agesilaos wrote:The heads were not ‘knocked off’ but clearly fell off and the very slight damage comes from that fall. That the wings broke into smaller pieces will be due to their more fragile nature, otherwise the supposed iconoclasts carried the barely damaged heads to the third chamber for what reason?
The position of the marble fragments suspended within the fill need not be significant; the area has been subject to seismic activity as well as bombardment, which may cause particulates, like sand to behave as a fluid and float objects that would not float in water, basically sand runs underneath the object and makes it move up through the strata, this is the same effect that brings coin hoards to the surface after artillery bombardments (quite a frequent occurrence in the recent middle East.
The heads could not have reached the third chamber at all without being carried there. The perpetrators intended to make them inaccessible/hidden/buried behind the other sealing wall and deep into the monument - perhaps just making the reconstruction of the sphinxes as difficult as possible or perhaps motivated by some degree of superstition. What it suggests is that the third chamber was the one being filled when the sphinxes were mutilated, so that provided the immediate opportunity for burying the heads somewhere they would not easily be found.
Heads do not just fall off marble statues. If you mean that something fell on the sphinxes to knock their heads off, please explain how it also neatly chopped their breasts off without damaging the rest of the beasts?
Sand liquifaction would result in anything denser than the sand-air mix (e.g. marble) sinking to the floor. You have described a process which might remove marble fragments from the middle of the fill, but would not put them into the middle of the fill.
The men were not iconoclasts, but troops who had been instructed to desecrate and seal up the tomb of an extremely important individual and were probably doing so quite reluctantly and superstitiously.
Best wishes,
Andrew
I believe the Kasta Hill Mound lies above the 80m contour. Such a Tsunami would have obliterated every port in the eastern Mediterranean (which it did not).