A statue cut out of the ground
The Great Sphinx is not built: it is carved from the bedrock of the Giza Plateau, the same rock that served as the quarry for the pyramids and the other monuments. It is a lion with a human head wearing a royal headdress, about 73 metres long, 20 metres high and 19 metres wide at the haunches, one of the largest sculptures ever made from a single piece of stone.
It lies at the bottom of the plateau, beside the valley temple of Khafre, and most Egyptologists attribute it to that king of the Fourth Dynasty. That position matters for its story. Because the sculptors cut the Sphinx downwards into the rock, the statue sits in a hollow below the desert surface, and hollows in a desert collect sand.
Buried again and again
So why was it buried? Not by an earthquake or a flood, but by the slow, constant work of the wind. Sand blowing off the desert settled in the enclosure around the Sphinx, and whenever nobody cleared it, the body disappeared, leaving the head above the surface. By the time European travellers arrived, the Sphinx had been almost completely covered by sand for centuries.
The sand also hid what lay at the Sphinx’s feet, including a granite stele between its paws.
A prince’s dream: the first known clearing
The stele between the paws tells the oldest story of the Sphinx being dug out. It belongs to Thutmose IV, a king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, around 1400 BCE. According to its text, the young prince Thutmose fell asleep in the shadow of the Sphinx, and the god Harmachis, embodied in the statue, appeared to him in a dream. The god complained of the sand pressing on his body and promised the prince the throne if he cleared it.
Did it happen? The dream is a royal story, and a convenient one: the stele presents his kingship as a gift from the god, a useful message for any new king. What is real is the work. Once king, Thutmose IV cleared and repaired the Sphinx, and the plaited beard it once wore was probably added in his time. A fragment of that beard is now in the British Museum, and other pieces are in the Grand Egyptian Museum.
Caviglia, 1817: digging out the chest and the stele
After antiquity the sand returned. In 1817 Henry Salt, the British consul general in Egypt, hired the Italian sea captain Giovanni Battista Caviglia to excavate the Sphinx, which by then was almost totally covered. Caviglia’s men cleared the front of the statue and found the Dream Stele standing between the paws, at the end of a small chapel.
It did not last. Within a few decades the sand had filled the hole again, and later explorers, including the Prussian Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius and the Duc de Luynes, had to start over. That is the pattern of the Sphinx’s modern history: each excavation was temporary until someone cleared the whole enclosure and kept it clear.
The 1920s and 1930s: the Sphinx set free
That happened in the twentieth century. In the 1920s and early 1930s Émile Baraize led the work of clearing and consolidating the Sphinx, and by 1934 he had completed the excavation of the statue and its enclosure. In 1936 the Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan began new work around it. Since then the Sphinx has stood fully exposed, for the first time in many centuries.
Being uncovered also exposed the statue to the weather. Over the centuries it has been restored with layers of limestone blocks, from ancient repairs to modern ones. The missing nose and the debate on the statue’s age have their own stories; what the sand story shows is how much of the Sphinx we see today depends on people who kept digging it out.
Where to see it
The Sphinx stands at the foot of the Giza Plateau, next to the valley temple of Khafre, below the Great Pyramid and its neighbours. The way Egyptian sculptors shaped kings as lions and gods runs through the whole tradition of Egyptian sculpture.
Sources
- Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (formerly Oriental Institute), University of Chicago, “The Great Sphinx at Giza”.
- British Museum, collection object EA58, “Beard of the Great Sphinx”.
- Harvard University, Giza Project, record of the beard fragments.
- University of Miami, Lowe Art Museum, photograph “The Great Sphinx at Giza” (after Baraize, 1934).
- Birch, S. (ed.), “The Stele of Thothmes IV”, Records of the Past, Second Series (1888).
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