The Sphinx, Göbekli Tepe (Video Archive) and the Old Paradigm, Evidence They Refuse to See

Now on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/57DWFx0n8eUmRyAMGTnWIOJohn Anthony West was never interested in politely accepting the approved version of the ancient past. A writer, satirist and self-described “rogue Egyptologist,” West spent decades arguing that ancient Egypt represented something far older, stranger and more intellectually sophisticated than conventional archaeology was prepared to admit. In this wide-ranging conversation, West explains how the work of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz changed the direction of his life, why *The Temple of Man* became central to his understanding of Egypt, and how a single observation about water erosion on the Great Sphinx eventually led him into one of the most bitter archaeological disputes of the twentieth century. He recounts his collaboration with geologist Robert Schoch, the controversial geological case for an older Sphinx, and the extraordinary reaction that followed their 1991 presentation before the Geological Society of America. West also turns to Göbekli Tepe, prehistoric cave art, ancient stoneworking, cosmology, reincarnation, megalithic monuments and the possibility that sophisticated ideas existed thousands of years before conventional histories allow for them. Throughout, he attacks what he calls the “Church of Progress”: the assumption that modern technological civilization necessarily represents the summit of human achievement. Combative, funny, provocative and frequently merciless toward academic orthodoxy, this is John Anthony West in full flight—a man less interested in winning the approval of Egyptologists than in forcing people to reconsider what civilization is, how old it may be, and how much of the human past we may still have completely wrong.