Environment: Fighting to Save the Sphinx

Corrosive salts spark an international controversy

Muslim fanatics knocked its nose off, Greeks scrawled graffiti on its paws and Mamluk soldiers used its face as a rifle target. But the saddest indignity suffered over the centuries by Egypt's Great Sphinx of Giza has stemmed from erosion, seemingly caused by a single enemy—the relentless desert wind. At the present rate of decay, experts say, the 64-foot-high figure could be reduced to a mound of dust in five to ten centuries.

Now, however, a newly discovered threat to the 4,500-year-old monument poses fresh problems for conservationists. It has also triggered a scientific and political controversy. A chemical analysis of the Sphinx by K. Lal Gauri, 48, a stone-preservation expert at the University of Louisville, suggests that salt, not wind, is the main cause behind the statue's decay.

Salts occur naturally in the Sphinx's limestone. Because of the hot days and relatively cool nights of the desert, water in the air condenses and dissolves the salts lying near the surface of the statue. When the salts crystallize again, they crack pores within the stone. In recent years, scientists agree, the salt damage has been accelerated by the Aswan High Dam, more than 400 miles upriver. The new dam has raised the water table throughout the Nile Valley. Another villain has been the high-salt mortar used to restore the flaking monument. "Walking on top of the Sphinx in the morning," says Gauri, "you can hear the stones popping like potato chips."

Gauri's analysis was prompted by the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) and the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (EAO). The agencies set out jointly in 1979 to clean and map the monument. The task of producing a detailed architectural chart of the Sphinx was taken on by Mark Lehner, 32, ARCE's field director. At Lehner's invitation, Gauri visited the site in 1980.

Gauri, who has worked on the Taj Mahal and the Acropolis, proposes that the Egyptians flush out the Sphinx's salt deposits and replace part of its veneer with low-salt stone and mortar. "If the work is done right," says Gauri, "it should last as long as the stones of the pharaohs."

Last October a section of veneer in the statue's left haunch collapsed. The Egyptians postponed consideration of Gauri's plan, formed seven committees to study the problem, and began to repair the Sphinx's left side. In the Egyptian view, the main threat to the Sphinx is not from humidity but from the higher water table.

The delicate situation has been complicated by the hovering presence of Houston's Susan Beth Franzheim, 41, the wife of Kenneth Franzheim II, former U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga. Franzheim, who believes she may be the reincarnation of Senmut, an Egyptian court adviser who lived some 3,400 years ago, donated $20,000 to ARCE for Gauri's initial research and offered to raise $60,000 more.

When Franzheim criticized the EAO for charging ahead and ignoring Gauri, the EAO barred her from the site and refused access to Lehner for a week. Says Kamel El Mallakh, cultural editor of Cairo's al Ahram newspaper: "We are experts, and the Sphinx is Egyptian. It is our glory, our history."