Dan Snow's History Hit - The Sphinx

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

The Great Sphinx of Giza is probably the most recognisable statue in the world but it’s also one of the most mysterious...with conflicting stories about who built it and why have circulated since ancient times. These include tales of what lies inside…To bust some of these myths, we're sharing this episode of Echoes of History, the podcast that delves into the history behind the Assassin's Creed games. In this episode, Egyptologist Dr Chris Naunton joins host Matt Lewis to explain everything you’ve always wanted to know about the mysteries of the Sphinx…Echoes of History is a History Hit podcast available on all podcast players. Listen here.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The Great Sphinx of Giza is probably the most recognisable statue in the world. I've seen it a few times, I've taken cover, I've sat in its shade during a massive heatwave when I was once filming at the pyramids. Its nose was not broken off by asterisks, obliques or Napoleon. One of many myths surrounding the Great Sphinx. But you can see why myths abound, because there is an air of mystery about the Sphinx. There are conflicting stories about who built it, and those stories have circulated since ancient times. And there are

strange tales of what lies inside. To bust some of these myths, I'm sharing this episode of Echoes of History, one of my favourite podcasts at the moment. It delves into the history behind the Assassin's Creed games. In this episode, friend of the podcast, Egyptologist Dr Chris Norton, joins host Matt Lewis to explain everything you've always wanted to know episode, friend of the podcast, Egyptologist Dr Chris Norton joins host Matt Lewis to explain everything you've always wanted to know about the mysteries of the Sphinx. Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. In this episode, we're travelling to the shores

of the Nile and walking in the sand of ancient Egypt. Today I want to investigate the origins of the Sphinx. As well as being the ancient world's most iconic statue, it's one of the most mysterious. Historians have hunted for clues to its nature for centuries and still debate the meaning of the hints they found. So let's saddle our steeds and set out from the safety of the city streets across the sands to the great sphinx of Giza. Ra, the sun god, is making his presence felt today. The harsh midday sun beats the back of your neck as you cross the dunes. You pull your hood over your head to protect you from its rays.

It stops the burning sensation on your skin, but does nothing against the immense heat. The flanks of your horse are hot against your thighs, and you take pity on your loyal steed. As you reach the shade of some palm trees you dismount and give the poor beast some rest. Despite the cooling breeze in the shadow of the trees you keep your hood on to ward away the sand blowing in from the plain. Against the clear blue sky the pyramids of Giza stand out like giants' teeth. The sight of them never ceases to amaze you, especially because their bright cladding reflects the daylight, nearly blinding you. There are many stories about how they were built, and for whom. You remember once

overhearing a mystic talking about celestial alignment and the special positioning of the pyramids. Another time, a priest of Ra pointed out how, during the summer solstice, you can see the sun set between the two great pyramids. In that moment, nature imitates the hieroglyph that signifies the horizon. To witness that event, you have to stand in a certain spot near a monument that is dwarfed by the pyramids. That is your destination now. You lead your horse out of the shade and across more dunes. Here and there, outcrops of limestone jut above the sand. You observe their strange shapes as if they'd been polished by the

hand of Seth, the god of the desert and storms. Alone out here, under the hard sun and against the gritty wind, you feel very much that your fate is not in your own hands. As you approach the ridge, the ground suddenly drops away to reveal a great ditch carved from the bedrock. At the centre of this quarry reclines a gigantic lion with the head of a pharaoh. Its blue and yellow headdress is striking against the brown sands, and its fiercely red face makes the white of its eyes even brighter. You could swear that as you descend, those eyes are following you. Luckily, this mythological creature isn't real.

