Back to Main Page

<< Back           the pyramids : giza : sphinx

 

Giza Sphinx
PAGE 2

 

<<PREV [1] [2] [3] [4] NEXT>>

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


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.


<<PREV [1] [2] [3] [4] NEXT>>



Giza Main Sphinx Main Sphinx in Pictures Age of the Sphinx