Greek sphinxes devoured travellers while Egyptian ones guarded pharaohs
The Greek sphinx was a winged, woman-headed killer who ate anyone failing her riddle. The Egyptian kind was usually a wingless man-headed lion embodying a king's strength. Both stood guard at sacred doorways, and the most famous of all, beside the Giza pyramids, likely bears the face of Khafre.
At its simplest, a sphinx pairs a human head with a lion's body, often adding an eagle's wings. The Greeks made her female and merciless, posing a riddle and devouring those who failed, as in the story of Oedipus. Egyptian sphinxes, typically male and called androsphinxes, were benevolent symbols of royal power and lacked wings, unlike their Greek, Levantine and Mesopotamian relatives.
The name is puzzling. Folk etymology ties the Greek word to a verb meaning to squeeze or tighten, perhaps because lions strangle their prey. Historian Susan Wise Bauer offers another idea: a Greek garbling of the Egyptian shesepankh, living image, referring to statues carved from bedrock that was shaped but never cut free.
The Great Sphinx of Giza sits on the Nile's west bank, southeast of the pyramids and facing east. Most Egyptologists identify its head with Khafre, placing it around 2600 to 2500 BC. A fringe group of late 20th-century geologists argued that water erosion proved it thousands of years older, but that hypothesis has little support and clashes with other evidence. Nobody knows what its builders called it. A stele of the 18th-dynasty king Thutmose IV, set up around 1400 BC, names three aspects of the local sun god.
Pharaohs often put their own faces on guardian sphinxes to signal kinship with Sekhmet, the lioness deity. A granite sphinx of Hatshepsut now sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an alabaster one remains at Memphis. At Thebes, where Amon's cult was strongest, some nine hundred ram-headed criosphinxes lined the approaches, those at Karnak each fronted by a statue of the pharaoh, meant to hold evil at bay. Renaissance Europe revived the creature in decorative art, and as it spread its form drifted from the Egyptian model.
Source: Sphinx