It's a monster of stone made by the hands of men long before living memory. Some say it's a god. Others say it's a god, others say it's a guardian, but what exactly it's guarding no one can say. That is what you're here to find out. At the base of the statue you pull back your hood, roll up your sleeves and draw your blade. It's time to go exploring and you must be prepared for whatever you find. Assassin's Creed Origins allows us to see the Sphinx as it stood in 49 BCE, but the statue was already an antique mystery by then, with its purpose long forgotten. Today I'm joined by Egyptologist Dr Chris Naunton,

who not only knows a thing or two about the Sphinx, but works tirelessly to make the study of ancient Egypt accessible to everyone. Welcome to Echoes of History, Chris. It's fantastic to have you here. Thank you very much for having me. Great to be here. It's a pleasure. I can't wait to find out more about the Sphinx as well, because I feel like it's one of those things that everybody knows about the Sphinx. Everybody kind of feels like they know what it looks like. Maybe it's something you could draw a picture of from memory, even if you've never seen it. It's kind of a fairly ubiquitous image. But just to start us off with,

could you give us a description of what the Sphinx is and what it looks like, please? Yes, it is essentially an enormous statue with a lion's body. It's a recumbent lion with four paws out on the ground in front, as it were, its hind legs tucked underneath it. And with the body of a human being wearing a particular kind of headdress an egyptian headdress which we call a nemes and that is the sort of essence of the of the egyptian sphinx if you like they can have various different animals for bodies and various different heads but lion plus human head is what we're looking at here and and the whole thing is an enormous uh sculpture cut from the natural rock and it's it's weathered quite badly now in some places.

And it's been rebuilt on a whole series of occasions from ancient times down to more or less the present day. So if you look closely, it's a bit of a mishmash of natural rock and blocks of limestone. But that's the essence of it. So this isn't one of those occasions where people have bought tons and tons of stone to the spot to build it. It's actually carved from a piece of rock that was already there. Yeah it is exactly. So the Egyptians were very capable of bringing huge pieces of stone fashioned into the images

of the king or gods normally into position wherever they wanted them but in this case this is carved from the natural rock. So most probably this was at least partly a natural outcrop of rock which from the off naturally had had the shape of something i suspect and um and the egyptians had you know had the idea they were they were quarrying around it actually for stone to build other things and and either from the beginning or or at a certain way through that process, somebody realises, oh, look, maybe we could make a statue. I quite like the idea that someone's like, what are we going to do with this manky big piece of rock that's sticking out?

I've got an idea. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and funnily enough, actually, not to get to the conspiracy theories too early on in the pod, but there are other areas of the natural bedrock of the Giza Plateau, which have weathered or sort of weathered, partly being cut, and which now look a bit like a sphinx, which has got the conspiracy theorists all jumping up and down, because, you know, maybe there's another sphinx, and there's not, it's just a bit of rock that

looks a bit like one. I'm definitely coming back to conspiracy theories in a bit though okay and in terms of age when are we talking about for the creation of the sphinx originally so the conventional view is that it was cut during the reign of pharaoh kai fra who is a pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, the fourth in the sequence in the fourth dynasty. And he reigned somewhere around 2600, 2700 BC. So early on in dynastic Egyptian history, the reason I mention conspiracy theories is because it and indeed lots of the monuments at Giza are, unlike some monuments elsewhere in Egypt, not covered with inscriptions naming the person who is responsible for them. We're sort of not entirely sure of inscriptions, but there just aren't that many. built by Kai Farrar or whether in fact it was built slightly earlier by his predecessor Khufu or whether and you know the the upper limit of the speculation is that it's maybe thousands of

years older but the consensus conventional view is that it's coming up to sort of 4,700 years old which is pretty old I mean it's an impressive thing to still be there as well. Do you have an idea that you could give us of its dimension? So obviously in the game, you can clamber all over it, but how big is it for someone who's never been to see it? Could you give us an idea of the scale? It's the size of sort of a, the sides of it are the size of a two or three story building. And so if you found yourself on the back, you'd be like a little sort of ant running around rather than a human being straddling the thing like you would ride a horse.

It takes a good five or so minutes to walk around it, to give you a sense. That's a sort of leisurely walk in the sunshine around it, but it's a very, very large thing. I quite fancy a leisurely walk in the sunshine around the Sphinx, which very large thing i quite fancy a leisurely walk in the sunshine around the sphinx which i'm sure you've done before but i haven't i have done a couple of times actually yeah i know i've been very fortunate to be able to do that it's um the area immediately around it the the quarried area is not accessible to the public most of the time but for things like tv projects i've had the chance to go down which is really

