Mark Lehner

Attribution:

Photograph Courtesy of the SCA

Mark Lehner

Egyptologist

Mark Lehner is an American archaeologist with more than thirty years of experience excavating in Egypt. His approach, as director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), is to conduct interdisciplinary archaeological investigation. His international team currently runs the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, excavating and mapping the ancient city of the builders of the Giza pyramid complex.

Mark Lehner first went to Egypt in the 1970s to study at the American University in Cairo and to search for the Hall of Records that psychic Edgar Cayce had prophesied lay beneath the Sphinx. He later turned to the scientific method of discovery in order to understand the culture better, returning some years later to complete a doctorate degree at Yale University. Lehner's 1991 dissertation was titled 'Archaeology of an image: The Great Sphinx of Giza'.

Among his other work in Egypt, Mark Lehner has produced the only known scale maps of the Giza Sphinx. He spent five years surveying and mapping the famous statue built by Khafre. He is also a visiting assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.