Great Sphinx of Giza Egypt

Legendary

This famous statue has the head of a pharaoh and the body of a lion.

Photo by Warren LeMay

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The Sphinx wasn't built from blocks hauled in from somewhere else. Workers found a natural ridge of limestone on the Giza Plateau and carved the entire thing directly out of it, right where it stood.

That makes it the largest statue in the world cut from a single piece of stone. It stretches 73 meters from paw to tail and stands 20 meters tall, roughly the height of a six-story building.

It has the body of a lion and the head of a man wearing a royal headdress. Most Egyptologists believe the face belongs to the pharaoh Khafre, who ruled around 2500 BC and built the second pyramid at Giza.

It doesn't look like it now, but the Sphinx was once brightly painted. Traces of red pigment still cling to the face, with hints of blue and yellow found on the body.

The famous missing nose has a famous story attached to it, and the story is wrong. People often blame Napoleon's soldiers for shooting it off in 1798.

Drawings made in 1737 already show the nose missing, decades before Napoleon arrived. Marks on the face suggest someone deliberately removed it with chisels or metal rods, long before that.

The Sphinx has spent much of its life buried in sand. Around 1400 BC, a young prince named Thutmose fell asleep in its shadow while out hunting.

He dreamed the Sphinx spoke to him, complaining about being buried and promising him the throne if he cleared the sand away. He did, he became pharaoh, and he had the story carved onto a granite slab that still sits between the Sphinx's paws today.

The monument faces due east, straight toward the rising sun. Egyptians later called it Horus of the Horizon.

Visit early in the morning, when the Sphinx faces the sunrise and the crowds are thinnest. Look for the Dream Stele between its front paws, still telling Thutmose's story after 3,400 years. Then walk over to the Valley Temple of Khafre right next door, the best-preserved temple of its kind in Egypt.