- "What's the probability that a meteor hits an object of cultural significance?" -> vastly lower than the probability that the meteor hits something of non-cultural significance.
- "What's the probability that a meteor hits a given object of cultural significance?" -> Proportional to object size + age.
Maybe the sphinx isn't a bad candidate for the only object of cultural significance impacted by a meteor? Still seems unusually improbable however.
Right. A meteorite strike on the Sphinx is both extremely unlikely considered as an explanation for damage, and also entirely possible given evidence that it occurred.
The same reasoning applies to two UUIDs or Git hashes matching by accident: of negligible probability, yet easily proven if it happens.
Nothing compelling that I know of. Other meteorite strikes being described using the same language might count. A record of having used the particular meteorite in religious apparatus, more so. It is the sort of thing that would have been recorded, but records are spotty.
I think the headdress was supposed to have been covered in gold leaf, which might have attracted lightning strikes. Just cracking from normal weathering and falling off is the most likely cause, though. It seems like a thing that they would have liked to blame on something dramatic like a thunderbolt.
There are a lot of monuments that would feel similar if they got hit (the Taj Mahal, Notre Dame cathedral, the Statue of Liberty, Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, large parts of the Vatican, the Forbidden City, ...), and the odds of any one of them getting hit should be quite a bit higher. The Sphinx is on the smaller end of qualifying monuments, but it had a lot more time to get hit than most. A meteorite striking the site of Notre Dame in 1000 B.C. wouldn't have had the same ... impact.
When you're looking at hindsight, it is the "somewhere" that matters here, so it's not unlikely at all. There are a massive number of interesting things around the world that would be "surprising" to have been hit by a meteorite. If one of them was in the past, this isn't as unlikely as it seems.
Regardless, I realize other posters linked to pretty good evidence that this isn't what happened.
The whole point of this comment thread is that there does seem to be some evidence it happened. The evidence is just being written off here because the odds are low.
Spatial flux studies show they are a little more likely to hit the equatorial rather than polar regions due to the elliptic distribution of the source material.