really great because in fact it's quite it's not difficult but it you're you're inevitably because of the way the site is managed you're sort of led to certain points on the giza plateau that give you a good view of the sphinx and a good view of the pyramids and that sort of thing but it does it does mean you don't get to see things from all angles. So when you get to walk around it, you see things, you know, the hindquarters. I mean, nobody's top priority is to see the Sphinx's bum, but it is very interesting, actually. And it is cut very beautifully, actually. The body of the lion with the, as I say, its hind legs kind of tucked underneath it

and its tail, which is present, curled around the side of its body around the right hand side of its body it's easy to miss those things in just looking at their the head and shoulders basically which is the famous the much more famous part of it and of course if you want to do that thing of going and taking a photograph of yourself sort of in position as if you were kissing it which is the thing to do and then then you know you need there is a certain spot you can go to to go and do that and most people go there you know take it all in and then go again um and if you if you do get to walk around yeah there's a lot to see yeah fantastic and do we have a sense of what it would have looked like when it was new if we assume the conventional wisdom it's it's about four and a

half thousand years old and it was carved from the rock would it for example would it have been painted yeah good question um so yes it would have been and in fact there are traces of paint still on it so i'm not sure to what extent those are visible when you visit but if you can get up close enough the flesh of the pharaoh's face is painted as you would expect in a kind of sort of reddish brown colour, which is the convention in Egyptian art for human or male flesh, I should say. It's different for women. The Nemi's headdress, it seems, was painted as well. This is the same headdress, by the way, that Tutankhamun famously wears in the solid gold death mask so in that case the the stripes on of the headdress and the sphinx's uh headdress is also striped they aren't always but this one is striped in the case

of king tut's death mask these are these are made of gold and royal blue lapis lazuli and there are traces of paint there too the other thing of course is that it has worn. It did have a beard at one point and fragments of that are here and there. You can go and see a chunk of that in the British Museum if you'd like to. There was a ureus. And then I suppose, as we mentioned at the start, the body is quite badly worn now and it's been restored. stored so actually if you look closely it is a bit of a it is a bit of a mishmash now of eroded limestone and then patches of limestone blocks and i think we have to assume that you know originally it would have been cut smooth and in fact so whether where the limestone has weathered it's it's interesting i'm not a geologist but it's weathered more in certain

layers in the rock than in others which gives it this kind of bumpy kind of surface and obviously that's the result of of wind and perhaps to some extent rain runoff um over the centuries um but it would it would originally i think you know have been a kind of perfect looking thing and painted, yes. Yeah. What is a sphinx in Egyptian mythology? Why is it a creature that they would build a statue for there? Good question. We don't know. So, yeah, so sphinx is common in Egyptian art and more so almost in architecture. Most of the time when you see them, they are statues which are lining things like processional roots.

You sometimes get them in pairs. You do get them in pairs. Egyptians are very keen on symmetry. So, you know, typically you might have them either side of the doorway or something like that. And then in some cases you have many, many of them, dozens and dozens of them, you know, lined up either side of the entrance route to the temple. They don't always take the same form. So as I mentioned earlier, in this case, we've got a lion's body and a human head, head of pharaoh. That's not entirely uncommon, but you can also get jackals sometimes involved. Sometimes those are entirely jackal, jackal body, jackal head, and sometimes rams and jackal representing the god anubis by the way so that would that would be a

kind of anubis has connections with mummification and funerary rites so that would be in a funerary context ram headed ram sphinxes are connected with the god amun who was the egyptians principal god certainly from the new kingdom onwards so So they would represent Amun. There's no consistency is what I'm heading towards saying here. So there's no sort of rules. And in the case of the Sphinx, things are even sort of stranger in that, again, as I mentioned, we're short of inscriptions. And quite often it's not possible to be 100% confident of identifying a god or goddess

on the basis of what they look like or goddess on the basis of what they look like, or even on the basis of what they're doing, the clincher is the hieroglyphic inscription, and we don't have those in the case of the Sphinx. Or rather, we don't have inscriptions that are contemporaneous with its construction. What we do have is a little stela, which was erected over a thousand years later and placed in between the paws, just in front of the kind of chest, if you like. And that refers to the Sphinx as being a composite solar deity. So in this case, it seems to represent some form of the sun god. But the other thing I suppose that's odd about it is that it's without

