The Sphinx is a monster of the Greek mythology: a winged being with head of woman and body of lion. The Sphinx appears in the myth of Oedipus, whom, answering to an enigma, makes Tebe free from the presence of the monster, then he becomes king of the city. This connection with the access to the throne of Tebe is not accidental, but it reproduces a native relationship, probably Egyptian, between Sphinx and royalty. It was in fact already from the protodinastic age an Egyptian use to represent sometime the dead pharaoh in the form of lion. The more ancient Sphinxes are squatting and with the head covered by the nemes with ureo that is the hair style typical of the pharaoh. From the begin of the New Kingdom there are also female Sphinxes that represent queens.
The Sphinx that everyone knows, and one of the most ancient, is perhaps that of El Gîza (57 m of length, 20 m of height), which represents the pharaoh Khafre, carved in a block of natural rock near the funeral temple of the same sovereign. The Sphinx is in essence a carving out of the living rock, though parts of it have been repaired (and possibly were originally constructed) with cut blocks of stone. It is immediately apparent that the rock strata out of which the Sphinx has been made vary from a hard grey to a soft yellowish limestone. The head is formed of good, hard limestone of the same sort as was quarried all around locks of the pyramids. The hulk of the body, on the other hand, is made of poorly consolidated and therefore readily eroded limestone. The rock improves again at the base of the monument, with a return to harder (but brittle) reef-formed limestone that has allowed some carved details of the beast to remain visible after at least four-and-a-half thousand years of natural and human attrition.
The Sphinx is also identified with the solar divinity Ra-Harakhte (Harmachis) and with other divinities as Amon-Ra or Horo, assuming in these cases the head of ram or of hawk. For its divine character, the Sphinx has the role of keeper of the accesses to the temples or to the graves: the Sphinx with head of ram flank the passage that joins the temple of Karnak to that of Luxor. The relationship Sphinx - royalty assumes in the Greek mythical formulation the aspect of an opposition. The Sphinx introduces itself with female head and body of winged lioness (Sphinx of Calidone, Athens, National Museum; Sphinx of the Nassis, sec. VI B.C., Delfi, Museum). It is a dangerous monster and an adversary of the one who will become king of Tebe; that reproduces the monstrosity of the succession to the teban throne (the old king Laio is killed by his child and successor Oedipus).
The name of the mythological monster has entered the common language to indicate an enigmatic person, with covered and mysterious feelings, difficult to understand.
The sphinx, half human and half lion, is long 240 feet and tall 66 feet. During the millennia, the sphinx has been submitted to numerous restaurations because of the continuous erosion from the atmospheric agents. The first restauration has been completed by the pharaoh Tuthmosis IV in the year 1400 B.C.
Today, the statue is crumbling because of the wind, humidity and the smog from Cairo. The rock was of poor quality here from the start, already fissured along joint lines that went back to the formation of the limestone millions of years ago. There is a particularly large fissure across the haunches, nowadays filled with cement, that also shows up in the walls of the enclosure in which the Sphinx sits. Below the head, serious natural erosion begins. The neck is badly weathered, evidently by wind-blown sand during those long periods when only the head was sticking up out of the desert and the wind could catapult the sand along the surface and scour the neck and the extensions of the headdress that are missing altogether now. The stone here is not quite of such good quality as that of the head above.
Erosion below the neck does not look like scouring by wind-blown sand. In fact, so poor is the rock of the bulk of the body that it must have been deteriorating since the day it was carved out of the stone. We know that it needed repairs on more than one occasion in antiquity. It continues to erode before our very eyes, with spalls of limestone falling off the body during the heat of the day.
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