The Great Sphinx is to the northeast of Chephren's Valley Temple. Where it sits was once a quarry. Chephren's workers shaped the stone into the lion and gave it their king's face over 4,500 years ago. The sphinx faces the rising sun with a temple to the front which resembles the sun temples which were built later by the kings of the 5th Dynasty. The figure was buried for most of its life in the sand. King Thutmose IV (1425 - 1417 BC) placed a stela between the front paws of the figure. It describes when Thutmose, while still a prince, had gone hunting and fell asleep in the shade of the sphinx. During a dream, the sphinx spoke to Thutmose and told him to clear away the sand because it was choking the sphinx. The sphinx told him that if he did this, he would be rewarded with a kingship. Thutmose carried out this request and the sphinx held up his end of the deal.
The sphinx is built of soft sandstone and would have disappeared long ago had it not been buried for so long. The body is 200 feet (60m) in length and 65 feet (20m) tall. The face of the sphinx is 13 feet (4m) wide and its eyes are 6 feet (2m) high. Part of the uraeus (sacred cobra), the nose and the ritual beard are now missing. . The beard from the sphinx is displayed in the British Museum. The statue is crumbling today because of the wind, humidity and the smog from Cairo. Attempts to restore it have often caused more harm than good. No one can be certain who the figure is to personify. It is possible that it is Chephren. If that is so, it would then be the oldest known royal portrait in such large scale. Some say that it was built after the pyramid of Chephren was complete. It may have been set as a sort of scarecrow to guard his tomb. Still others say it is the face of his guardian deity, rather than Chephren himself. The image of the sphinx is a depiction of royal power. Only a pharaoh or an animal could be shown this way, with the animal representing a protective deity.
In the 1980's, a carefully planned restoration of the Sphinx was in progress. Over 6 years, more than 2,000 limestone blocks were added to the body of the sphinx and chemicals were injected. This treatment did not work. It just flaked away along with parts of the original rock. Later, various mortars and many workers who were not trained in restoration worked for six months to repair it. In 1988 the left shoulder crumbled and blocks fell off. Present attempts at restoration are under the control of the Supreme Council of Antiquities' archaeologists. They are concentrating on draining away subsoil seepage which is damaging the rock. They are also repairing the damaged shoulder with smaller blocks and staying with the original size.
Great Sphinx in Situ
The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza has a rival for size and grandeur very close at hand: standing next to it is the pyramid of Khufu's successor Khafre, which from many angles looks bigger than the Khufu pyramid, being built on slightly higher ground. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians called Khafre's 'The Great Pyramid' and that of Khufu 'The Pyramid which is the Place of Sunrise and Sunset'. There were originally only a couple of metres in height between these pyramids, but our Great Pyramid of Khufu is the taller, has a shallower angle of incline than Khafre's and encloses a greater volume.
Just down the escarpment from the pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx stands alone, with no rivals either on site or elsewhere among all the sphinxes of Egypt. Truly, this is the Great Sphinx, as well as being very likely the first of the breed. It might possibly have had a companion if its sculptors had cared to repeat the exercise of carving it.
For the Great Sphinx started life as a knoll of rock (quarried in the course of pyramid building) on the slope down from the Giza Plateau towards the river valley of the Nile; and there is another knoll not far to the south, clearly visible to every visitor to Giza, which might have been fashioned into another giant monument.
The later sphinxes of Egypt were often installed as pairs to guard entrances to significant places, but the Great Sphinx of Giza is a one-off, and perhaps the other knoll was just a little too far from the necropolis to be convenient. And perhaps the original meaning of the Great Sphinx was too particular to be shared with another of its kind. An eminent Egyptologist once spent some time looking for another Great Sphinx on the other side of the river, but eventually gave up the idea.
The damaged face of the Sphinx, smiling inscrutable smile.
