The Sphinx by Maxime Du Camp, 1849. From the Photographic Collection of the New York Public Library.

No doubt the artists who made their sketches on site could avail themselves of the most up-to-date cameras and other drawing aids. When Howard Vyse published his account of Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Giza in three volumes in the early 1840s, the first photograph of the Sphinx had not yet been taken. Howard Vyse's picture of the Sphinx under excavation by Caviglia shows the sand dune around the Sphinx quite parlously opened up in front of the beast and round the left shoulder, revealing the front paws and the chapel between the forelegs.

The Dream Stela is well depicted, with something of its graphic design conveyed, while the jumbled masonry behind it and the column of blocks suggest evidence of the original presence of a statue and the support plate of the beard. But the distance from the enclosure floor to the chin is vastly exaggerated and the disproportion of head and body quite marked. The first photographs of the Sphinx were taken in 1849 by Maxime Du Camp and published in 1852 in one of the earliest books to be extensively illustrated with real photographic prints made from negatives - in this case calotype paper negatives.

The Sphinx at the extreme right of the photography by Hammerschmidt, 1858.

Du Camp travelled with Flaubert a year or two before Madame Bovary, and both writers were bowled over by the Sphinx. 'No drawing I have seen conveys a proper idea of it,' wrote Flaubert, 'the best thing is an excellent photograph that Max took.' In the better of Du Camp's two photographs, the benefits of the first modern sand-clearances are still to be seen, but the Dream Stela has apparently gone under again. In the background is the pyramid of Menkaure with one of its subsidiaries. Khafre's pyramid is out of frame to the right, and his causeway is entirely invisible under the sands. The featureless and too-light sky has resulted from the colour-blind quality of the early photographic processes.

The Sphinx by Zangaki, before 1880

Thousands of photographs were taken of the Sphinx, by both amateurs and professionals, as the age of photography got under way and the business of photography became simpler and more reliable after about 1880. Before that, there was a ready market for prints of Egyptian antiquities sold by professional photographers like Beato, Bonfils, Hammerschmidt, Lekegian, Sebah and Zangaki. Their photographs mainly chart the swamping and clearance of the sand about the monument.

A striking picture by Hammerschmidt, in which foreground trees grow out of half-submerged ruins on the slope of the Giza Plateau, shows the Sphinx head peeping out of the sand below the Great Pyramid of Khufu: it was taken in 1858, at about the time that Mariette was excavating at the Sphinx. Despite Mariette's work, the sands soon invaded the breast area of the monument again and photographs from the 1860s show no front paws, no chapel, no stela - all this was once more buried under a sand drift.

The Sphinx by unknown nineteenth-century photographer

One of Zangaki's photographs shows picturesque camels at the Sphinx's breast, sitting on a sandbank that hides the forelegs, chapel and stela below, with the photographer's travelling darkroom drawn up alongside the upper right flank of the monument. A picture by Sebah, taken from the north-east, with Menkaure's pyramid in the background, shows particularly clearly the great fissure at the hindquarters and the severe gouge in the left-hand side of the top of the head. Another, by an unknown photographer, also shows this deep (and inadvertently rather characterful) cut in the top of the head, with a sentinel figure sitting above the uraeus: the pyramid to the right of the picture is that of Khafre. A second photograph taken by Sebah shows the Sphinx's head with the Khufu pyramid behind it and the valley temple of Khafre in the foreground, first excavated by Mariette: the plain granite pillars and lintels of the temple interior are clearly seen, together with some of the massive (and highly eroded) limestone blocks of the core construction of this building. Though cleared by Mariette, sand is seen in this photograph to be reinvading the interior. A picture by Fiorillo of 1882 shows members of the British Army disporting themselves on and around the Sphinx in the year when the British under Sir Garnet Wolseley asserted Britain's imperial power in Egypt.