Great Sphinx of Giza

The Great Sphinx of Giza is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx, a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion. Facing east, it stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile in Giza, Egypt. The face of the Sphinx appears to represent the pharaoh Khafre. The original shape of the Sphinx was cut from bedrock and has since been restored with layers of limestone blocks. It measures 73 m (240 ft) long from paw to tail, 20 m (66 ft) high from the base to the top of the head and 19 m (62 ft) wide at its rear haunches. The Sphinx is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt and one of the most recognizable statues in the world. Archaeological evidence suggests that it was created by ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom during the reign of Khafre (c. 2558–2532 BC).
The circumstances surrounding the Sphinx's nose being broken off are uncertain, but close inspection suggests a deliberate act using rods or chisels. Contrary to a popular myth, it was not broken off by cannonfire from Napoleon's troops during his 1798 Egyptian campaign. Its absence is in fact depicted in artwork predating Napoleon and referred to in descriptions by the 15th-century historian al-Maqrīzī.
The original name the Old Kingdom creators gave the Sphinx is unknown, as the Sphinx temple, enclosure, and possibly the Sphinx itself was not completed at the time, and thus little is known about its cultural context. In the New Kingdom, the Sphinx was revered as the solar deity Hor-em-akhet (English: "Horus of the Horizon"; Hellenized: Harmachis), and the 14th century BC pharaoh Thutmose IV specifically refers to it as such in his Dream Stele.
The commonly used name "Sphinx" was given to it in classical antiquity, around 2,000 years after the commonly accepted date of its construction by reference to a Greek mythological beast with the head of a woman, a falcon, a cat, or a sheep and the body of a lion with the wings of an eagle (although, like most Egyptian sphinxes, the Great Sphinx has a man's head and no wings). The English word sphinx comes from the ancient Greek Σφίγξ (transliterated: sphinx) apparently from the verb σφίγγω (transliterated: sphingo / English: to squeeze), after the Greek sphinx who strangled anyone who failed to answer her riddle.
Medieval Arab writers, including al-Maqrīzī, call the Sphinx by an Arabized Coptic name Belhib (Arabic: بلهيب), Balhubah (Arabic: بلهوبه) Belhawiyya (Arabic: بلهويه), which in turn comes from Pehor (Ancient Egyptian: pꜣ-Ḥwr) or Pehor(o)n (Ancient Egyptian: pꜣ-Ḥwr(w)n), a name of the Canaanite god Hauron with whom the Sphinx was identified. It is also rendered as Ablehon on a depiction of the Sphinx made by François de La Boullaye-Le Gouz. The medieval Egyptian Arabic name is Abū il-Hawl (أبو الهول), meaning "father of terror", which may be a folk etymological reinterpretation of the name of the god Ḥwr.
The archaeological evidence suggests that the Great Sphinx was created around 2500 BC for the king Khafre, the builder of the Second Pyramid at Giza. The Sphinx is a monolith carved from the bedrock of the plateau, which also served as the quarry for the pyramids and other monuments in the area. Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz has suggested that the head of the Sphinx may have been carved first, out of a natural yardang, a ridge of bedrock that had been sculpted by the wind. These can sometimes achieve shapes that resemble animals. El-Baz suggests that the "moat" or "ditch" around the Sphinx may have been quarried out later to allow for the creation of the full body of the sculpture. The stones cut from around the Sphinx's body were used to construct a temple in front of it; however, neither the enclosure nor the temple were completed, and the relative scarcity of Old Kingdom cultural material suggests that a Sphinx cult was not established at the time. Selim Hassan, writing in 1949 on recent excavations of the Sphinx enclosure, makes note of this circumstance:
In order to construct the temple, the northern perimeter wall of the Khafre Valley Temple had to be deconstructed, hence it follows that the Khafre funerary complex preceded the creation of the Sphinx and its temple. Furthermore, the angle and location of the south wall of the enclosure suggests the causeway connecting Khafre's pyramid and Valley Temple already existed before the Sphinx was planned. The lower base level of the Sphinx temple also indicates that it does not pre-date the Valley Temple.
Some time around the First Intermediate Period, the Giza Necropolis was abandoned, and drifting sand eventually buried the Sphinx up to its shoulders. The first documented attempt at an excavation dates to c. 1400 BC, when the young Thutmose IV (1401–1391 or 1397–1388 BC) gathered a team and, after much effort, managed to dig out the front paws, between which he erected a shrine that housed the Dream Stele, an inscribed granite slab (possibly a repurposed door lintel from one of Khafre's temples). When the stele was discovered, its lines of text were already damaged and incomplete. An excerpt reads:
The Dream Stele associates the Sphinx with Khafre. However, this part of the text is not entirely intact:
Egyptologist Thomas Young, finding the Khaf hieroglyphs in a damaged cartouche used to surround a royal name, inserted the glyph ra to complete Khafre's name. When the stele was re-excavated in 1925, the lines of text referring to Khaf flaked off and were destroyed. Later, Ramesses II the Great (1279–1213 BC) may have undertaken a second excavation.
