No other monument in the world evokes mystery like the Great Sphinx of Giza. It has survived the harsh climate of Egypt for thousands of years and will remain long after our own civilisation is gone. According to orthodox Egyptology, the Sphinx was built around 2500 BCE as a memorial to the pharaoh Khafre. Yet this “fact” has scant to no supportive evidence. When was the Sphinx really built and, most importantly, why? In this provocative collaboration two Egyptology outsiders, Robert M. Schoch and Robert Bauval combine their decades of research to show how the Sphinx is thousands of years older than the conventional Egyptological timeline and was built by a long forgotten pre-Pharaonic civilisation. They examine the known history of the Sphinx, contrasting what Egyptologists claim with prominent historical accounts and new research, including updates to Schoch's geological water weathering research and reanalysis of seismic studies. Building on Bauval's Orion Correlation Theory, they investigate the archaeo-astronomical alignments of the monuments of the Giza Plateau and reveal how the pyramids and Sphinx were built to align with the constellations of Orion and Leo. Analysing the evidence for a significantly older construction phase at Giza and the restoration and recarving of the Sphinx during the Old Kingdom era, they assert that the Sphinx was first built by an advanced pre-Pharaonic civilisation that existed circa 12,000 years ago on the Giza Plateau, contemporaneous with the sophisticated Göbekli Tepe complex. The authors examine how the monuments at Giza memorialise Zep Tepi, the Golden Age of legend shown here to be an actual historical time period from roughly 10,500 BCE through 9700 BCE. Moving us closer to an understanding of the true age and purpose of the Great Sphinx, Schoch and Bauval provide evidence of an early high civilisation witnessed by the Great Sphinx before the end of the last ice age.