parallel. There's no other giant rock-cut Sphinx like this anywhere else um and it's it's on its own as well it's not it's not one of a pair in this case although as i mentioned there are people that want to see funny lumps of rock as being second sphinxes at giza and that inscription on on the in between the paws as i mentioned is from over a thousand years later so we can't be absolutely certain the conception of what the sphinx was in the new kingdom in the time of top nazi the fourth was the same as it was at the time it was constructed. My hunch is that this was a roughly Sphinx-looking outcrop of rock at a certain point

and got fashioned into this. On the one hand, you can try and read loads of meaning into that. I often think, actually, that there might have just been a bit more opportunism here and it just looked cool. So they did it. And then years later, somebody goes, oh, it's the sun god. Yeah. Desperately trying to read a big plan into something that was actually we've got a lump of rock over there. The easiest thing to do with that is to turn it into a sphinx. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I favour that take on humankind.

Take the easiest option. So when we talk about the Sphinx, we're talking about this statue, but a Sphinx is kind of a catch-all term for something that is representative of gods and can be a bit of a mash-up of animals and humans sometimes? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely right. So the Sphinx is the big one at giza a sphinx can be yeah lots of different things and and that as far as i know you know they they don't necessarily have you know such such clear and great meaning they are they're sort of adornments a lot of the time but but not necessarily anything terribly significant so So in Assassin's Creed, the Sphinx turns out to be a tomb that you can go into. Do we know if it's hollow? Was it ever designed to be a tomb?

There are cavities within it, but without any clear sort of explanation as to what they are. And some of those at least might have been natural fissures or voids in the rock. Giza is a cemetery and there are certainly hundreds of tombs there and indeed the pyramids were tombs but the Sphinx itself it seems to have been part of a plan to develop the landscape at Giza under Khafra if we're right in thinking that and so Khafra has a pyramid it's the middle one of the three main pyramids that pyramid is connected to what we imaginatively call a pyramid temple which is a little cult building directly next to the pyramid on the east side on the east face a causeway then leads down the plateau. The plateau slopes downwards eastwards towards the Nile. And at the base of that causeway is what we call a valley

temple. That's part of the standard pyramid complex by this point. The Sphinx is sort of next to the bottom end of the causeway and directly in front of it and directly next to the valley temple of kafra is another temple which we call imaginatively the sphinx temple and that all seems to have been part of a unity so if that's right then the sphinx is the sphinx and its temple is connected to kafra's burial place cult place you know all the buildings that were provided for his his funeral and his afterlife but but other than that you know the sphinx itself is not a tomb and in what in what way it's connected to kathra's finery cult is not clear yeah and i guess if it was a much more opportunistic thing that it happened to be a piece of rock that looks something like that

anyway it's it's less likely to have been carved specifically to be there to act as a tomb it's it's less likely to have been carved specifically to be there to act as a tomb it's kind of a decoration maybe rather than a functional building yes i think yeah yeah i think so like like i say i mean there there are these voids there which have got people very excited but there's no clear there's no clear function to them they are not cut chambers you know as such they are just spaces and so you know you can read what you want to in into that but it was very possible that there's there's nothing to it at all and the other thing in assassin's creed that you come across is a stone tablet that suggests that the sphinx represents a pharaoh so maybe kafrar if it's attached to his pyramid kind of thing could there be any mileage in that could it be a representation of the face of a pharaoh so maybe kafrar if it's attached to his pyramid kind of thing could

there be any mileage in that could it be a representation of the face of a pharaoh or is that reading too much into it no it's not no and in fact the conventional view is that it is the face of kafrar um again i mean again that's based on the fact that the sphinx and the temple appear to have been a part of a grand design for that part of the Giza Plateau, and that grand design we attribute to Khafre. So if it's anybody, it's him. And, you know, colleagues of mine have tried to look very closely at the face and, you know, scans have been done of the face

and those have been compared to known statues of Khafre. There's a very famous one which was in fact found in the Valley Temple now in the Egyptian Museum. And there are people that say, oh, yes, it's Khafre's face. And then there are other people that say, no, it's not Khafre's face. It's somebody else's face. Maybe it's Jeddah Farrar, his immediate predecessor, or maybe it's Khufu. Lots of Egyptologists, me included, will tell you that very few statues

are ever attempts to capture the likeness of anyone. You know, they're just idealised images. So even if it was intended to be the image of Pharaoh Khafra, there's no way, well, I don't think it's a very safe way of doing it to look at other statues and say, oh, look, it looks the same. It must be him. Yeah, and I guess, you know, as a medievalist, you look at medieval art and quite often that is an idealised version of what a king should look like. It's not necessarily meant to be facially representative of exactly what he looked like.

