Sphinx
Subtitle: History of a Monument
Contributors: David Lorton (Translator)
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: October 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 168
ISBN-13: 9780801439629
Subjects: African history: BCE to c 500 CE; Egyptian archaeology; Memorials, monuments; History: World; Great Sphinx (Egypt); History - General History; Ancient Egypt; Subjects & Themes - Religious; Ancient - Egypt; Archaeology; History
First sentence: This book is devoted to an archetypal figure: the Great Sphinx of Giza, as it is habitually called to specify its location (Figure 1).
Description: "The Great Sphinx of Giza is one of the few monuments from ancient Egypt familiar to nearly everyone. In a land where the colossal is part of the landscape, it still stands out, the largest known statue in Egypt. Originally constructed as the image of King Chephren, builder of the second of the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx later acquired new fame in the guise of the sun god Harmakhis.

Major construction efforts in the New Kingdom and Roman Period transformed the monument and its environs into an impressive place of pilgrimage, visited until the end of pagan antiquity.".

"Christiane Zivie-Coche, a Egyptologist, surveys the long history of the Great Sphinx and discusses its original appearance, its functions and religious significance, its relation to the many other Egyptian sphinxes, and the various discoveries connected with it.

From votive objects deposited by the faithful and inscriptions that testify to details of worship, she reconstructs the cult of Harmakhis (in Egyptian, Har-em-akhet, or "Horus-in-the-horizon"), which arose around the monument in the second millennium. "We are faced," she writes, "with a religious phenomenon that is entirely original, though not unique: a theological reinterpretation turned an existing statue into the image of the god who had been invented on its basis."".

"The coming of Christianity ended the Great Sphinx's religious role. The ever-present sand buried it, thus sparing it the fate that overtook the nearby pyramids, which were stripped of their stone by medieval builders. The monument remained untouched, covered by its desert blanket, until the first excavations. Zivie-Coche details the archaeological activity aimed at clearing the Sphinx and, later, at preserving it from the corrosive effects of a rising water table."--BOOK JACKET.