In the New Kingdom, the Sphinx became more specifically associated with the sun god Hor-em-akhet (Hellenized: Harmachis) or "Horus-at-the-Horizon". The Pharaoh Amenhotep II (1427–1401 or 1397 BC) built a temple to the northeast of the Sphinx nearly 1,000 years after its construction and dedicated it to the cult of Hor-em-akhet.
In Graeco-Roman times, Giza had become a tourist destination—the monuments were regarded as antiquities—and some Roman emperors visited the Sphinx out of curiosity and for political reasons. The Sphinx was cleared of sand again in the first century AD in honor of Emperor Nero and the Governor of Egypt Tiberius Claudius Balbilus. A monumental stairway—more than 12 metres (39 ft) wide—was erected, leading down to a pavement in front of the paws of the Sphinx. At the top of the stairs, a podium was positioned that allowed a view into the Sphinx sanctuary. Farther back, another podium neighbored several more steps. The stairway was dismantled during the 1931–32 excavations by Émile Baraize. Pliny the Elder describes the face of the Sphinx being colored red and gives measurements for the statue:
A stela dated to 166 AD commemorates the restoration of the retaining walls surrounding the Sphinx. The last emperor connected with the monument is Septimius Severus, around 200 AD. With the downfall of Roman power, the Sphinx was once more engulfed by the sands.
Some ancient non-Egyptians saw the Sphinx as a likeness of the god Hauron. The cult of the Sphinx continued into medieval times. The Sabians of Harran saw it as the burial place of Hermes Trismegistus. Arab authors describe the Sphinx as a talisman that guarded the area from the desert. Al-Maqrizi describes it as the "talisman of the Nile" that the locals believed the flood cycle depended upon. Muhammad al-Idrisi stated that those wishing to obtain bureaucratic positions in the Egyptian government gave incense offering to the monument.
Over the centuries, writers and scholars have recorded their impressions and reactions upon seeing the Sphinx. The vast majority were concerned with a general description, often including a mixture of science, romance and mystique. A description was made by John Lawson Stoddard:
From the 16th to the 19th centuries, European observers described the Sphinx having the face, neck and breast of a woman. Examples included Johannes Helferich (1579), George Sandys (1615), Johann Michael Vansleb (1677), Benoît de Maillet (1735) and Elliot Warburton (1844). Most early Western images were book illustrations in print form, elaborated by a professional engraver from either previous images available or some original drawing or sketch supplied by an author, and usually now lost. Seven years after visiting Giza, André Thévet (Cosmographie de Levant, 1556) described the Sphinx as "the head of a colossus, caused to be made by Isis, daughter of Inachus, then so beloved of Jupiter". He, or his artist and engraver, pictured it as a curly-haired monster with a grassy dog collar. Athanasius Kircher (who never visited Egypt) depicted the Sphinx as a Roman statue (Turris Babel, 1679). Johannes Helferich's (1579) Sphinx is a pinched-face, round-breasted woman with a straight haired wig. George Sandys stated that the Sphinx was a harlot; Balthasar de Monconys interpreted the headdress as a kind of hairnet, while François de La Boullaye-Le Gouz's Sphinx had a rounded hairdo with bulky collar. Richard Pococke's Sphinx was an adoption of Cornelis de Bruijn's drawing of 1698, featuring only minor changes, but is closer to the actual appearance of the Sphinx than anything previous. The print versions of Norden's drawings for his Voyage d'Egypte et de Nubie, 1755 clearly show that the nose was missing.
In 1817, the first modern archaeological dig, supervised by the Italian Giovanni Battista Caviglia, uncovered the Sphinx's chest completely.
One of the people working on clearing the sands from around the Great Sphinx was Eugène Grébaut, a French Director of the Antiquities Service.
Early Egyptologists and excavators were of divided opinion regarding the age of the Sphinx and the associated temples. In 1857, Auguste Mariette, founder of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, unearthed the much later Inventory Stela (estimated to be from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, c. 664–525 BC), which tells how Khufu came upon the Sphinx, already buried in sand. Although certain tracts on the stela are likely accurate, this passage is contradicted by archaeological evidence, thus considered to be Late Period historical revisionism, a purposeful fake, created by the local priests as an attempt to imbue the contemporary Isis temple with an ancient history it never had. Such acts became common when religious institutions such as temples, shrines and priests' domains were fighting for political attention and for financial and economic donations.
