Benjamin Phillips, age 13, of Bowling Green, Ohio, for his question:
WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF THE SPHINX?
An imaginary creature called a sphinx plays a large role in Egyptian, Greek and Near Eastern statuary history and mythology. Usually he had a human head, the body of a lion, the tail of a serpent and the wings of a bird.
In Egypt, the sphinx was supposed to represent the god Horus. Most of the time, he was used to guard temples and tombs. Egyptians made many statues of sphinxes.
When Egyptian sculptors made stone sphinxes, they usually designed the faces to resemble the pharaohs who were ruling at the time. Some of their heads, however, looked like rams and hawks.
The Egyptians often lined both sides of major avenues with sphinx statues, as in the great temple of Karnak.
Perhaps the most famous sphinx in the world is the one at Giza, near the Great Pyramid in Egypt. It is usually called the Great Sphinx and is more than 4,500 years old.
The head and body of the Great Sphinx are carved from solid rock, and the paws and legs are built of stone blocks. The face is believed to be a portrait of the Egyptian king who built it. Unfortunately, no one knows exactly who that was.
It was constructed to serve as a guard of the Great Pyramid.
The Great Sphinx is 140 feet long and about 66 feet high. The width of its face measures 13 feet 8 inches. The head has been used as a target by gunmen, and desert winds have worn away part of the great statue's stone.
Sand covers the base of the Great Sphinx. Thutmose IV of Egypt cleared the sand away in the 1400s B.C., and one of the Ptolemies cleared it away during Roman times.
In modern times, sand was cleared away from the Great Sphinx in 1818, 1886 and in 1926.
Sphinxes found in Greece usually have heads of women. In Greek literature, the sphinx lived on a high rock outside the city of Thebes. When anyone passed by, she asked him a riddle: What has one voice and yet is four footed, then two footed, then three footed?
If the traveler could not give the right answer, the sphinx ate him.
When Oedipus passed by on his way to Thebes, the sphinx asked him the riddle. Oedipus quickly replied that the answer was man, because he walks on his hands and knees when young, on two feet in the middle of his life and with a cane or staff in his old age.
The sphinx became furious because Oedipus had given the right answer. She howled with rage and finally jumped from the rock to her death.