page_title: Great Sphinx of Giza
section_title: Early Egyptologists
hierarchical_section_title: Great Sphinx of Giza / Origin and identity / Dissenting hypotheses / Early Egyptologists
caption_attribution_description: English: Seated in chairs, from left to right: Auguste Mariette, Dona Josefina da Fonseca Costa, lady-in-waiting of the Empress, Luís Pedreira do Couto Ferraz, Baron and later Vicount of Bom Retiro, Empress Teresa Cristina, an unidentified man and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, surrounded by local Egyptians during the Emperor's trip to Egypt in the end of 1871. Behind them can be seem the Great Sphinx of Giza and the Giza Necropolis.
context_page_description: The Great Sphinx of Giza, commonly referred to as the Sphinx of Giza or just the Sphinx, is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx, a mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head of a human. Facing directly from West to East, it stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile in Giza, Egypt. The face of the Sphinx is generally believed to represent the pharaoh Khafre.
  Cut from the bedrock, the original shape of the Sphinx has been restored with layers of blocks. It measures 73 m long from paw to tail, 20 m high from the base to the top of the head and 19 m wide at its rear haunches. It is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt and is commonly believed to have been designed, sculpted, and constructed by ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom during the reign of the pharaoh Khafre.
context_section_description: Some early Egyptologists and excavators of the Giza pyramid complex believed the Great Sphinx and associated temples to predate the Fourth Dynasty rule of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. Flinders Petrie wrote in 1883 regarding the state of opinion regarding the age of the nearby temples, and by extension the Sphinx: "The date of the Granite Temple [Valley Temple] has been so positively asserted to be earlier than the fourth dynasty, that it may seem rash to dispute the point".
  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 of Egypt, c. 664–525 BC), which tells how Khufu came upon the Sphinx, already buried in sand. Although certain tracts on the Stela are considered good evidence, this passage is widely dismissed as 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.
  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 Dynasty IV, c. 2575–2467 BC. English Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge agreed that the Sphinx predated Khafre's reign, writing in The Gods of the Egyptians (1914): "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]." Maspero believed the Sphinx to be "the most ancient monument in Egypt".
caption: French archaeologist Auguste Mariette (seated, far left) and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil (seated, far right) with others in front of the Sphinx, 1871
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