Flinders Petrie wrote in 1883 regarding the state of opinion of the age of the Khafre Valley Temple, and by extension the Sphinx: "The date of the Granite Temple has been so positively asserted to be earlier than the fourth dynasty, that it may seem rash to dispute the point. Recent discoveries, however, strongly show that it was really not built before the reign of Khafre, in the fourth dynasty." Gaston Maspero, the French Egyptologist and second director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, conducted a survey of the Sphinx in 1886. He concluded that because the Dream Stela showed the cartouche of Khafre in line 13, it was he who was responsible for the excavation and therefore the Sphinx must predate Khafre and his predecessors—possibly Fourth Dynasty, c. 2575–2467 BC. Maspero believed the Sphinx to be "the most ancient monument in Egypt".
Ludwig Borchardt attributed the Sphinx to the Middle Kingdom, arguing that the particular features seen on the Sphinx are unique to the 12th dynasty and that the Sphinx resembles Amenemhat III. E. A. Wallis Budge agreed that the Sphinx predated Khafre's reign, writing in The Gods of the Egyptians (1904): "This marvelous object [the Great Sphinx] was in existence in the days of Khafre, or Khephren, and it is probable that it is a very great deal older than his reign and that it dates from the end of the archaic period [c. 2686 BC]." Selim Hassan reasoned that the Sphinx was erected after the completion of the Khafre pyramid complex.
Rainer Stadelmann, former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, examined the distinct iconography of the nemes (headdress) and the now-detached beard of the Sphinx and concluded the style is more indicative of the pharaoh Khufu (2589–2566 BC), known to the Greeks as Cheops, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza and Khafre's father. He supports this by suggesting Khafre's Causeway was built to conform to a pre-existing structure, which, he concludes, given its location, could only have been the Sphinx.
In 2004, Vassil Dobrev of the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale in Cairo announced he had uncovered new evidence that the Great Sphinx may have been the work of the little-known pharaoh Djedefre (2528–2520 BC), Khafre's half brother and a son of Khufu. Dobrev suggests Djedefre built the Sphinx in the image of his father Khufu, identifying him with the sun god Ra in order to restore respect for their dynasty. Dobrev also says that the causeway connecting Khafre's pyramid to the temples was built around the Sphinx, suggesting it was already in existence at the time. Egyptologist Nigel Strudwick responded to Dobrev saying that: "It is not implausible. But I would need more explanation, such as why he thinks the pyramid at Abu Roash is a sun temple, something I'm sceptical about. I have never heard anyone suggest that the name in the graffiti at Zawiyet el-Aryan mentions Djedefre. I remain more convinced by the traditional argument of [the sphinx] being Khafre or the more recent theory of it being Khufu."
Geologist Colin Reader suggests that water runoff from the Giza plateau is responsible for the differential erosion on the walls of the sphinx enclosure. Because the hydrological characteristics of the area were significantly changed by the quarries, he contends this suggests that the sphinx likely predated the quarries (and thus, the pyramids). He points towards the larger cyclopean stones in part of the Sphinx Temple, as well as the causeway alignment with the pyramids and the break in the quarries, as evidence that the pyramids took the alignment with some pre-existing structure, such as the sphinx, into consideration when they were constructed, and that the sphinx temple was built in two distinct phases. He contends that such erosion could have occurred relatively rapidly and suggests that the sphinx was no more than a few centuries older than present archaeology would suggest, suggesting a late Predynastic or Early Dynastic origin, when Ancient Egyptians already were known to be capable of sophisticated masonry.
In 1931, engineers of the Egyptian government repaired the head of the Sphinx. Part of its headdress had fallen off in 1926 due to erosion, which had also cut deeply into its neck. This questionable repair was by the addition of a concrete collar between the headdress and the neck, creating an altered profile. Many renovations to the stone base and raw rock body were done in the 1980s and then redone in the 1990s.
The nummulitic limestone of the area consists of layers which offer differing resistance to erosion (mostly caused by wind and windblown sand), leading to the uneven degradation apparent in the Sphinx's body. The lowest part of the body, including the legs, is solid rock. The body of the animal up to its neck is fashioned from softer layers that have suffered considerable disintegration. The layer in which the head was sculpted is much harder. A number of "dead-end" shafts are known to exist within and below the body of the Great Sphinx, most likely dug by treasure hunters and tomb robbers.
Examination of the Sphinx's face shows that long rods or chisels were hammered into the nose area, one down from the bridge and another beneath the nostril, then used to pry the nose off towards the south, resulting in the one-metre wide nose still being lost to date. Many folk tales exist regarding the destruction of its nose, aiming to provide an answer as to where it went or what happened to it. One tale erroneously attributes it to cannonballs fired by the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. This is considered false since drawings of the Sphinx by Frederic Louis Norden in 1737 show the nose missing, predating Napoleon's arrival by 60 years.
