Great Sphinx of Giza

“ Not many hundred feet from the pyramids, on a somewhat lower plain, stands that colossal mystery, the Sphinx. The Arabs call it "The Father of Terror," and it certainly has a most weird, unworldly look. Its body, and most of the head, is hewn out of the solid rock where it stands, the upper portion forming the head and bust of a human being, to which is added the paws and body of an animal. The great size of the figure will be realized when we recall the fact that the face is thirty feet long and half as wide. ”

“ The typical sphinx, a male or female head, with an animal’s body, in the Greek “the strangler,” signifies intelligence or force. It was a favorite form in architecture and sometimes the face was a portrait of an existing king or queen. The great Sphinx is said, from an inscription at Edfu, to represent one of the personifications of the god Horus. It was designated as Horem Khou, “Horus on the Horizon,” and bore the shape of a human-headed lion to vanquish Typhon (Set) principle of evil, and turning East awaited the resurrection of his father Osiris. ”

“ These signs happening to be Leo and Virgo, the mystical fancy of the ancient Egyptians united them in one, and thus formed the figure of the Sphinx, which has the head and breast of a woman, and the body of a lion. This was a great enigma to the Greeks and Phœnicians who travelled to Egypt; they saw the monster, but could not comprehend its meaning. On returning to their respective countries, they invented the fable of the Sphinx offering riddles at the gates of Thebes, and destroying those who could not unravel them ”

“ The gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid, nearly buried in the drifting sands, yawns subterraneously southeast of the Sphinx. Persistent tradition dubs it the "Temple of the Sphinx"; and it may perhaps be rightly called such if the Sphinx indeed represents the Second Pyramid's builder Khephren. There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren—but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his oto that men might look at the colossus without fear. It was in the great gateway-temple that the life-size diorite statue of Khephren now in the Cairo museum was found ”

“ The promise of the resurrection of the soul was symbolized, by the Great Sphinx of Gizeh, old at the beginning of the Ancient Empire; by the Phœnix, and by the Scarab, the antiquity of the symbolism of which no Egyptologist has yet fathomed. We have it set forth in writing on the inscriptions of the earliest Dynasties. [70]
[83] On a stele found between the paws of the Great Sphinx of Gizeh is: "The majesty of this beautiful god speaks by its own mouth, as a father speaks to his child, saying: Look to me, let thine eye rest on me, my son Thutmes! ”

“ The Sphinx is as lasting as the mountains, as eternal as the rock out of which it is carved. The riddle of the origin of this masterpiece of an ancient civilization may yet be solved by a man digging with a spade in the desert sands.
The famous Colossi of Memnon, set up by Amenhotep III in front of his chapel on the bank of the Nile at Thebes, almost rival the Sphinx in their gigantic stature. The great figures, 50 feet [Pg 70] high, are carved out of solid blocks of limestone, and there they sit on guard as they have sat for thousands of years. ”

“ In raising these monuments Egypt attempted to erect the Herculean pillars of universal science. Sands have accumulated, centuries have passed, but the pyramids in their eternal greatness still propound to the nations that enigma of which the solution is lost. As to the sphinx, it seems to have sunk in the dust of ages. The great empires of Daniel have reigned by turn upon the earth and have gone down into the tomb, overwhelmed by their own weight. Conquests on the field of battle, monuments of labour, results of human passions—all are engulphed with the symbolic body of the sphinx ”

“ The idea that they were places for worship, is perhaps strengthened by the presence of the colossal Sphinx, which lies about two hundred yards east [107] from them, and on the side of the eminence on which they stand. Avenues of sphinxes leading to their temples were common in the ancient Egyptian cities; and in Memphis, if my memory is correct, was one of great extent, formed by colossal sphinxes, which have all disappeared. ”