What they're giving you is the ideal picture of a king. Right, exactly. Yes, exactly. you as the ideal picture of a king right exactly yes exactly just imagine how much more handsome we would both be if if we had artists to create statues of us we could also imagine parts of our beard ending up in the the british museum bearded men here yeah exactly yeah so you've mentioned i mean i i probably need to get into this idea that there are lots of theories about what it was so it seems like you think it was kind of an opportunistic use of a lump of stone that was there and was almost the right shape anyway but what are some of the kind of wilder theories about what it was and how it came to be there the one that is the go-to for

everybody is that um it is in somehow in some way connected with a lost hall of records, which is underneath the Sphinx, which preserves all the knowledge of a lost ancient civilization. I don't know a great deal about this, but there's a number of pseudo-archaeologists who want to believe that such a thing does exist, so that there was a much older civilization in ancient Egypt which was very sophisticated in advance and had lots of technology that subsequently became lost and had lots of knowledge and that this was all set down somehow and preserved

and it happened to be preserved in this hall of records, this chamber which is in the sphinx or under the sphinx or something like that and in fact it's this ancient civilization that was responsible for the construction of the sphinx and the construction of the pyramids so that's why uh you know i mentioned earlier that uh the the age of the sphinx is for some people is in is in doubt just to be absolutely clear, the archaeological evidence all points to it. The consensus view, you know, the fourth dynasty, probably the time of Khadrar, if not maybe one of his immediate predecessors or successors, so, you know, roughly

2,700 years ago. But that idea doesn't seem to want to go away for people that want to believe it. So despite the fact that, you know, there is no chamber and all sorts of investigations have been done in and around looking for it. And there are cavities and there are, of course, tombs cut all over the Giza Plateau, including, you know, subterranean tombs cut into the rock. There are all sorts of spaces that if you really want to believe, I suppose perhaps could be seen to be a hall of records if you want to think like that but none of them found you know with any records in unfortunately but but why let evidence get in the way of a really good story yeah right yeah i think i i it's one of those things it sounds like you know it's the idea that there is a version of the library of alexandria that's still there waiting to be found you know that all of this stuff isn't lost somehow and we might one day get to it and it's also got lots of elements of the the

indiana jones to it hasn't it that there is this mythological stuff hidden somewhere if only we could find it yeah yeah yeah exactly it seems to me that part of the thrill of archaeology and of ancient Egypt is the idea of something being hidden and then that thing being revealed. And obviously the more interesting that thing is, you know, the better, you know, digging up a pencil sharpener or something is not so very interesting. Digging up something blingy like gold is very exciting, you know, and I think the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, which is almost too good to be true, is a large part of the reason why Egyptology is so popular with people.

But I suppose if it's not sort of bling and treasure, then the other thing that people are interested in is knowledge. Yeah, and for some reason, this idea that there's this secret, hidden mystery, you know, words like that that attach to this sort of stuff, the idea that those things could exist if only we could find them or, you know, unlock the mystery. It's sort of like the Da Vinci Code plays on that, doesn't it? And Indiana Jones, like you say.

And from time to time, that stuff, you know, does actually happen. You know, metal detectorists might come across a hoard of golden coins. Howard Carter digs up an intact tomb of Pharaoh that's absolutely full of golden treasure. The thing with the Hall of Records thing is that it's always the wrong way of doing archaeology, of course, to have it in mind, have the thing that you want to find in mind and then look for that.