The damaged nose has also been attributed by some 10th century Arab authors stating that it was a result of iconoclastic attacks. Besides this, there was also mention of the damage being the work of the Mamluks in the 14th century. According to Ibn Qadi Shuhba, Muhammad ibn Sadiq ibn al-Muhammad al-Tibrizi al-Masri (d. 1384), desecrated the sphinxes of "Qanatir al-Siba".
The Arab historian al-Maqrīzī, writing in the early 15th century, attributes the loss of the nose to Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim from the khanqah of Sa'id al-Su'ada in 1378, who found local peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest and therefore defaced the Sphinx in an act of iconoclasm. According to al-Maqrīzī, many people living in the area believed that the increased sand covering the Giza Plateau was retribution for al-Dahr's act of defacement. Al-Minufi (1443–1527) meanwhile mentioned that the Alexandrian Crusade in 1365 was divine retribution for Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr's breaking off the nose of a sphinx.
In addition to the lost nose, a ceremonial pharaonic beard is thought to have been attached, although this may have been added in later periods after the original construction. Egyptologist Vassil Dobrev has suggested that had the beard been an original part of the Sphinx, it would have damaged the chin of the statue upon falling. Residues of red pigment are visible on areas of the Sphinx's face and traces of yellow and blue pigment have also been found elsewhere on the Sphinx, leading Mark Lehner to suggest that the monument "was once decked out in gaudy comic book colours".
Johann Helffrich visited the Sphinx during his travels in 1565–1566. He describes that a priest went into the head of the Sphinx, and when he spoke it was as if the Sphinx itself was speaking. Many New Kingdom stelae depict the Sphinx wearing a crown. If it in fact existed, the hole could have been the anchoring point for it. Émile Baraize closed the hole with a metal hatch in 1926.
Howard Vyse directed John Shae Perring in 1837 to drill a tunnel in the back of the Sphinx, just behind the head. The boring rods became stuck at a depth of 27 feet (8.2 m). Attempts to blast the rods free caused further damage. The hole was cleared in 1978. Among the rubble was a fragment of the Sphinx's nemes headdress.
A major natural fissure in the bedrock cuts through the waist of the Sphinx, first excavated by Auguste Mariette in 1853. At the top of the back it measures up to 2 metres (6.6 ft) in width. Baraize, in 1926, sealed the sides and roofed it with iron bars, limestone and cement, and installed an iron trap door at the top. The sides of the fissure might have been artificially squared; however, the bottom is irregular bedrock, about 1 metre (3.3 ft) above the outside floor. A very narrow crack continues deeper.
In 1926, the Sphinx was cleared of sand under direction of Baraize, which revealed an opening to a tunnel at floor-level at the north side of the rump. It was subsequently closed by masonry veneer and nearly forgotten. More than 50 years later, the existence of the passage was recalled by three elderly men who had worked during the clearing as basket carriers. This led to the rediscovery and excavation of the rump passage, in 1980.
The passage consists of an upper and a lower section, which are angled roughly 90 degrees to each other:
It is possible that the entire passage was cut top down, beginning high up on the rump, and that the current access point at floor-level was made at a later date. Vyse noted in his diary (February 27 and 28, 1837) that he was "boring" near the tail, which indicates him as the creator of the passage, as no other tunnel has been identified at this location. Another interpretation is that the shaft is of ancient origin, perhaps an exploratory tunnel or an unfinished tomb shaft.
A 1925 photograph shows a man standing below floor level in a niche in the Sphinx's core body. It was closed during the 1925–1926 restorations.
Another hole might have been at floor level in the large masonry box on the south side of the Sphinx.
The space behind the Dream Stele, between the paws of the Sphinx, was covered by an iron beam and cement roof, which was fitted with an iron trap door.
At the ledge of the Sphinx enclosure, a square shaft is located opposite the northern hind paw. It was cleared during excavation in 1978 by Hawass and measures 1.42 by 1.06 metres (4.7 by 3.5 ft) and about 2 metres (6.6 ft) deep. Lehner interprets the shaft to be an unfinished tomb and named it "Keyhole Shaft", because of cuttings in the ledge above the shaft that are shaped like the lower part of a traditional (Victorian era) keyhole, upside down.
Numerous ideas have been suggested to explain or reinterpret the origin and identity of the Sphinx, that lack sufficient evidential support and/or are contradicted by such, and are therefore considered part of pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology.
Until the early 20th century, it was suggested that the face of the Sphinx had "Negroid" characteristics, as part of the now outdated historical race concepts.