A New Interpretation of a Rare Old Kingdom Dual Title: The King’s Chief Librarian and Guardian of the Royal Archives of Mehit

Abstract

To date, no unequivocal textual reference to the Great Sphinx has been identified prior to Egypt’s New Kingdom. Here, we present evidence that the monument we now know as the Great Sphinx was called Mehit and that this name was part of an exclusive title held only by the highest officials of the royal Egyptian court going back to at least early dynastic times, i.e. prior to the time of the Great Sphinx’s generally presumed construction during the 4th Dynasty. Furthermore, the symbolic origins of this title precede the 4th Dynasty by at least five centuries, going back to the very cradle of writing during the earliest dynastic era of the early Nile civilization. Based on this philological evidence corroborating geological and archeo-astronomical evidence previously published, we conclude that a lion-like stone monument existed on the Giza Plateau long before the Great Sphinx is generally believed to have been made and that early dynastic Egyptians referred to it in writing.