Great Sphinx of Giza

The head of the Great Sphinx at Giza, Egypt

The Great Sphinx of Giza is a large half-human Sphinx statue in Egypt, on the Giza Plateau at the west bank of the Nile River, near modern-day Cairo (29.975299°N 31.137496°E / 29.975299; 31.137496). It is one of the largest single-stone statues on Earth, and is commonly believed to have been built by ancient Egyptians in the 3rd millennium BC.

What name ancient Egyptians called the statue is not completely known. The Western name "Sphinx" was given to it in Antiquity based on the legendary Greek creature with the body of a lion, the head of a woman and the wings of a bird, though Egyptian sphinxes have the head of a man. The ancient Greek term itself is postulated to be a corruption of the ancient Egyptian Shesep-ankh. This name was applied to royal statues in the Fourth Dynasty, though it came to be more specifically associated with the Great Sphinx in the New Kingdom. In medieval texts, the names balhib and bilhaw referring to the Sphinx are attested, including by Egyptian historian Maqrizi, which suggest Coptic constructions, but the Egyptian Arabic name Abul-Hôl, which translates as "Father of Terror", came to be more widely used.

Description

The Great Sphinx in 1867. Note its unrestored original condition, still partially buried body, and a man standing beneath its ear.

The Great Sphinx is a statue with the face of a man and the body of a lion. Carved out of the surrounding limestone bedrock, it is 57 metres (260 feet) long, 6 m (20 ft) wide, and has a height of 20 m (65 ft), making it the largest single-stone statue in the world. Blocks of stone weighing upwards of 200 tonnes were quarried in the construction phase to build the adjoining Sphinx Temple. It is located on the west bank of the Nile River within the confines of the Giza pyramid field. The Great Sphinx faces due east, with a small temple between its paws.

After the necropolis was abandoned, the Sphinx became buried up to its shoulders in sand. The first attempt to dig it out dates back to 1400 BC, when the young Tutmosis IV, falling asleep beneath the giant head, dreamt that he was promised the crown if he would only unbury the Sphinx. The young prince immediately formed an excavation party which, after much effort, managed to dig the front paws out. To commemorate this effort, Tutmosis IV had a granite stela known as the Dream Stela placed between the paws. Ramesses II may have also performed restoration work on the Sphinx.

It was in 1817 that the first modern dig, supervised by Captain Caviglia, uncovered the Sphinx's chest completely. The entirety of the Sphinx was finally dug out in 1925, to the great pleasure of its numerous visitors.

File:Sphinx in 1925.jpg

The Great Sphinx on December 26 1925, undergoing restoration.

Missing nose

The one-meter-wide nose on the face is missing. It has long been presumed that the nose had been broken off by a cannon ball fired by Napoléon's soldiers. However, sketches of the Sphinx by Frederick Lewis Norden made in 1737 and published in 1755 illustrate the Sphinx without a nose. The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, writing in the fifteenth century, attributes the vandalism to Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi fanatic from the khanqah of Sa'id al-Su'ada. In 1378, upon finding the Egyptian peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest, Sa'im al-Dahr was so outraged that he destroyed the nose. Al-Maqrizi describes the Sphinx as the "Nile talisman" on which the locals believed the cycle of inundation depended.

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 Rainer Stadelmann has posited that the rounded divine beard may not have existed in the Old or Middle Kingdoms, only being conceived of in the New Kingdom to identify the Sphinx with the god Horemakhet. This may also relate to the later fashion of pharaohs, which was to wear a plaited beard of authority—a false beard (chin straps are actually visible on some statues), since Egyptian culture mandated that men be clean shaven. Pieces of this beard are today kept in the British Museum and the Egyptian Museum.

Mythology

The Great Sphinx was believed to stand as a guardian of the Giza Plateau, where it faces the rising sun. It was the focus of solar worship in the Old Kingdom, centered in the adjoining temples built around the time of its probable construction. Its animal form, the lion, has long been a symbol associated with the sun in ancient Near Eastern civilizations. Images depicting the Egyptian king in the form of a lion smiting his enemies appear as far back as the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt. During the New Kingdom, the Sphinx became more specifically associated with the god Hor-em-akhet (Greek Harmachis) or Horus at the Horizon, which represented the Pharaoh in his role as the Shesep ankh of Atum (living image of Atum). A temple was built to the northeast of the Sphinx by King Amenhotep II, nearly a thousand years after its construction, dedicated to the cult of Horemakhet.

