Secret History, Justinian and Theodora are like the shape-shifting reptilians of modern conspiracy theories. According to Procopius, "some of those who were in the Emperor's company late at night, conversing with him (evidently in the palace) -- men of the highest possible character -- thought that they saw a strange demonic form in his place." -- Ibid, p.103. One of these witnesses claimed to see Justinian's head disappear while he paced around the room.

"A second man said that he stood by the Emperor's side as he sat, and saw his face suddenly transformed into a shapeless lump of flesh: neither eyebrows nor eyes were in their normal position, and it showed no other distinguishing features at all; gradually, however, he saw the face return to its usual shape." -- Ibid, p.103.

The Secret History is a classic example of what we would now call a political hit piece. After discussing the relationship between Belisarius and Antonina, Procopius goes on to describe in vivid detail "Justinian's Misgovernment," "The Crimes of Theodora," "The Destruction Wrought By The Demon Emperor," "The Ruin Of Various Classes Of The Community," and how "Everyone And Everything [was] Sacrificed To the Emperor's Greed," just to quote the chapter headings.

Note: I'm not sure if the chapter headings are used in the original manuscript. The book was apparently given the title "The Secret History" by later scholars.

Is The Secret History authentic? The book is so unlike Procopius's other works -- his history of Justinian's wars and his pandering description of the emperor's admittedly fantastic building projects -- that some scholars have wondered if The Secret History was actually written by Procopius at all. However, according to the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, written by the translator, G.A. Williamson, the book is most likely authentic.

The question is why Procopius would have written such a vicious attack in the first place. It was an extremely dangerous thing to do, to say the least, and he couldn't have published it while the emperor and his wife were still alive and in power. Williamson argues that no one would have forged the book for the same reason. If they couldn't publish it, what would be the point? Furthermore, nothing in The Secret History contradicts the information in Procopius's other books and he most likely thought he could get it published after Justinian died. One way or another, Procopius must have taken extraordinary measures to safeguard the manuscript while he was working on it.

I can only imagine what Justinian and Theodora would have done to Procopius if they had discovered what he was writing about them. They would have executed him, naturally, but how? Considering their well-deserved reputation for cruelty, whatever method they used wouldn't have been gentle or quick. I like to imagine Procopius working on his manuscript by candlelight in a locked chamber in the middle of the night, constantly on the alert for approaching footsteps. He must have hidden the scrolls somewhere safe--under a loose floorboard, maybe, or behind a stone in the wall. If you're writing a book that could get you blinded, flayed and burned alive, you're not going to just leave it lying around on your desk.

Theodora died, maybe of cancer, in 548 AD, Justinian about 20 years later. The Secret History is thought to have been written around the same time that Procopius wrote books 1-7 of his history of the wars, according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised). "The Secret History covers roughly the same years as the first seven books of the History of Justinian's Wars and appears to have been written after they were published," according to Wikipedia. "Current consensus generally dates it to 550 or 558, or maybe even as late as 562." Justinian died in 565, so Procopius had to keep the Secret History secret for several years at least.

The Secret History "is a virulent, uncritical, and often scurrilous attack on the whole policy of Justinian and on the characters of the emperor and his consort, which can only have been circulated clandestinely so long as Justinian was alive. It provides a kind of subtext to the History of the Wars, and reveals Procopius as a diehard, if occasionally almost paranoiac, adherent of the aristocratic opposition..." (OCD)

Were Justinian and Theodora as bad as Procopius says they were? Probably. They were highly intelligent and competent in many ways, but never forget that these "saints" also massacred thousands of their own subjects at the Hippodrome during the Nika riots. Procopius may have been "uncritical" and "paranoid," but The Secret History is one of the most entertaining books I've ever read about the period. Highly recommended.

The Drowned World Of Doggerland

"Doggerland was an area of land, now submerged beneath the southern North Sea, that connected Great Britain to continental Europe. It was flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500–6,200 BC. Geological surveys have suggested that it stretched from Britain's east coast to the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and the peninsula of Jutland. It was probably a rich habitat with human habitation in the Mesolithic period, although rising sea levels gradually reduced it to low-lying islands before its final submergence, possibly following a tsunami caused by the Storegga Slide." (Wikipedia)

"Evidence of Doggerlanders’ nomadic presence can be found embedded in the seafloor, where modern fishermen often find ancient bones and tools that date to about 9,000 years ago. These artifacts brought Doggerland’s submerged history to the attention of British and Dutch archaeologists and paleontologists." Source: National Geographic.

