The Sphinx Twice, Pictures of the Week 9th March 2012

The Great Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, Giza 1951
Photograph by Captain John Sinclair Gilbert RAMC.

Searching through my father's old photographs, which I'm slowly cataloguing and copying for posterity - well for the family anyhow - I came across this handsome black and white print ( he printed them himself) taken early in his army career.

The Sphinx in front of the Great Pyramid, Giza
Photograph by Susan Gilbert, March 2006

I already had my own versions of this image, shot from almost the identical location 55 years later! My father's is the better composition, he captured a superb cloud formation to enhance the picture, giving the ravaged giant statue a brooding air. I am still quite pleased with my shot, because of the horseman.

The poor old Sphinx - yes she is old, four and a half thousand years old is about as precise as can be ascertained - suffers severly from sand blown erosion. She has been extensively restored, to keep her  going a bit longer. She probably isn't even a she, but a representation of the Pharoh Khafre, whose Pyramid is the second largest at Giza.

She is certainly nothing to do with the legendary Sphinx, who posessed a lion's body, woman's head, the wings of an eagle and devoured those who could not answer her riddles. Giza's Sphinx never had wings and that story was anyway part of Greek mythology, not Egyptian. The word Sphinx is Greek and was only applied to her thousands of years after her creation.

She is probably one of the wonders of the world which will be lost in the not too distant future, and for once I don't believe we can blame global warming, though we are still mainly to blame. A highly knowledgeable tour guide, Magdi, who was an Egyptian historian, told us that the Sphinx was almost completely buried in sand dunes for many centuries, which protected her from the worst effects of erosion from wind blown sand, until enthusiastic Western archaeologists dug her out. During one of the wars of the past two centuries she was also used for target practice, further damaging her face.