THE GREAT SPHINX: IDEAS OF THE SPHINX IN THE ANCIENT WORLD.1

By HELEN MARY TIRARD.

Every now and then our interest is renewed in one of the oldest monuments of the world, by a sort of ceremony of unveiling. However long the Great Sphinx of Egypt may have crouched on the edge of the Libyan desert, with the exception of his head, he has certainly spent most of his time covered up with the sand, which, according to Arab tradition, he is supposed to keep back from encroaching upon the fertile land in front of him. We read of this sand being cleared away as early as 1500 B.C. Again, in modern times Lepsius and the Duc de Luynes accomplished the same work; and in 1869 Mariette cleared it out in honour of the opening of the Suez Canal, and yet again, three years ago, the sphinx was covered as thickly as hundreds of years before. In 1886 the excavators again set to work, and the great sphinx was unveiled to the world, and for a time, at least, we are able to see the whole of the huge lion body crouching far below the gigantic human head, which rises high above the level of the surrounding table land. How long we may have this advantage is very doubtful. Thothmes IV, when he cleared away the sand about 1500 B.C., built a crude brick wall to keep it back, and there is some talk of restoring this old wall, unless something of the kind is soon undertaken the greater part of the sphinx will be speedily again hidden. That at the present moment he can be seen will, I hope, be a sufficient excuse for my asking you to give a few minutes to the consideration of such a very well-known object of antiquity.

1Read at the Monthly Meeting of the Institute, November 7, 1889.

The form of the great sphinx is that of the manheaded lion; it is carved out of the limestone rock, the natural form of which probably gave the artists the first idea of their design.

The head, which rises 40 ft, above the surrounding plateau, is carved with much more care than the rest of the figure; the forehead is wide, the eyes remarkably deep set, the cheeks round, the lips very full. As a whole the face gives the characteristics of the old Egyptian face, features which are repeated in the Copts of to-day, and it therefore may be regarded as a portrait, not of any individual, but of the race itself. The face was bearded, the beard being plaited broad and square, and slightly turned up at the end, representing the false beard of the ancient Egyptians, which was fastened by a strap round the face. Good examples of this form of beard may be seen in pictures and statues of gods and kings of ancient Egypt. The head is encircled by a headdress made of folded linen, striped with red or blue lines; it covers the whole of the head and upper part of the forehead; the broad folds stand out behind the ears, and fall in two lappets in front over the sides of the chest. This headdress is called the klaft, a word signifying in the Coptic a monk's cowl; it was formerly reserved for royalty, and may be seen on many sculptures of sphinxes and kings of ancient Egypt, a good example being the diorite statue of King Khafra of the fourth dynasty. Centuries later it was used as an artistic drapery for the head by Greek workers in Alexandria, as we see by some of the bronzes of that period. At the present day the Coptic priest puts a striped handkerchief over his head, much like the klaft of the great sphinx, at the celebration of the Holy Communion, as part of his ritual dress. Above the klaft, the head of the great sphinx is surmounted by the hooded snake or uraeus, which rears its upraised head from the forehead; the origin of this symbol is most obscure, but from the earliest times it seems to have been the emblem of royalty, both human and divine. Pieces of the uraeus and the beard were found broken off, and were brought to England early in this century, and are now in glass cases in the British Museum. The body of the sphinx, in the form of a crouching lion, lies 100 ft. below in a huge

artificial amphitheatre hollowed out in the limestone plateau. It is 140 ft. long, and, like the head, is formed of the rock itself, but supplemented here and there with masonry to complete the shape; it was formerly plastered all over with smoothed limestone, and coloured; this has almost disappeared; but we read of traces having been seen by Greaves in 1736. The colour used was chiefly a dull red, the same red as the Egyptians used to depict themselves as distinguished from the lighter coloured Libyans or the darker Ethiopians. Some of this colour is still to be seen, not only on the face and body, but also on the broken pieces in the British Museum. In order to reach the front paws, a sloping descent leads to a flight of steps, 40 ft. wide, described by Pliny, and uncovered by Caviglia in 1817, but since then entirely lost to sight for seventy years. These steps lead to a platform of the rock, on which some Roman buildings seem to have stood; from this platform another flight of thirty steps lead down to the level of the paws. The paws are stretched out straight; they were restored in Roman time, and look very insignificant and poor with their covering of thin slabs. Before them still stands the Roman altar made from a piece of granite, which possibly was taken from the granite temple close by; this altar probably replaced an earlier one, on which sacrifices and incense may have been offered to the great sphinx for some thousands of years.