"Using sophisticated seismic survey data acquired mainly by oil companies drilling in the North Sea, the scientists have been able to reconstruct a digital model of nearly 46,620 square kilometers (18,000 square miles) of what Doggerland looked like before it was flooded."

"The prehistoric existence of what is now known as Doggerland was established in the late 19th century. H. G. Wells referred to the concept in his short story A Story of the Stone Age of 1897, set in 'a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea...Fifty thousand years ago it was, fifty thousand years if the reckoning of geologists is correct', though most of the action seems to occur in what is now Surrey and Kent, but stretching out to Doggerland." (Wikipedia)

Ancient Origins reported in 2015 that "[t]he study of Doggerland has received a €2.5 million ($2.8 million) Advanced Research Grant from the European Research Council, with hopes that the results of the study provide better insight into the life of prehistoric inhabitants who are thought to have resided in the area for about 6000 years."

Related: "Britain's Atlantis" Found At Bottom Of North Sea (2012).

British Atlantis: Archaeologists Begin Exploring Lost World Of Doggerland (2015).

10,000-Year-Old Prehistoric Forest Discovered Submerged Off UK Coast

Book Review: Jesus Was Caesar

Jesus Was Caesar by Francesco Carotta is an interesting book even if you don't buy its central premise that the story of Jesus is essentially a retelling of the story of Divus Julius -- the deified Julius Caesar. I don't buy it myself and Carotta's theory has been completely ignored by serious scholars, probably for good reason, but the book's worth checking out if you're interested in alternate histories of the origin of Christianity.

"The thesis of Carotta's book Jesus was Caesar is based on a comparison of the gospels, especially the earliest Gospel of Mark, with the ancient sources about the last years in the life of Caesar and his immediate legacy," according to Wikipedia. "Within Carotta's theory the gospels are hypertexts after a diegetic transposition." This basically means that the story of Caesar's assassination and deification is the story hidden within the story of Jesus.

According to Carotta, the cult established by Augustus for the Divine Caesar evolved into the Jesus cult over the years:

"Julius Caesar, son of Venus and founder of the Roman Empire, was elevated to the status of Imperial God, Divus Julius, after his violent death. The cult that surrounded him dissolved as Christianity surfaced. A cult surrounding Jesus Christ, son of God and originator of Christianity, appeared during the second century. Early historians, however, never mentioned Jesus and even now there is no actual proof of his existence. On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." -- from the synopsis of Jesus Was Caesar.

On the face of it, I don't see any reason why one kind of cult couldn't have morphed into another like this, but Carotta's theory isn't very convincing, to say the least. He suffers from a bad case of parallelism, i.e., the tendency to find parallels everywhere, and some of his arguments are tenuous at best, even more shaky than many of the parallels Joseph Atwill claims to find between the gospels and The Jewish War by Josephus.

Carotta makes some strange claims, arguing, for instance, that Jesus may have already been dead when he was crucified, assuming he was crucified at all, and Jesus Was Caesar describes in incredible detail a bewildering maze of connections that aren't exactly overpowering in their persuasiveness, to put it mildly. One way or another, though, it's obvious that Carotta's done a huge amount of research on the history of early Christianity and the imperial cult of Caesar.

This is a massive book (358 pages with over a hundred pages of footnotes and a detailed bibliography) full of details about Roman and Jewish religion, paleography, ancient languages, geography, statuary, artwork, cultic practices, etc. At times Carotta reaches an almost Robert Burton level of scholastic obsessiveness, but it's fascinating stuff if you're into this kind of thing. Jesus Was Caesar is the kind of humongous tome you could easily spend months or years reading and studying. In fact, it would probably take a lifetime of research just to track down and verify all of Carotta's sources.

Jesus Was Caesar should be classified as "speculative nonfiction." It's one of those books that's worth reading for its details rather than its conclusion, though it's almost impossible to know if Carotta got the details right. Reading it would also make a good intellectual exercise in spotting leaps of logic and hidden assumptions, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. I've got to admit that I couldn't make it through the whole thing. I gave it a shot, but I got bogged down pretty quickly.

I have to give Carotta credit for one thing, at least. His book is well-sourced with extensive footnotes. Maybe his argument is wrong -- I'm not saying it is or isn't -- but Jesus Was Caesar is definitely a scholarly work, which is more than can be said for a lot of the alternate histories of early Christianity that are floating around out there.

