Around 2500 B.C. a momentous statue was formed out of limestone. This statue is known as The Great Sphinx which sits in front of Khafra’s pyramid guarding which is located in Giza. The statue has a body of a lion, and a head of a king. “The Sphinx was not assembled piece by piece, but was carved from a single mass of limestone exposed when workers dug a horseshoe-shaped quarry in the Giza plateau (Hadingham, 2010).” For the time period that this statue was erected it is quite impressive standing at roughly 66 feet tall and 240 feet long. Over the course of history the Sphinx has been buried several times in the sand, however now it is uncovered and on display to see. With the Sphinx’s age it has succumb to the elements and has been severely weathered and damaged. The original Sphinx had a nose but was smashed during the 15th century CE by Muslim troops “because their religion forbids images of a god (Putnam, 2011).” The Sphinx also had a braided beard that is thought to be added during restoration work sometime in the Eighteenth Dynasty. It is unlikely the braided beard was part of the original design because the beard was plaited. Those types of beards were depicted with gods and the deceased not kings and the …show more content…
It was the Greeks who gave it the name “The Sphinx” from ancient Greek mythology meaning human-headed lion. Strangely there are hundreds of tombs at Giza with hieroglyphic inscriptions and not one of them mentions anything about the Sphinx’s meaning, who constructed it, or its purpose. The original symbolism behind the Sphinx is unclear, however it is believed to relate to Ruti, a double lion god that guarded the entrance to the underworld and the horizon where the sun rose and set. “The setting sun would renew the power of the dead king and like him, enter the underworld where Re and Osiris are united (AERA, 2015).” Later Egyptian rulers called it Hor-Em-Akhet or “Horus of the Horizon” and worshipped it as a sun