The Sphinx is in essence a carving out of the living rock, though parts of it have been repaired (and possibly were originally constructed) with cut blocks of stone. It is immediately apparent that the rock strata out of which the Sphinx has been made vary from a hard grey to a soft yellowish limestone. The head is formed of good, hard limestone of the same sort as was quarried all around locks of the pyramids. The hulk of the body, on the other hand, is made of poorly consolidated and therefore readily eroded limestone. The rock improves again at the base of the monument, with a return to harder (but brittle) reef-formed limestone that has allowed some carved details of the beast to remain visible after at least four-and-a-half thousand years of natural and human attrition.
In keeping with the whole Giza Plateau, these strata within the Sphinx run upwards from east to west, in other words from the breast to the hindquarters, and down from north to south. The Sphinx faces due east, with the same great precision of orientation as is seen in the disposition of the Giza pyramids.
It seems inevitable that the monument was made from the start to point directly to the equinoctial sunrise. Interestingly, the face (but not including the ears) is a little awry in relation to the head as a whole: the left eye is slightly higher than the right and the mouth off-centre, and the entire face is tilted back a little.
The heavily eroded Sphinx. Despite the generally better quality of the stone of the head, the face - as is immediately apparent - is badly damaged, and not just by natural erosion. The nose is missing altogether and the eyes and the areas around them are seriously altered from their original state as carved, as is the upper lip. Napoleon's artillerymen have been blamed for using the face of the Sphinx for target practice.
The alteration of the face has brought an insinuation of mood to the features, changing with different lights (sometimes into a knowing smile), that needs to be borne in mind when any attempt is made to compare the face of the Sphinx with the portrayals in sculpture of various Dyn. IV kings.
Great Sphinx in Situ
A photochrome print from around the turn of
the Century, showing the fissure across the
haunches that was filled with cement in the 1930s.
the Century, showing the fissure across the
haunches that was filled with cement in the 1930s.
Fragment of the Sphinx
Beard: cast in the Cairo Museum
For the head and face of the Sphinx certainly belong with the Old Kingdom of the ancient Egyptians, and with their Dyn. IV in particular. The style of the headdress (known as the 'nemes' head-cloth), with its fold over the top of the head and its triangular planes behind the ears, the presence of the royal 'uraeus' cobra on the brow, the treatment of the eyes and lips all speak of that historical period.
The sculptures of kings Djedefre, Khafre and Menkaure all show the same configuration that we see on the Sphinx. The Sphinx was originally bearded with the sort of formally plaited beard to be seen on many Egyptian statues. Pieces of the Sphinx's massive beard found by excavation adorn the British Museum in London and the Cairo Museum: it was supported by a stone plate to the breast, parts of which have also been found.
There is a hole in the top of the head, now filled in, that formerly located some further head decoration: depictions of the Sphinx from the latter days of ancient Egypt show a crown or plumes on the top of the head, but these were not necessarily part of the original design. The top of the head is flatter, however, than is the case with later Egyptian sphinxes.
Below the head begins the serious natural erosion of the body of the Sphinx, the leonine body of the man-lion hybrid. The neck is badly weathered, evidently by wind-blown sand during those long periods when only the head was sticking up out of the desert and the wind could catapult the sand along the surface and scour the neck and the extensions of the head-dress that are missing altogether now. The stone here is not quite of such good quality as that of the head above.
In the 1920s it was deemed necessary to support the head with cement approximations of the absent parts of the head-dress, and it is these extensions that chiefly account for the altered appearance of the Sphinx's head in recent times, when compared with old photographs and drawings.
Erosion below the neck does not look like scouring by wind-blown sand. In fact, so poor is the rock of the bulk of the body that it must have been deteriorating since the day it was carved out. We know that it needed repairs on more than one occasion in antiquity. It continues to erode before our very eyes, with spalls of limestone falling off the body of the Sphinx in the heat of every day.
The Sphinx temple in front of the Sphinx. The rock was of poor quality here from the start, already fissured along joint lines that went back to the formation of the limestone millions of years ago. There is a particularly large fissure across the haunches, nowadays filled with cement, that 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, for example, what may have been in the first place 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 from the first have been built on to the basically carved body, out of necessity arising from the poor state of the rock from the beginning. 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, good rock or bad. 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. The later Egyptians were accustomed to build big (but never again so big as the Giza pyramids) and to carve large statues, but even the giant New Kingdom statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, sculpted thirteen hundred years later than the Sphinx, do not exceed the Old Kingdom monument, at 20 m high with faces about 3 m wide, and they have no long body behind them.
