What Is the Sphinx in Mythology?

In Egypt the sphinx was a protective figure, typically with the body of a lion and the head of a king. It combined royal authority with the strength of a predator and was placed to guard sacred sites and approaches to temples.

There is no riddle and no menace towards the respectful. Egyptian sphinxes were built in large numbers, including avenues lined with them, and they were generally male, representing specific rulers rather than a single mythological creature.

The most famous example was carved from a single outcrop of limestone on the Giza plateau, around seventy three metres long and twenty metres high. It is usually dated to the reign of Khafre, around 2500 BCE, though the dating is debated by some researchers.

The missing nose has attracted many legends, including a persistent story about Napoleon's troops. The damage is documented well before Napoleon arrived, and a fifteenth century account attributes it to deliberate defacement. Erosion and centuries of burial in sand also took a heavy toll.

The Greek sphinx is a different creature: female, winged, with a lion's body and a woman's head, and thoroughly hostile. She sat outside Thebes and stopped travellers with a riddle, killing everyone who answered wrongly.

The riddle asks what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening. Oedipus answered correctly that it is a human being, crawling as an infant, walking upright as an adult, and using a stick in old age. The sphinx then destroyed herself, and Oedipus entered Thebes as its saviour, which begins the far darker part of his story.

The differences are systematic rather than incidental:

• •Egyptian sphinxes are protective, Greek ones are predatory
• •Egyptian sphinxes are usually male, the Greek sphinx is female
• •Egyptian sphinxes are wingless, the Greek sphinx has wings
• •The riddle appears only in the Greek tradition

The Greek version almost certainly borrowed the visual form from Egypt and the Near East through trade and contact, then attached quite different meaning to it. Borrowing an image and reinventing its significance is extremely common in the history of mythology.

Sphinx like figures also appear in Mesopotamian and Persian art, and the composite lion body with human head recurs widely. What varies is whether the creature is guarding you or hunting you.

The Great Sphinx has attracted an unusual volume of speculation about hidden chambers, lost archives and much earlier construction dates. Some of this comes from a genuine scientific disagreement about weathering patterns on the enclosure walls.

Surveys using ground penetrating radar and seismic methods have found some cavities in the bedrock, and Egyptologists generally regard these as natural fissures rather than constructed rooms. Mainstream dating to the reign of Khafre rests on the surrounding causeway, temple layout and quarry evidence, which tie the monument to a well documented building programme.

More than a thousand years after it was carved, the Great Sphinx was largely buried by drifting sand. A granite slab still standing between its paws, known as the Dream Stele, tells how a young prince who later ruled as Thutmose IV fell asleep in its shadow after hunting. In his dream the Sphinx promised him the throne if he would clear away the sand that was choking it. The stele presents his kingship as a reward for that service, which made it a useful piece of royal publicity.

By this period, the New Kingdom, the Sphinx was no longer seen simply as a portrait of an earlier king. Egyptians identified it with Horemakhet, meaning Horus in the horizon, a form of the sun god, and visitors left offerings and inscribed stones nearby. This shows how a monument's meaning can shift across its own long history. A royal guardian carved for one ruler became a god in its own right for later generations, long before Greek visitors gave it the name we still use today.

Not every Egyptian sphinx has a human face. At Karnak in Luxor, long rows of sphinxes with the bodies of lions and the heads of rams line the approaches to the temple of Amun, a god closely associated with the ram. Other sphinxes carry the head of a falcon, linking them to Horus. The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the fifth century BCE, used the word androsphinx for the human-headed kind, which suggests visitors noticed there was more than one type. A few sphinxes even show royal women, including the female pharaoh Hatshepsut.

The word sphinx itself is Greek, and its origin is uncertain. Greeks linked it with a verb meaning to squeeze or bind tightly, so the name was often understood as the strangler, which suits a monster who kills those who fail her test. In Hesiod's Theogony, one of the oldest Greek poems about the gods, she appears under the name Phix, born into a family of monsters that includes the Chimera, and a mountain near Thebes carried a related name. Later writers said a god had sent her to punish Thebes, though they disagreed about which god and why.

The Great Sphinx was carved from layers of limestone that differ in hardness, and that has shaped its survival. The head sits in a harder, better-quality layer, while much of the body was cut from softer beds that weather faster, which helps explain why the face is still recognisable while the body has needed so much repair. The monument has been dug out of the sand many times. In 1817 the Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Caviglia cleared the chest and uncovered the stele between the paws, but the whole body was only fully exposed during excavation campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Sphinx also once wore a long divine beard, probably added some time after the original carving. It fell away long ago, and fragments are now kept in the British Museum in London and in Cairo. Modern conservation has had its own setbacks. Twentieth-century repairs using cement and gypsum mortar trapped moisture and salts behind the new facing and harmed the original stone, and in 1988 a piece fell from the shoulder. Later work has used limestone blocks and mortars chosen to match the original more closely, while scientists monitor groundwater and the salts that crystallise in the pores of the rock and flake away its surface.

The Egyptian sphinx is a royal guardian with a lion's body and a king's head, while the Greek sphinx is a winged female monster who kills those who fail her riddle, and the Greeks borrowed the form while inventing an entirely different meaning.