“ The shallow depression in the crown of the head, once thought to be the terminus of a closed up passageway leading from the Sphinx to the Great Pyramid, was merely intended to help support a headdress now missing.
Metal rods have been driven into the Sphinx in a vain effort to discover chambers or passages within its body. The major part of the Sphinx is a single stone, but the front paws have been built up of smaller stones. The Sphinx is about 200 feet long, 70 feet high, and 38 feet wide across the shoulders. ”

“ Great clumsy Time shall stumble and dance, who liked to kill little children and can hurt even the daisies no longer.
Then shall our children laugh at him who slew Babylon's winged bulls and smote great numbers of the elves and fairies, when he is shorn of his hours and his years.
We will shut him up in the Pyramid of Cheops, in the great chamber where the sarcophagus is. Thence we will lead him out when we give our feasts. He shall ripen our corn for us and do menial work.
We will kiss thy painted face, O Sphinx, if thou wilt betray to us Time. ”

“ As we pass out of the narrow streets of the city to which the temple belongs, we find ourselves standing upon a broad paved way, which stretches before us for hundreds of yards. On either side, this way is bordered by a row of statues, and these statues are in the form of what we call sphinxes—that is to say, they have bodies shaped like crouching lions, and on the lion-body there is set the head of a different creature. Some of the sphinxes, like the Great Sphinx, have human heads; but those which border the temple avenues have oftener either ram or jackal heads. ”

“ Mizram had packed many good things to eat in a big palm-leaf basket covered over with green leaves to keep the things cool, and this was slung across Teddy Pasha's broad back. Our friends were to have a picnic among some riverside ruins.
Soon they were riding between two rows of stone figures; an avenue of Sphinxes, like the great Sphinx at the Pyramids, only much smaller, and in a few minutes more all dismounted at the entrance to a great temple. ”

“ In the mysteries of the Eleusinia there is the same prominence of human sorrow,—only here the Sphinx propounds her riddle in its religious phase; and in the change from the mystæ to the epoptæ, in the revelation of the central self, was the great problem symbolically realized.
Greece had her reckoning; and to her eye the Sphinx long ago seemed to plunge herself headlong into precipitate destruction. But this strange lady is ever reappearing with her awful alternative: they who cannot solve her riddle must die. It is no trifling account, reader, which we have with this lady. ”

“ The Sphinx was an ancient Egyptian divinity, who personified wisdom, and the fertility of nature. She is represented as a lion-couchant, with the head and bust of a woman, and wears a peculiar sort of hood, which completely envelops her head, and falls down on either side of the face.
Transplanted into Greece, this sublime and mysterious Egyptian deity degenerates into an insignificant, and yet malignant power, and though she also deals in mysteries, they are, as we shall see, of a totally different character, and altogether inimical to human life. ”

“ About six hundred yards to the Southeast of the Great Pyramid is the Sphinx. The Sphinx is a natural rock, to which has been given, more or less accurately, the external appearance of that mystic animal. The head alone has been sculptured. The body is formed of the rock itself, supplemented, where defective, by a somewhat clumsy masonry of limestone. ”

“ In another Greek legend, that of Œdipus, the same connection is made through the Sphinx, whose riddle the Greek hero solves, whereat the Egyptian monster destroys itself.
The Sphinx, the grand symbol of Egypt and chief product of its Art, may be taken as the Egyptian starting-point for both Greece and Judea. The Sphinx is half human, half animal; the two are put together in stone and thus stand a fixed, unreconciled contradiction. Such was just the Sphinx-riddle of humanity to the old Egyptian: man is a beast and a spirit, linked together without any true mediation. ”

“ But they have come a long way expecting to be thrilled, and they do not intend to be disappointed. Some of the sphinxes in the museum of Gizeh, which you pass on your way to the pyramids, impressed me more than did the one great Sphinx, though they were indoors and surrounded by attendants and the cheap decoration of the museum, once a palace for the harem. ”

