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On the plateau of Giza, facing the rising sun, the Great Sphinx statue still sits. Visiting the site it is impossible to be unmoved; the Sphinx is huge; 241 ft long, 20 ft wide, and 66.34. It is one of the oldest AND largest statues in the world, but apart from those measurements, we know very little about it. No-one knows for certain whose face the statue bares, who had it built or why. We do know that the Great Sphinx is so old that the Pharaohs (including Rameses II) regarded it as an incredibly old and sent workers to restore it, as in their time almost all of the ancient statue had disappeared beneath the sands. Beyond that there are no writings to mention it's creation and we don't know it's name. Why do we even call it 'The Sphinx'?
Greek mythology tells of a mythical beast who had the body of a lion and the head of a woman. This beast guarded the town of Thebes, but this is Greek Thebes, not the Egyptian city of the same name. According to legend this beast asked every passing traveller a riddle. "Which creature in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening upon three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be?" Anyone unable to answer the riddle was immediately strangled by the monster and eaten. According to legend Oedipus escaped death with this answer "Man-who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and then walks with a cane in old age." The monster then leaped from the cliff where she lived, to her death. This monster the Greeks called a sphinx, from the Greek word which means 'to strangle' the result is that all such monuments of a mythical beast with the body of a lion, whether Greek Status or Egyptian statues are now called 'sphinx'.
Anyone who has looked at an Egyptian statue of a sphinx may be puzzled - this does not seem like a statue of a monster. Could there be some sort of mistake? There are many similar Egyptian statues showing lion bodied beasts with the heads of other animals (frequently men or rams) such as the great avenue of 900 sphinxes at Thebes in Egypt, but these sphinxes (we don't actually know what they Ancient Egyptians called them) were not monsters. An Egyptian sphinx statue was a guardian, the lions body represented the sun god; And that's not the only difference.
A Greek sphinx statue shows a lions body, a serpents tale and the face of a woman. The lion is seated, her font legs vertical, but her most outstanding feature is the pair of eagles wings stretching out from her shoulders. Egyptian statues depict a prone leonine body and usually have the head of a man or other animal. Most notably they have no wings at all.
It seems strange that this one word could come to represent two such different forms of ancient statue, but the Great Sphinx itself has even greater mysteries.
In 1950 R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz noticed the marks of what he believed was water erosion inside the Sphinx Enclosure. In 1989 a further investigation by geologist, Robert Schoch, revealed that this 'weathering' had been caused by rain, yet the average annual rainfall in the area since 2600 BC (when archaeologists believe the sphinx was built) was only one inch. This has lead a number of authors to state that the sphinx is in fact far older than originally thought and dates from pre-dynastic times, making this Egyptian statue over 5000 years old. While many reputable archaeologists say this cannot be true and give other explanations for the water erosion effect, the fact that no other building on the Giza plateau shows any sign of this weathering leaves the question unanswered.
While it may lack the flamboyance of a winged Greek sphinx statue, the Great Sphinx is magnificent. We may not know it's age or why it was so carefully chiseled from the rock of the Giza Plateau, but we are fortunate to be able to enjoy this ancient statue and it's mysteries, and look forward to the day when they can be fully unraveled.
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