Mysterious Megalithic Monument Found At Carrowmore "Unlike Anything Seen In Ireland"

"In Ireland, archaeologists have found a remarkable monument in the heart of the extensive Stone Age complex of Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery in Sligo. They were expecting to find a burial site or graves but instead found a most unusual monument that no one in Ireland has ever seen before. This mysterious monument is baffling researchers and it is hoped that it may ultimately yield insights into the prehistoric past." Source: Ancient Origins.

Archaeologists discovered "a circular-shaped monument surrounded by a ditch which they initially assumed to be a barrow, a type of burial site or grave, in the heart of the Carrowmore complex." After excavating around 15 tons of soil, they found "a large number of prehistoric tools that are known as cherts and were crucial to prehistoric societies. They would have been used for a variety of tasks, such as making baskets, working bones, scraping hides and in the preparation of food. These cherts were essential for the survival of Prehistoric peoples."

Apparently, nothing like this has been discovered in Ireland before. The Carrowmore complex dates back to the 4th millennium BC.

Pavlopetri: The Oldest Submerged City (2012)

"The city of Pavlopetri, underwater off the coast of southern Laconia in Peloponnese, Greece, is about 5,000 years old, making it one of the oldest submerged lost cities, as well as the oldest in the Mediterranean sea." Source: Wikipedia.

"The ruins date from at least 2800 BC through to intact buildings, courtyards, streets, chamber tombs and some thirty-seven cist graves which are thought to belong to the Mycenaean period (c.1680-1180 BC). This Bronze Age phase of Greece provides the historical setting for much Ancient Greek literature and myth, including Homer's Age of Heroes." Source: Science Daily (2009).

According to Wikipedia, the town "was submerged around 1000 BC by the first of three earthquakes that the area suffered. The area never re-emerged, so it was neither built-over nor disrupted by agriculture. Although eroded over the centuries, the town layout is as it was thousands of years ago. The site is under threat of damage by boats dragging anchors, as well as by tourists and souvenir hunters."

Who Built The Great Sphinx Of Giza?

"Who built the Sphinx? The most compelling evidence that the Sphinx was built for the Egyptian Pharaoh Khafre during his reign (2520-2494 BC) is in the architecture, geology, and archaeology of the Sphinx and its related monuments." Source: Ancient Egypt Research Association.

Khafre ruled during the 4th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom. He was the son of Pharoah Khufu, thought to have commissioned the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Khufu had another son, King Djedefre, but "until recently, experts thought that King Djedefre was a murderer and outcast who couldn't possibly have had the power to create the Great Sphinx," according to the Smithsonian Magazine (2013?). The new evidence described in the above video "makes him a more likely candidate."

It's possible that the sphinx actually shows the face of Khufu, rather than Khafre or Djedefre.

There's also a possibility that the Sphinx predates the 4th Dynasty. This theory is controversial, but if true it would mean that the statue wasn't built by any of these pharaohs:

 "More recently, a new theory emerged that places the statue’s origins much further back, to some 9,000 years ago. Supporters of this hypothesis point to extensive erosion of the limestone near the top of the Great Sphinx, arguing that the last time the region experienced enough rainfall in the region to cause this type of erosion on limestone was 7000 B.C." Source: The History Channel (2015).

"More traditional Egyptologists reject this view for several reasons," according to NBC News. "First, a Sphinx built earlier than 7000 B.C. would upset our understanding of ancient civilization, as there is no evidence of an Egyptian civilization this old."

One outlandish theory -- that the pyramids and the sphinx were built by refugees from Atlantis -- led to an interesting discovery.

The possibility that the Sphinx predates Egyptian civilization itself has led to all sorts of speculation that the statue was actually constructed by aliens. Why aliens would build a statue of a lion's body with or without a human head (the original may have been the head of a lion) has never really been explained as far as I know. Presumably, the statue had some kind of astronomical significance, but never mind that. The problem with the Ancient UFO crowd is that they immediately turn to aliens whenever they run into one of these ancient mysteries. Even if the Sphinx was built before the Egyptians came along -- which I doubt -- it would only prove, once again, that prehistoric people were a lot more advanced than we have been led to believe.

Related: 10 Bizarre Theories About The Pyramids That DON'T Involve Aliens