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 comparison with the Sphinx carving in modern times, with its faces at 18 m in height, which took six-and-a-half years to create even with the aid of dynamite and pneumatic drills. The Statue of Liberty tops everything at 92 m, but is made out of copper sheets hammered together, over a framework of steel.
When viewed close-up, the head and body of the Sphinx look relatively well proportioned, !out seen from further away and side-on the head looks small in relation to the long body (itself proportionally much longer than is seen in later sphinxes). In its undamaged state, the body is likely to have appeared still larger all round in relation to the head, which has not been so reduced by erosion. There could be a number of explanations for this discrepancy in our
eyes.
This was, as far as we can tell, 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, where fine detail was required, any bigger; after that the fissure at the rear may have dictated a longer body, rather than one much too short.
There remains the possibility that the head has been remodeled at some time and thereby reduced in size, but on sure stylistic grounds alone this is not likely to have been done after Old Kingdom times in ancient Egypt. 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, except that it would be the rock surface of the Giza Plateau out of which it would grow.
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 put it into someone's mind to create the Sphinx. The limestone removed to shape the body of the beast was evidently employed 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 generally poorer 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.
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 of decorative detail there is no trace.
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, 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; perhaps it was never even used.
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, the same rectangular style of pillar, the same presence of statue niches, the same 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 of 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 to us now 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 today, in times that are drier still than were the days of the Old Kingdom, rains can sometimes come and cause considerable damage in a context where they are 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 Dyn. 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.
At the top of the Khafre causeway, 400 m in length, there was another temple, larger than the one at the valley end and immediately in front of Khafre's pyramid. This was the feature of a pyramid complex that Egyptologists call a mortuary temple. It is now a badly eroded ruin, but once measured over 110 m by nearly 50 m. It was again part-faced with granite from Aswan, but also with fine limestone from across the Nile at Tura. It featured an entrance hall, an open court, statue niches, storage magazines and a sanctuary close to the base of the pyramid, with an altar for offerings. The pyramid itself was surrounded by a high wall, and the area between the wall and the pyramid was paved.
Khafre's pyramid was accompanied by one smaller pyramid to the south, but the slightly searlier pyramid of Khufu has three to the east, while the smaller Giza pyramid of their successor Menkaure has three to the south. All three main pyramids were equipped with mortuary and valley temples and causeways between these temples, though most of the causeway and the valley temple of Khufu is now invisible. The pyramids of Khufu and Khafre (and probably Menkaure too) were additionally accompanied by several boat pits in which wooden boats of some religious significance were buried.
Around the Great Pyramid of Khufu there are numerous contemporary tombs of relatives, courtiers and officials, laid out in ordered lines. Subsequently, there was infilling with tombs of later reigns, and more tombs were built to the south-east of Khafre's pyramid.
To the south of Khafre's tomb field there is a priests' town, where the priests who maintained the religious duties of the necropolis were housed, and nearby there is another large tomb, of an Old Kingdom queen. Rock-cut tombs occur along the various natural and quarried edges of the escarpment including, as we have seen, the northern side of the Sphinx enclosure. To the west of Khafre's pyramid there is a line of ancient storehouses.
The whole Giza site was, you might say, a living necropolis for three millennia: living because, with varying degrees of dedication from time to time, the cults of the royal dead and their followers were kept up by the priestly administration of the place. There were periods of neglect, extreme at times, but also periods of renewal. We have described the complex of monuments that belonged together in Old Kingdom times, but Giza went on being an important place till practically the end of ancient Egyptian history.
New Kingdom pharaohs, ruling a thousand years after Khufu and Khafre, built new temples close to the Sphinx, who had become in their time (whatever his original significance may have been) a god in his own right. In the latter days of ancient Egypt, two thousand years after Khufu and Khafre, an atavistic passion for an idealized and (not surprisingly) misremembered past led to more rebuilding on the Giza site and fresh interpretations of the origin and meaning of the Sphinx. The Giza complex lies at an elevation of about 100 m above sea-level on a latitude 30° north of the equator, towards the northern end of a vast cemetery of the ancient Egyptians associated with their Old Kingdom capital city of Memphis. Both city and cemetery lay on the west hank of the Nile.