“ As to sculpture, we have not only the great Sphinx of Gizeh, so marvellous in its boldness and dignity, dating from the very first period of Egyptian history, but we have ranges of sphinxes, heroic statues, and bas-reliefs, showing that even in the early ages this branch of art had reached an amazing development. ”

“ Their features are gone, and though in their attitudes there is power, and there is something that awakens awe, they are more wonderful as a far-off feature of the plain. They gain in grandeur from the night in strangeness from the moonrise, perhaps specially when the Nile comes to their feet. More than three thousand years old, they look less eternal than the Sphinx. Like them, the Sphinx is waiting, but with a greater purpose. The Sphinx reduces man really to nothingness. The Colossi leave him some remnants of individuality. ”

“ The sphinx is a great stone figure of a beast with a human face. The pyramids and the sphinx were built before Joseph came to Egypt.
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Here is a song of trust in God, who watches over us day and night:--
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: From whence shall my help come? My help cometh from the Lord, Which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved; He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel Shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper: The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. ”

“ From time to time others have removed the sand, but always the sand comes back and quickly steals over the body and covers it, leaving the head emerging like some monster of the desert.
In the past the Sphinx has been badly treated by the ignorant Arabs, who have smashed its face about and given it that strange expression which is a half-wry smile. Probably thousands of years hence, when our present civilization has disappeared and been forgotten, the Sphinx will still be regarding the Nile and the world with the same half-sad, half-mocking expression. ”

“ Likewise also the poet Euphorion introduces Nestor saying,
"We have not yet wet the Achæan steeds in Simois."
Therefore also the Egyptians place Sphinxes before their temples, to signify that the doctrine respecting God is enigmatical and obscure; perhaps also that we ought both to love and fear the Divine Being: to love Him as gentle and benign to the pious; to fear Him as inexorably just to the impious; for the sphinx shows the image of a wild beast and of a man together. ”

“ It has been said that such composite creatures were as real to the Egyptian as the cattle and sheep he tended in the fields; that he was quite as much prepared to meet with them in the desert, as the ancient Greek would have been to meet with a satyr in the woods or a Highlander with a kelpie by the waterside. Very possibly that was the case; it will not, however, explain their origin, or the forms that were assigned to them. Why, for instance, should the sphinx of Giza be in the form of a lion with a human head? ”

“ It is far more likely that its origin dates back to that period of very ancient Egyptian art which gave birth to the obelisks, the Sphinx, and the Great Pyramids. Its original birthplace was amongst the granite quarries of Upper Egypt, and whether hewn fresh from the native rock, or taken from some more ancient structure, it was a work of no small skill to transport it from its original site and erect it upon the elevated platform of solid limestone from which it is visible for miles in almost every direction. ”

“ The author has seen objects of Egyptian production, in the Boolak Museum, on the banks of the Nile, which were six thousand years old. The Sphinx, standing in its grim loneliness ten miles from Cairo, is still older, while in the South Sea Islands there are prehistoric ruins which are believed to antedate the Sphinx. The probability is that a degree of antiquity applies to this globe so inconceivably remote that, like stellar distances, the mind can hardly realize the truth. ”

“ Mightier and mightier grew the yearning within her, as the full moon floated upward from the east and cast her dewy dreams over land and sea. The hour was come; the whole impulse and persistence of her nature went out in vivid life, and, filling the very stones which the winds had gathered and piled against her breast, cleft them with its sentient spell, clothed them with lean flesh and wiry sinews, shaped them after the fashion of the Desert men, and sent them out alive with intellect and will, but with hearts of flint, into the wide world,—the Sphinx's children! ”

“ In this way we obtain a solution of the Sphinx's riddle more commensurate and symmetrical with the other features of the story, which are all clothed with the grandeur of mystery. The Sphinx herself is a mystery. Whence came her monstrous nature, that so often renewed its remembrance amongst men of distant lands, in Egyptian or Ethiopian marble? Whence came her wrath against Thebes? This wrath, how durst it tower so high as to measure itself against the enmity of a nation? ”