The Great Sphinx
The Great Sphinx is a lion with a human head that lies on the eastern side of the Giza plateau, with the pyramids in the backdrop and is one of the world’s biggest sculptures. The planet’s oldest Sphinx was built by King Kephren; it is a single block of limestone that was previously attached to the main bedrock and is 20.5 meters tall, 73 meters long, and 6 meters wide.
The Great Sphinx Story:
When people were building the pyramid of King Kephren, they took limestone from the area that now houses the Sphinx. Workers ignored a large portion of the rock after they examined it and found it too poor to cut for the pyramid.
After the workers finished construction on the pyramid, this piece of rock still blocked the view. This clearly irritated the king, who most likely gave orders to remove it so the pyramid’s view would be unobstructed. Someone then came up with the idea to make a statue of the king instead. However, the rock’s size and shape were inconvenient for making a typical royal statue sitting on a throne.
The ancient Egyptians chose to construct the Sphinx with the head of a king and the body of a lion. This combination represents the physical power of the lion and the intelligence of the king in one image. The Sphinx is at least 4,500 years old. Tests have proven that the bottom portion of the Sphinx is more than 10,000 years old. It has stood through much of human history in both forms.
The Dream Stele:
Between the Sphinx’s claws lies the Dream Stele. This granite slab has hieroglyphs that tell the story of Prince Thutmose IV. The prince was hunting in the Giza desert and fell asleep in the Sphinx’s shadow. At the time, the Sphinx was mostly buried in sand, with only its head showing.
Thutmose IV had a dream where he saw a god offer him a new kingdom. The deity was the Sphinx itself, as ancient Egyptians recognized it as “the living image of God on earth.” They called royal sculptures of Dynasty IV (2575–2467 BC) and the Great Sphinx “Sshp-ankhw.” The word “Sphinx” is not phonetically similar to “Sshp-ankhw,” so it might be a Greek mispronunciation.
The Great Sphinx
An examination of the Sphinx’s face shows that someone broke off its one-meter-wide nose. They hammered long rods or chisels into the nose—one down from the bridge and one beneath the nostril—and used them to pull the nose off to the south.
Historians attribute the loss of the Sphinx’s nose to iconoclasm by a Sufi Muslim named Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr. In 1378 AD, al-Dahr became enraged after seeing Egyptian peasants making sacrifices to the Sphinx to improve their harvest. According to the Egyptian Arab historian al-Maqrz, Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr then smashed the nose, and authorities executed him for the crime. Locals believed the Sphinx, considered the “talisman of the Nile,” controlled the flood cycle. Another legend claims that a cannonball from Napoleon’s troops broke the nose. However, drawings from 1737 show the Sphinx without a nose, disproving this theory. Other stories blame British soldiers and Mamluks for the damage.
A ceremonial pharaonic beard was supposedly attached to the Sphinx, in addition to its missing nose. However, this may have been a later addition. According to Egyptologist Vassil Dobrev, the beard would have damaged the statue’s chin when it fell if it had been an original component. The absence of apparent damage supports his theory that people added the beard later.
