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The
rock was of poor quality from the start, with fissures along
joint lines going back to the formation of the limestone millions
of years ago. There is a particularly large fissure across the
haunches - filled with cement - which also shows up in the walls
of the enclosure in which the Sphinx sits.
So severe is the erosion of the body of the Sphinx that, what
may have been an entire statue or attached column standing proud
from the breast of the beast, has been reduced to a formless
line of protuberances on the front of the monument between the
forelegs. It is plain that extensive repairs have been made
to the front paws of the Sphinx and in many other places over
the body.
Some of these repairs go back to the New Kingdom of around 1400
BC(the time when King Tuthmosis IV set up his stela between
the paws), and there is reason to believe that parts of the
Sphinx must have been built on the carved body, arising out
of necessity of the poor state of the rock. It is even possible
that the body of the Sphinx was entirely plastered over at some
stage.
Below the neck, the Sphinx has the body of a lion, with paws,
claws and tail (curled round the right haunch), sitting on the
bedrock of the rocky enclosure out of which the monument has
been carved. The enclosure has taller walls to the west and
south of the monument, in keeping with the present lie of the
land: it is generally thought that quarrying around the original
knoll (for pyramid blocks or blocks with which to build temples
associated with the necropolis complex) revealed the too-poor
quality of the rock for construction purposes at this point;
whereupon some visionary individual conceived the plan of turning
what was left of the knoll into the Sphinx; but, of course,
the Sphinx may equally well have been planned from the start
for this location. The walls of the Sphinx enclosure are of
the same characteristics as the strata of the Sphinx body and
exhibit similar states of erosion.
The Sphinx
lying in its enclosure,
mobbed by the tourists of today. |
There are three passages into or under the Sphinx, two of
them of obscure origin. The one of known cause is a short
dead-end shaft behind the head drilled in the nineteenth century.
No other tunnels or chambers in or under the Sphinx are known
to exist. A number of small holes in the Sphinx body may relate
to scaffolding at the time of carving.
The Great Sphinx is huge. The length of the body is more than
74 m; its height from the floor of the enclosure to the top
of the head some 20 m. The extreme width of the face reaches
over 4 m, the mouth being 2 m wide; the nose would have been
more than 1.5 m
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long,while the ears are well over 1 m high. Not even the giant
New Kingdom statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, sculpted thirteen
hundred years after the Sphinx, at 20m high with faces about
3 m wide exceed the Old Kingdom monument.
The wrecked statue of Ramesses II that inspired Shelley's poem
about Ozymandias was evidently about 18 m high. Similarly, the
huge seated statues of Amenophis III called the 'Colossi of
Memnon' are no taller than the Sphinx and, again, not so bulky
- though they were entirely made out of single blocks and transported
to their location. The statue of Zeus at Olympia, made by Phidias
in the mid-fifth century BC, was neither quite so tall nor made
out of one piece of material; the Colossus of Rhodes was reputedly
half as tall again as the Sphinx, but put together out of bronze
castings.
Mount Rushmore makes the closest modern time comparison with
the Sphinx, with its faces at 18m in height. The Statue of Liberty
tops them all at 92 m, but is made out of copper sheets hammered
together, over a framework of steel.
This was, as far as is known, the first of the Egyptian sphinxes:
the rules of proportion commonly employed on later and smaller
examples may not yet have been formulated at the time of the
carving of the Great Sphinx of Giza. In any case, the sphinx
pattern was always a flexible formula, to an unusual degree
in the context of Egyptian artistic conservatism. Then again,
the Sphinx may have been sculpted to look its best when seen
from fairly close by and more or less from the front. It is
possible that there was simply insufficient good rock to make
the head bigger, where fine detail was required.
The Sphinx sits in an enclosure formed by the removal of limestone
from around its body. This enclosure is deepest immediately
around the body, with a shelf at the rear of the monument where
it was left unfinished, and a shallower extension to the north
where important archaeological finds have been made. Without
the excavation around it, the Sphinx would at best have no carved
body below the level of the uppermost part of its hack: it would
look as it did when the sands buried it almost up to its neck
in the nineteenth century.
The good, hard limestone that lay around the Sphinx's head was
probably all quarried for blocks to build the pyramids. It was
perhaps the removal of this limestone, leaving at some stage
a suggestive lump of remaining rock (together with the discovery
of poor rock beneath), that inspired someone to create the Sphinx.
The limestone removed to shape the body of the beast was evidently
used to build the two temples to the east of the Sphinx, on
a terrace lower than the floor of the Sphinx enclosure - one
almost directly in front of the paws, the other to the south
of the first one.
The core blocks of these two temples are of the same poor quality
and more easily eroded limestone as the body of the Sphinx.
Thus these temples can be regarded as contemporary with the
carving of the monument.
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