Gina Martin, age 9, of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, for her question:
WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF THE SPHINX?
An imaginary creature of ancient myths, called a sphinx, is part of Egyptian, Greek and Near Eastern history. 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 made the faces of the statues resemble the pharaohs who were ruling at the time. Some of their heads, however, represented those of rams and hawks.
The Egyptians often lined both sides of avenues with sphinx statues, as in the great temple of Karnak.
Perhaps the most famous sphinx in the world is the one that stands at Giza, near the Great Pyramid in Egypt. It is most properly called the Great Sphinx. It is more than 4,500 years old.
The head and body of the Great Sphinx monument 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 which king built it.
But it was definitely the Great Sphinx's job to guard the Great Pyramid.
The Great Sphinx is 240 feet long and about 66 feet high. The width of its face measures 13 feet 8 inches. The head has been used as a gunnery target, regretfully, and desert winds and sands have also worn away part of the stone.
Sand covers the base of the Great Sphinx and buries it most of the time. 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 again in 1818, 1886 and 1926.
The sphinx monuments 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 becomes four footed and two footed and 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 feet when he is 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 threw herself from the rock to her death.