The Sphinx

What is the Sphinx? It is the body of a lion couchant, with the head of a man—“a symbol of animal power and of human intellect.” The whole figure was typical of kingly royalty and set forth the power and wisdom of the Egyptian monarch. One traveler describes the present appearance of the great Sphinx as, “a ball of stone rising on a neck some forty feet above the sand.” Miss Edwards says, “the sphinx is purely an Egyptian monster and of immemorial antiquity. The great sphinx of Gizeh is probably the oldest monument in Egypt. There are thousands of sphinxes in Egypt of various sizes, but the great Sphinx is this one at the base of the pyramids. It is carved out of the summit of the original rock from which it has never been separated. Its body is over one hundred feet long; its head is thirty feet long and fourteen in width; the marks of paint still remain on the face—on the eye-brows and on the right cheek. The face is much mutilated; the body is hidden by drifting sands of the desert; the paws project some fifty feet and in the space between was an altar for sacrificial purposes.” While some assert with Miss Edwards and others that the Sphinx is much older than the pyramids, it is attributed by some good authorities to the XIII dynasty which would give it “an origin old enough but a third less than the pyramids.” It seems to “spring directly out of the ground.” One does not wonder that the Arabs call the Sphinx “the father of horror.”