Riddle of the Sphinx

The Great Sphinx is one of the world's largest and oldest statues, yet basic facts about it such as the real-life model for the face, when it was built, and by whom, are debated. These questions have collectively earned the title "Riddle of the Sphinx", a nod to its Greek namesake, although this phrase should not be confused with the original Greek legend.

The Sphinx against Khafra's pyramid

Origin and identity

The person behind the Great Sphinx has been a subject of debate. While there is no contemporaneous evidence indicating with certainty whom it represents, the Dream Stele erected by Pharaoh Thutmose IV in the New Kingdom associates the Sphinx with King Khafra (also known by the Hellenised version of his name, Chephren). This would place its construction during the Fourth dynasty of Egypt (2723 BC–2563 BC). Its super-colossal design is characteristic of Old Kingdom architecture, especially during Khafra's reign. Khafra is known to have ordered the building of twenty-two stone structures that were more than three times life-size, but the largest is believed to be the Great Sphinx.

The Sphinx's link with Khafra therefore continues to be the most widely held view by Egyptologists, but other hypotheses exist. In 2004, French Egyptologist Vassil Dobrev announced the results of a 20-year reexamination of historical records and uncovering of new evidence that suggest the Great Sphinx may have been the work of the little known Pharaoh Djedefre, Khafra's half brother and a son of Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Dobrev suggests it was built by Djedefre in the image of his father Khufu, identifying him with the sun god Ra in order to restore respect for their dynasty.

Alternative Theories

In common with many famous constructions of remote antiquity, the Great Sphinx has over the years attracted speculative assertions by non-specialists, mystics, and general writers. The reasons for these alternative theories of the origin, purpose and history of the monument invoke a wide array of sources and associations, such as neighboring cultures, astrology, lost continents and civilizations (e.g. Atlantis), numerology, mythology and other esoteric subjects. Egyptologists and the wider scientific community largely ignore such claims; however, on occasion they are drawn into public debate with these theorists, particularly when the claim purports to rely upon some novel or re-interpreted data from an academic field of study.

Water erosion

In recent years professor Robert M. Schoch of Boston University and Colin Reader have speculated that the Sphinx may display evidence of prolonged water erosion. Egypt's last time period where there was a significant amount of rainfall ended during the 3rd millennium BC. Schoch claims that the amount of water erosion they feel that the Sphinx has experienced indicates a construction date no later than the 6th millennium BC or 5th millennium BC, at least two thousand years before the widely accepted construction date and 1500 years prior to the accepted date for the beginning of Egyptian civilization. Reader's assessment is that the Sphinx is a few hundred years older than the traditionally accepted date.

This theory has not been accepted by mainstream Egyptologists or experts in related fields. Alternative theories for the erosion include wind and sand, acid rain, exfoliation or the poor quality of the limestone used to construct the Sphinx.

Hancock and Bauval

One well-publicised debate was generated by the works of two writers, Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, in a series of separate and collaborative publications from the late 1980s onwards. Their claims include that the Great Sphinx was constructed in 10,500 BC; that its lion-shape is a definitive reference to the constellation of Leo; and that the layout and orientation of the Sphinx, the Giza pyramid complex and the Nile River is an accurate reflection or "map" of the constellations of Leo, Orion (specifically, Orion's Belt) and the Milky Way, respectively.