A monument in the Louvre informs us that as late as 600 B.C., a priest named Psammetichus offered incense in honour of the pyramid builders, Khufu and Khafva the king gods, and to the great Hormakhu (Hor on the Horizon), the name by which the sphinx was known to the Greeks. Close to this altar were found the little sphinx, the hawk and the lion, which were dedicated to the sphinx in Ptolemaic times, and which are now in the British Museum. From the altar the old processions. passed along the sacred paved way, between the paws to the sanctuary at the breast. This was a chamber, 35 ft. long by 10 broad, formed by three stelae 14 ft. high. The two side ones are gone; they were made of limestone, and two low jambs projected to form a doorway. The third stela is of granite, and still rests against the breast; it was placed there by the king Thothmes IV, and some

holes in it behind shew that he appropriated a piece of granite from the granite temple to make it. In the basrelief at the top, the king is represented offering incense and a libation to the sphinx, who like the colossal figure behind has a beard and other divine attributes. Below is an inscription, a full translation of which may be found in Brugsch's history. The following extracts are perhaps the most interesting: We read how Thothmes IV, before he came to the throne, hunted lions in the valley of gazelles, behind the pyramids, riding in a two-horsed chariot, with two attendants. When in the heat of the day he granted rest to his servants, he was wont to advance and present an offering of the seeds of flowers to Hormakhu, and to the great goddesses.

Further on we read, "On one of these days it happened, when the king's son Thothmes had arrived on his journey about the time of midday, and had stretched himself to rest in the shade of this great god, that sleep overtook him. He dreamt in his slumber at the moment when the sun was at the zenith, and it seemed to him as though this great god spoke to him with his own mouth, just as a father speaks to his son, addressing him thus:"Behold me! look at me, thou, my son Thothmes. I am thy father, Hormakhu, Khepra, Ra, Tum. The kingdom shall be given unto thee, and thou shalt wear the white crown and the red crown on the throne of the earth-god Seb, the youngest (among the gods). The world shall be thine in its length and in its breadth, as far as the light of the eye of the Lord of the Universe shines. Plenty and riches shall be thine; the best from the interior of the land, and rich tributes from all nations; long years shall be granted thee as the term of life. My countenance is gracious towards thee, and my heart clings to thee; I will give thee the best of all things. The sand of the district has covered me up. Promise me that thou wilt do what I wish in my heart, then shall I know whether thou art my son, my helper. Go forward; let me be united to thee." After this Thothmes awoke and he repeated all these speeches, and he understood the meaning of the words of the god and laid them up in his heart, speaking thus with himself: "I see how the dwellers in the temple of the city honour this god with sacrificial

gifts, without thinking of freeing from sand the work of King Khafra, the statue which was made to Tum Hormakhu."

Thus Thothmes IV received, as he said, the command in a dream to clear the sand away from round the sphinx. This he faithfully fulfilled afterwards when he became king, as a thank-offering to the sun-god, who had helped him to ascend the throne of Egypt.

As to the date of the sphinx there have been diversities of opinion, varying not by centuries, but by thousands of years. Miss Edwards, in a recent lecture on portrait sculpture, proposes 10,000 B.C. as a possible date. For myself, I feel that we know so little of the course of events we will say between 4,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C., that at present it does not much matter what date we fix upon between those limits.

From the conclusion of the inscription on the granite tablet of Thothmes IV, we see that in his time the great sphinx was said to be the work of King Khafra, the builder of the second pyramid, according to Brugsch 3666 B.C. This idea may have arisen from the fact, that this colossal work lies in a direct line east of that pyramid, and that close by, is the granite temple, probably built by Khafra, wrongly called the temple of the sphinx. But that this opinion was erroneous, we learn from a limestone stela in the Boulak Museum which was found in the ruins of the temple, close to the southernmost of the three little pyramids near the great pyramid. Though this inscription only dates from the time of the 21st or 25th dynasty, and therefore not earlier than 1000 or 700 B.C., yet there seems no doubt that it was a copy of an older stela. It tells us that before the time of Khafra, king Khufu, the builder of the great pyramid, re-established the offerings in three temples, that of his mother Isis, that of Osiris, and that of the Sphinx. He built his pyramid and a pyramid for the king's daughter, Hontsen, near the temple of the goddess. The stela also gives representations of the gods and goddesses, and state the material of which they were made. Amongst these, the most interesting is that of the great sphinx, whose dwelling place, we are told, is to the south of the temple of Isis, lady of the pyramid, and to the north of the temple