THE SPHINX, THE KENNEDY CENTER, AND THE ANCIENT URGE TO CARVE POWER INTO STONE
By Janet Kira Lessin & Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D.
© 2026 Aquarian Media
Sasha began this article with Giza, where, in his reconstruction of the Anunnaki record, the great Deluge around 11,000 BCE destroyed the facilities around Sippar and forced the Anunnaki leadership to establish a new transportation, communications, and navigation center farther west.
In his interpretation, the Giza complex became part of that new system, with the Great Pyramid serving not simply as a monumental tomb or sacred structure but as an operating technological center that supported communications, computation, power amplification, and astro-navigation.
According to Sasha’s reconstruction, Anunnaki Prince Ningishzidda, Enki’s son, designed chambers inside the Great Pyramid that contained what later traditions described as crystals or data banks, along with equipment that supported the broader navigation and communications network.
The new approach corridor connected Sinai, Jerusalem, Lebanon, and Giza, while the Nile provided the water resources needed to help support the technological complex. Sasha sees a parallel between this ancient system and modern data centers, which also require enormous quantities of power, cooling, infrastructure, and carefully controlled access.
In this account, Commander Enlil was so pleased with Ningishzidda’s work that the face of the great stone lion at Giza was fashioned in his nephew’s likeness, establishing not only a functional center but a monumental marker of the individual associated with its creation.
Later, when Marduk gained control of Giza, Sasha argues that the identity connected to the great stone lion changed, with Ningishzidda’s image giving way to an identity associated with Osiris, Marduk’s son.
Whether readers accept Sasha’s Anunnaki reconstruction in whole, in part, or not at all, the larger human behavior that drew our attention is easy to recognize because it appears repeatedly in the conventional historical record.
Powerful rulers have long tried to attach themselves to public works, monuments, cities, temples, palaces, statues, coins, and institutions meant to outlast ordinary human life. The physical world becomes a place to advertise authority, assert legitimacy, diminish predecessors, and fuse personal identity with state power.
That recurring pattern is what brought us from Giza to Washington.
In September 2026, President Donald Trump continued to press to have his name associated with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after a federal judge ruled that Congress, rather than the president or the Center’s board, has the authority to rename the congressionally established memorial. Trump subsequently threatened