About 10 km north of Giza is the northernmost station of the cemetery, where the very ruined pyramid of Khufu's successor Djedefre (sometimes rendered Radjedef) lies at Abu Rawash. About 7 km south of Giza, another pyramid was left unfinished at Zawyet el-Aryan: to what king it belonged is now unknown. There is also evidence of an unfinished Dyn. III structure.
About the same distance south again is Saqqara, with more than a dozen royal monuments ranging from Dyn. III to Dyn. XIII, though none of them from Dyn. IV like the Giza pyramids. There are more Dyn. IV pyramids at Dahshur, about 10 km south of Saqqara, where the father of Khufu (his name was Snofru) built two pyramids, one with a noticeably gentler slope than those of any of his successors and the other with a change of angle like a mansard roof that has earned it the modern name of the Bent Pyramid.
Down in the river valley east of Saqqara lies all that remains of the great city of ancient Egypt that the Greeks called Memphis. Picturesquely forlorn and shrunken today, Memphis was really the capital city of Egypt in Old Kingdom times, reputedly founded by the first king and unifier of the ancient state, Menes as he is named by the Greek writers. In a long history, until rivaled by the southern city of Thebes in New Kingdom times (and totally superseded the Arab foundation of Cairo, on the east hank of the Nile) Memphis probably stretched at various times up and down the west hank of the river for many kilometres. Its no doubt abundant archaeological remains are buried now under successive inundations of silt and modern settlement. It got its Greek name under curious circumstances, after the whole town had come to be known by the name of one of the pyramids at Saqqara (that of Pepi I) called Mennufer. In Old Kingdom times, the town was commonly called The White Wall, probably because the king's residence was fortified with such a wall. Much later there was a temple there of the god Ptah, who was always closely associated with Memphis, called Hikuptah, and from this word it seems the Greeks derived their name for the entire land of Egypt, Aiguptos. (Why the Greeks called the southern city Thebes, after their own city of the same name, is a mystery.)
At all events, Memphis was the greatest and most important city of Old Kingdom Egypt, the seat of Menes and his successors. It is because of Memphis that the pyramids of Giza (et al.) are where they are - they and their associated tomb fields are the cemeteries of the top people of the Old Kingdom.
City and cemeteries were on the west hank of the Nile. On the east hank at the time, south of modern Cairo, were the quarries at Tura from which the hard high-quality limestone used to case the pyramids at Giza was extracted, to be rafted across the river on the annual flood to the foot of the plateau on which the pyramids were built, with cores of softer stone quarried on site.
About 20 km north of Memphis the river fans out in the branches that form the Delta of the Nile as it runs to the Mediterranean Sea, which the Egyptians called ‘The Great Green’. Formerly there were more streams than there are today and the whole area of the Delta constituted quite a different world, with its manifold creeks and brooks running among swamps and patches of dry ground, from the situation south of Memphis where the single stream in its fertile flood plain was soon bounded on both sides by desert and rock.
These two different worlds, Lower Egypt in the north and Upper Egypt in the south, were throughout Egyptian history culturally rather distinct, and more so prehistoric times before the unification of the state. The eastern part of the Delta was probably the readiest way by which influences from the other civilizations of the ancient world might come into Egypt from the peoples at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and beyond. Egypt was unusual among the early civilizations in the degree of its isolation from the outside world, as a result of geography. The route to Palestine up the eastern Mediterranean coast was not the only avenue to the wider world 'but it was probably always the likeliest.
