THE SPHINX HYPOTHESIS – Mehit: The Full Eye of Horus

The Great Sphinx of Giza bears no builder's inscription and, until recently, no known Egyptian name. This paper proposes a Predynastic origin and identifies Mehit—a reclining lioness attested at Hierakonpolis and Thinis, linked to Eye-of-Ra mythology and Early Dynastic seal-impressions—as the best-supported candidate for the Sphinx's original name. The conventional attribution to Khafre rests on circumstantial evidence, as Selim Hassan, who excavated the enclosure, acknowledged. The Sphinx Temple was abandoned before completion, and no Sphinx priesthood appears in any Old Kingdom tomb at Giza (Junker 1929–1955; Reisner 1942) — the plateau's only monument without a documented Old Kingdom cult. Mehit's cult centres were Thinis and Hierakonpolis, not Giza. Smith (1963) published Wepemnefret's slab stela, whose titulary names Mehit; Der Manuelian (2003) reads the title as 'heka-priest of Mehyt'. The framework places the Sphinx within the 3800–3100 BCE Shemsu Hor horizon documented in the Zep Tepi Series (Papers I–III, Levy 2026). That range is a corridor integration sequence, not a construction estimate, resolving into three phases: arrival in Upper Egypt from c. 3800 BCE; northward spread reaching Giza by c. 3500; and demographic majority in Lower Egypt c. 3300–3100. Carving is assigned to the second phase, c. 3400–3300 BCE, when settlement on the Giza floodplain is documented and stone-working technique had developed over some four centuries in Egypt; the monument then stands exposed and unmaintained through the third. Seven predictions derived from this framework are tested against the monument across Egyptology, geology, archaeology, palaeoclimatology and archaeoastronomy. Evidence includes a candidate population with documented Giza-corridor presence; non-uniform erosion on the western enclosure wall, requiring a directional mechanism and thus a pre-Khufu catchment; palaeoclimate proxies for the transitional period, alongside documented flash flooding from short, intense rainfall on the plateau before pyramid construction; and a burial history consistent with a monument whose custodians left no institutional successors. The earliest attested royal headcloth, on the Den label dated to c. 2985 BCE, sets a terminus post quem for the face, yielding a two-event model: Predynastic body, dynastic face, some three to four centuries apart. Falsification conditions are stated explicitly, and physical tests are proposed that would discriminate between this account and the conventional attribution.