Their initial claims regarding the alignment of the Giza pyramids with Orion ("…the three pyramids were an unbelievably precise terrestrial map of the three stars of Orion's belt"— Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods, 1995, p.375) are later joined with speculation about the age of the Sphinx (Hancock and Bauval, Keeper of Genesis, published 1997 in the U.S. as The Message of the Sphinx). By 1998's The Mars Mystery, they claim:

...we have demonstrated with a substantial body of evidence that the pattern of stars that is "frozen" on the ground at Giza in the form of the three pyramids and the Sphinx represents the disposition of the constellations of Orion and Leo as they looked at the moment of sunrise on the spring equinox during the astronomical "Age of Leo" (i.e., the epoch in which the Sun was "housed" by Leo on the spring equinox.) Like all precessional ages this was a 2,160-year period. It is generally calculated to have fallen between the Gregorian calendar dates of 10,970 and 8810 BC. (op. cit., p.189)

A date of 10,500 B.C. is chosen because they claim this is the only time in the precession of the equinoxes when the astrological age was Leo and when that constellation rose directly east of the Sphinx at the vernal equinox. They claim also that in this epoch the angles between the three stars of Orion's Belt and the horizon was an "exact match" to the angles between the three main Giza pyramids. This time period also coincides with the American psychic Edgar Cayce's "dating" of Atlantis, and together these claims are used to support the overall belief in some advanced and ancient, but now vanished, progenitor civilization.

These claims, and the astronomical and archaeological data upon which they are based, have been refuted by scholars who have examined them, notably the astronomers Ed Krupp and Anthony Fairall. The refuting evidence includes noting that the correspondence of the angles between the pyramids and the angles in Orion's Belt at that epoch is not in fact precise or even very close, that the "Age of Leo" (period when the Sun's path appears in this constellation at the equinoxes) in fact starts 1500 years later than this, that the Zodiac of western astrology is known to have originated in Mesopotamia and not pre-ancient Egypt, and that if the Sphinx is meant to represent Leo, then it should be on the other side of the Nile (the "Milky Way") from the pyramids ("Orion"). Hancock and Bauval maintain their positions and continue to publish books on their speculations. The scientific community regards these as pseudoscience.

Ethnicity

Over the years, casual observers, as well as at least one forensic expert have characterized the face of the Sphinx as "Negroid". One of the earliest known descriptions of a "Negroid" Sphinx is recorded in the travel notes of French scholar Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney, who visited in Egypt between 1783 and 1785. Volney described it as "typically Negro in all its features…." Likewise, French novelist Gustave Flaubert traveled to Egypt in 1849 and recorded the following observation:

We stop before a Sphinx ; it fixes us with a terrifying stare. Its eyes still seem full of life; the left side is stained white by bird-droppings (the tip of the Pyramid of Khephren has the same long white stains); it exactly faces the rising sun, its head is grey, ears very large and protruding like a negro’s,[1] [see prognathism] its neck is eroded; from the front it is seen in its entirety thanks to great hollow dug in the sand; the fact that the nose is missing increases the flat, negroid effect. Besides, it was certainly Ethiopian; the lips are thick….[2]

More recently, in 1992, the New York Times published an article reporting the findings of Frank Domingo, a senior forensics artist with the New York City Police Department who had traveled to Egypt to take exact measurements of the Sphinx's head. Domingo, credited with convening the first national gathering of forensic artists almost ten years earlier, generated a model of the head of the Sphinx both by hand and utilizing computer graphics [3], and determined that the Sphinx represented a person other than Khafra. Robert M. Schoch of Boston University further suggests that the face has "a distinctive 'African,' 'Nubian,' or 'Negroid' aspect which is lacking in the face of Khafra." [4]

The New York Times subsequently published a letter to the editor submitted by orthodontist Sheldon Peck, who concurred with Domingo:

The analytical techniques…Detective Frank Domingo used on facial photographs are not unlike methods orthodontists and surgeons use to study facial disfigurements. From the right lateral tracing of the statue's worn profile a pattern of bimaxilliary prognathism is clearly detectable. This is an anatomical condition of forward development in both jaws, more frequently found in people of African ancestry than in those from Asian or Indo-European stock. [5]

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See also

• Great Pyramid of Giza
• Sphinx

External links

• An academic article arguing the case for water erosion evidence
• Egypt—The Lost Civilization Theory
• Satellite images of Great Sphinx of Giza - at WikiMapia = Google maps + wiki
• The Sphinx's Nose
• Sphinx photo gallery
• Al Maqrizi's account in Arabic