It was also possible to go east from Memphis across the desert to the top of the Gulf of Suez and on to Sinai, in search of turquoise and copper for example; to go south down that arm of the Red Sea into the Sea itself and so reach the coasts of modern-day Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia; and to cross the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula. The Eastern Desert along the whole length of the Nile in Egypt was never as barren as the desert to the west. Probably nomad pastoralists tending their flocks were often to be found there, and there was the attraction of minerals and precious metals to draw the ancient Egyptians on expeditions away from their river valley home. Granite and greywacke, tin, copper and gold were to 'be found there, and more routes to the Red Sea. In the Western Desert, stretching away from Memphis to the Libyan Plateau, there was less to lure the ancient Egyptians away, even in the wetter days of old before the far Sahara became completely desiccated, though there were substantial oases of considerable importance to the Egyptians in later times.
South of Memphis, into Upper Egypt, the valley of the Nile reached for about a thousand kilometers towards the African interior out still within the land of Egypt itself before, above Aswan, the border of the state was crossed into Nub and tropical Africa. The first cataract of the Nile marked the frontier in Old Kingdom times, the place where the river first becomes seriously difficult to navigate as the waters tumble over rocks. The Old Kingdom Egyptians of Dyn. IV exercised some kind of influence over the region between the first and second cataracts - and this was, of course, the place where imports from the African interior made their way into Egypt: ivory, spices, ostrich feathers among them. There were probably many middlemen along the route these goods traveled into Egypt and few if any Egyptians are likely to have traveled far into the African interior.
But the sources of the great river which made the civilization of ancient Egypt possible were deep inside the continent. Above the fifth cataract first the Atbara, and then above the sixth the Blue Nile flow down from the Ethiopian Highlands into the waters of the White Nile, which rises in central Africa. It is the seasonal flooding of the Nile in Egypt as a result of the mingling of the rivers in the Sudan that supplies Egypt with the means to sustain life. Without this happy state of affairs, there would have been no settlement of the Nile Valley, no unification of the state, no great kings - and no Great Sphinx.
The Giza pyramids and Sphinx according
to Sundys in the seventeenth century
The earliest pictures of the Sphinx were produced by the ancient Egyptians themselves in New Kingdom times, when the Sphinx was already more than a thousand years old. Archaeological finds at the site of the Sphinx, particularly those made by Selim Hassan in the 1930s, include many stelae with depictions of the monument, showing considerable variation as to the details they record, or purport to record.
The Sphinx according to the "Description de l'Egypte"
at the end of the eighteenth century
On some of the stelae, the Sphinx sits on a corniced pedestal, on others there is no pedestal. Sometimes a crown tops the head of the Sphinx: in some cases the combined Red and White Crowns of Lower and Upper Egypt, in others a tall plumed crown. Sometimes the beard is shown wedged like a king's beard, at other times curled at the tip like a god's (as is the case with the actual fragments of the beard). On some of the stelae, the Sphinx wears the plumage of a bird, and a collar or cape.
On most of the stelae, the proportions of the Sphinx are shown more in accordance with the standard design of sphinxes after the Great Sphinx, but it is interesting to note that the Dream Stela itself depicts the proportions of head and body a little closer to the real Sphinx than the rest do; this stela of Tuthmosis IV between the Sphinx's paws shows no crown on its two Sphinx representations and the beard is of the divine pattern. But on the Dream Stela, no statue is shown before the Sphinx's breast, though many of the others do show it there. One of the most interesting of these is that of the scribe Mentu-Hor which uses unconventional artistic means, by the standards of the ancient Egyptians, to suggest that the statue is between the Sphinx's forelegs, by hiding the lower part of the statue's legs behind the outstretched limb of the Sphinx.
In a similarly bold way, two pyramids are shown behind the Sphinx, part-hidden by its body, and one part-obscuring the other. This sort of perspective drawing is very unusual in Egyptian art and suggests that on this occasion a more than usually naturalistic effect was sought, which inspires confidence in the potential accuracy of details like the presence of the statue and the collar about the neck.
The Sphinx according to Pococke, 1743 and Norden, 1755. Some two-and-a-half thousand years after Mentu-Hor, the German traveler Johannes Helferich visited Giza and left us an account of the Sphinx which, though it contains that fanciful material about the ancient priests' getting inside the Sphinx's head to address the multitude, does circumstantially suggest that he was reasonably familiar with the site. The woodcut he had made for publication in 1579 would suggest the opposite: this Sphinx is blatantly female and about all that has come through of the real situation of the monument at Giza at the time is that the breast is shown buried in the sand and, perhaps, that the hair resembles the damaged head-dress of the Great Sphinx. We recall that Helferich thought the Sphinx was an image of Isis.
