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Giza Sphinx
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Of these two temples the southerly one was excavated by Egyptologists before the one in front of the Sphinx and so was regarded for a time as the temple of the Sphinx - the discovery of the other one, long buried under the ever-drifting sands, established that the Sphinx's own temple was this one straight in front of the eastward-facing monument. The two temples are similar in size and both face east in a north-south alignment; each has a pair of north and south entrances in their eastern facades. They are both built with core blocks quarried on site, around the body of the Sphinx: some of these core blocks of the Sphinx temple are three times larger than the core blocks of the Great Pyramid. Both temples were faced, inside and out, with finely dressed granite from Aswan in the far south of Egypt, and floored with alabaster.

The Sphinx temple is very ruined now, with little of its granite facing left and little of its alabaster floor. Any inscriptions it may once have carried, which might have told us much about its purpose, are long gone. Only the eroded limestone core of the structure remains, in part: enough to show that this temple once boasted a central court, about 46 m by 23 m, open to the sky and affording a good view of the Sphinx, and there was an interior colonnade of rectangular pillars. Large recesses in the inside eastern and western walls suggest the original presence of cult statues, very possibly to do with the rising and setting sun, but there is no trace of decorative detail.

There was no immediate access to the Sphinx from inside the temple, whose west wall up to the height of 2.5 m was cut into the living rock, and thereafter topped with limestone blocks. It was necessary to go by passages to the north and south of the temple to reach the Sphinx. There is evidence that this temple of the Sphinx was never finished.

The interior of the other temple, to the south of the Sphinx temple, is quite different in layout, though the same granite casing of the limestone core blocks, rectangular style of pillar, presence of statue niches, overall size and method of construction mark both buildings as contemporary Old Kingdom temples.

In the southerly temple, the remains of nine more or less complete statues of a king named on them as Khafre were found. Further fragments show that twenty-three statues of Khafre once stood in this temple, which Egyptologists identify as the valley temple of Khafre's pyramid complex: the temple on the edge of the Giza escarpment to which his body was brought by a canal from the river at the start of the process that would end with his being sealed within his pyramid Up on the plateau above. Even in this century, the river in flood has occasionally come very close to the terrace of the temples by the Sphinx - and the water-table is not far below ground.

The valley temple of Khafre lies at the end of a limestone causeway that leads up the slope to a further temple at the foot of his pyramid. The Greek writer Herodotus, who never mentions the Sphinx as a feature on his visit to the pyramids (perhaps it was all but obscured by sand in the fifth century BC), thought the causeway of the Great Pyramid was as wonderful in its way as the pyramids themselves. To judge by the causeways of slightly later pyramids, these long ramps were covered over, with slits in the roof to let in light, and possibly their walls even in the time of Khufu and Khafre carried sculpted and painted scenes on them, in contrast to the lack of decoration in the Giza pyramids themselves.


The Great Sphinx in modern times.

The Khafre causeway was equipped with drainage channels which are interesting because they indicate that rainwater run-off was an essential provision of the pyramid complex. We are accustomed to think of Egypt as a very dry place but even nowadays, rain can sometimes cause considerable damage in a context where it is not routinely expected. Evidently the monuments of the Giza necropolis needed precautions against rain. On the north side of the Khafre causeway, there is a ditch (2 m wide and 1.5 m deep) that forms a demarcation line between the pyramid complexes of Khufu and Khafre. This rock-cut ditch was large enough to channel a great deal of rainwater when heavy rains occurred. It is cut into by the corner of the Sphinx enclosure, and - were it not blocked at this point with pieces of granite - would allow water to pour in quantity into the basin out of which the Sphinx body was carved. These circumstances strongly suggest that the Sphinx enclosure and the Sphinx itself were created after the demarcation of the complexes of Khufu and Khafre and after the construction of Khafre's causeway.

There are some tombs cut into the south-facing edge of the wider Sphinx enclosure to the north that belong to the same Dynasty IV as Khufu and Khafre, showing that the enclosure was not made after their time. Between them, the blocked ditch and the tombs indicate a narrow hand of time in which the Sphinx enclosure, and by strong implication the Sphinx itself, could have been carved. It means that the Sphinx most likely dates to a time no later than a couple of reigns after Khafre and no earlier than his reign.


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