Great Sphinx of Giza

The Great Sphinx of Giza is a colossal reclining lion with a human head, carved from the limestone bedrock of the Giza plateau, west of the Nile, and faces east beside the causeway to the pyramid of Khafre. About 73 metres long and 20 metres high, it is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt. It was made under the Fourth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, most likely in the reign of Khafre around the middle of the third millennium BCE, though exactly whose face it bears is still argued over.

The Sphinx is not a built statue but a block of bedrock left standing when the surrounding stone was quarried; Farouk El-Baz, a geologist, has proposed that the head was shaped first from a natural wind-carved ridge. Stone cut from around its body went into a temple in front of it, but neither the temple nor the enclosure was ever finished, and there is little sign of a cult in the Old Kingdom. Its original name is unknown.

Most Egyptologists attribute it to Khafre, because the Sphinx temple was built after his valley temple and causeway and fits into his pyramid complex. Selim Hassan, who excavated the enclosure, accepted this in 1949 while stressing that no inscription of the time links the two. Rainer Stadelmann has argued from the style of the headdress and beard for Khafre's father Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, while Vassil Dobrev proposed in 2004 that Khafre's half-brother Djedefre made it in Khufu's image. Claims that it is thousands of years older, based on supposed rain erosion or star alignments, are rejected by mainstream scholarship as pseudoarchaeology.

After the Old Kingdom the Giza necropolis was neglected, and sand buried the Sphinx to its shoulders. Around 1400 BCE the young prince Thutmose IV cleared its front paws and set up the Dream Stele between them, recording how the Sphinx had promised him the throne if he freed it from the sand. In the New Kingdom it was worshipped as the sun god Hor-em-akhet, "Horus of the Horizon", known to the Greeks as Harmachis. Amenhotep II built a temple to it, and Ramesses II may have cleared it again. Some non-Egyptians identified it with the Canaanite god Hauron. In the Late Period, priests produced the Inventory Stela, which falsely claimed that Khufu had found the Sphinx already buried.

In Graeco-Roman times Giza was already a tourist sight. The Sphinx was cleared again in the first century CE in honour of Nero and his governor of Egypt, and a broad stairway was built down to its paws. Pliny the Elder noted that its face was painted red and that locals revered it as a god. Its retaining walls were restored in 166, and Septimius Severus, around 200, is the last emperor linked to it. As Roman power declined, the sand returned.

Medieval Arab writers treated the Sphinx as a talisman guarding the land, and the historian al-Maqrizi called it the talisman of the Nile. Its nose had been damaged by at least the tenth century. Al-Maqrizi blamed a Sufi named Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, who in 1378, he wrote, defaced it in anger at peasants making offerings for their harvests; other writers blamed the Mamluks. The popular story that Napoleon's soldiers shot it off in 1798 is false: Frederic Norden drew the Sphinx without its nose in 1737.

Early Europeans often drew it with a woman's head. Auguste Mariette excavated around it in the 1850s, and the chest and paws were exposed in 1887. Howard Vyse drilled into its back in 1837, causing damage. In the mid-1920s Émile Baraize cleared it of sand, sealing holes and a fissure through its body, and in 1931–1932 removed the Roman stairway. Erosion is a constant danger: the soft limestone of the body weathers far faster than the harder layer of the head, part of the headdress fell in 1926, and in 1931 the head was fixed with a concrete collar that altered its profile. The masonry base was renovated in the 1980s and again in the 1990s. The Sphinx is part of the Memphis and its Necropolis World Heritage site, inscribed by UNESCO in 1979.