The illustrator of George Sandys' Relations of a Journey began in 1610 made a much better job of depicting the Sphinx. Sandy's noted that 'Pliny gave it a belly' though only its head was visible to him, and he must have made a pretty detailed sketch of it in the field, for the woodcut in his hook is really remarkably apt in showing the erosion of the neck, with knobbly protuberances, and the damage to the head-dress, with grooves and notches. What is more, this illustration of Sandys' book largely avoids the cultural contamination with the classical style that spoils many of the renditions of Egyptian art made before the end of the eighteenth century.
The Sphinx under excavation, about 1820 The picture of the Sphinx in Richard Pococke's account of his Egyptian travels, published in 1743, does not altogether escape the classical influence. Erosion and damage are fairly accurately recorded, but the nose of the monument - gone for several centuries by Rococke's time - is shown intact.
The Danish marine architect Frederick Norden published the story of his travels in 1755, with a Sphinx drawing in more recognizably ancient Egyptian spirit. The erosion of the face and the damaged nose are recorded in Norden's picture and something of the George Washington set of the head is captured, with its slight Backward tilt. But the eyes, lips and chin are still not right. With the magnificent Description de l'Egypte that was published over a number of years in the early part of the nineteenth century, the first really accurate depictions of the Sphinx became available to world scholarship - in a limited way, for the volumes were necessarily very expensive and printed in small numbers.
Napoleon's team had done their work well and their efforts in the field were well served by those who brought out the volumes of the Description hack in France after Napoleon's downfall. The engravings of the Sphinx vividly portray the damaged state of the face and the head-dress and the erosion of the neck as Napoleon's engineers and savants found the monument.
At the front, sand came up to the shoulders and nothing of the breast was visible (until the engineers dug down, possibly just uncovering the Tuthmosis IV stela before abandoning work); but the whole ridge of the back was visible, and at the hindquarters the sands fell away to reveal something of the rump of the Sphinx. What was entirely new in depictions of the Sphinx was that the whole setting of the Giza Plateau was accurately recorded about it, with correct perspective in the placing and rendering of the pyramids behind it.
The Sphinx by Maxime Du Camp,
1849. From the Photographic Collection of
the New York Public Library. No doubt the artists who made their sketches on site could avail themselves of the most up-to-date cameras and other drawing aids. When Howard Vyse published his account of Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Giza in three volumes in the early 1840s, the first photograph of the Sphinx had not yet been taken. Howard Vyse’s picture of the Sphinx under excavation by Caviglia shows the sand dune around the Sphinx quite parlously opened up in front of the breast and round the left shoulder, revealing the front paws and the chapel between the forelegs.
The Dream Stela is quite well depicted, with something of its graphic design conveyed, while the jumbled masonry behind it and the column of blocks suggest evidence for the original presence of a statue and the support plate of the heard. But the distance from enclosure floor to chin is vastly exaggerated and the disproportion of head and body quite marked. The first photographs of the Sphinx were taken in 1849 by Maxime Du Camp and published in 1852 in one of the earliest hooks to be extensively illustrated with real photographic prints made from negatives - in this case calotype paper negatives.
The Sphinx at the extreme right of the photography by Hammerschmidt, 1858. Du Camp traveled with Flaubert a year or two before Madame Bovary, and both writers were bowled over by the Sphinx. 'No drawing I have seen conveys a proper idea of it,' wrote Flaubert, 'the best thing is an excellent photograph that Max took.' In the better of Du Camp's two photographs, the benefits of the first modern sand-clearances are still to be seen, but the Dream Stela has apparently gone under again. In the background is the pyramid of Menkaure with one of its subsidiaries. Khafre's pyramid is out of frame to the right, and his causeway is entirely invisible under the sands. The featureless and too-light sky has resulted from the color-blind quality of the early photographic processes.
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