Archaeology works the other way around. You go to the place and you see what's there and then you interpret it. And at Giza, an awful lot of seeing what's there has been done. And as boring as it might be for people who want a hall of records, it's not there. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I think it's interesting how all of the space into which we don't know for certain can be filled with all of these various things. And I guess things like, you know, the pyramids, there are still spaces in the pyramids that we don't know what they are. We know there's spaces there, but we don't know what they are. And I guess all of that plays into this idea that there is still much more to be found out and it could be this or it could be that. Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah, that is the

that is the problem it's where you've got those gaps there are voids in the pyramid um it's a it's a funny it's a funny situation um not that long ago the last couple of years you you probably know this um technique called muon tomography or muography has been has been applied to the great pyramids and they detected voids that was there was a little flurry of excitement around that and flurry of excitement in the media sad almost as it is to have to accept it at that point initially all we could say was there's some voids you know we can't tell you anything more than that and egyptology is so is so fortunate in having such a super abundance of inscriptions that literally tell us what things are when we don't have them we are so much at a greater disadvantage and the and the the pyramids at

this point in history were not inscribed so in fact in the last year or so, one of those voids that was detected by the muon tomographers in the Great Pyramid has now been inspected via a keyhole camera that was pushed inside. I had a look around, so we can now see what this is. It's a small room with a painted roof, triangular roof. we can't really say anything about it. There's nothing in it. There's no inscriptions. There's no precedent for this. You know, we've got no parallels.

So, again, you're absolutely right. The door is then open. That can be whatever you want it to be. But if you lead from the evidence, there does come a point, unfortunately, but this is terribly dissatisfying to people, there does come a point in archaeology of the ancient world, particularly where you just have to say,

we don't know. But, you know, based on what we do know from elsewhere, this could be for storage or it could be for some, you know, ritual is the go-to, isn't it, for archaeologists when they don't know the answer. But we can't really say much more than that. Yeah.

Well, I could confidently talk about those voids because I watched a fantastic programme on the TV with some guy called Chris Naunton talking to Dara O'Brien about the voids in the pyramids. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We had fun with that, yeah. If the Sphinx then was part of sort of a complex

that maybe had some religious significance around the pyramids and lots of temples around it, when does it lose that and sort of become more of a tourist attraction oh that's a really great question if we follow the consensus for you and the sphinx and those pyramids are cut in the fourth dynasty as royal tombs and associated buildings giza then you're absolutely right has a has a life of its own that is still going. So that stela that I mentioned, for example, which is between the pores of the Sphinx, erected by Pharaoh Thutmose IV of the 18th dynasty, who reigned in something like 1400 BC,

so well over a thousand years after we think the pyramids were built, basically what that stealer says is it's a legitimizing tool for tamazio the fourth who who we deduce must have had some reason for feeling threatened as pharaoh and he tells us that he went to have a snooze um by the sphinx um at a certain point um and the sphinx was completely covered in sand at this point or not or you know almost and the sphinx visits him in a dream and says, look, mate, if you can just clear the sand from around me, then I'll make you king.

And that's, hey, presto, that's what happened. So he's the legitimate king. But of course, by the by, it shows us that the Sphinx had sanded up. And there is other activity at the site. There was a little temple built close to the Sphinx in the time of Amenhotep II, predecessor of Tutle Isaiah IV. So there was an interest. And then, I mean, I'm skipping through history very rapidly here,

but you've got a whole spate of new tombs being cut around the causeway of Caerphyrion elsewhere in the 26th dynasty. So the site is still very much in use as a sacred space and as a cemetery site at this point. And of course, I suppose, crucially, at that time, religious beliefs are not the same, but it's still basically the same, you know, paganism, same pantheon of Egyptian gods. There is obviously a change at the point at which paganism is supplanted by Christianity in Egypt and then subsequently by Islam. But the pyramids and the Sphinx never stop being something that people want to go and see. So even when the site was still in use as a cemetery, a sacred place,

place for the worship of pagan gods, I think we can imagine that people might have gone there for those reasons, you know, in order to be pious and religious. It's almost like a pilgrimage site in ancient Egypt. Yeah, I think, I mean, in fact, Giza comes to be supplanted that way by Saqqara, which is another pyramid cemetery site slightly further to the south which is there's much more activity there in later times it's closer to the ancient city of Memphis it may be you know it could could be that that's at least a part of the the explanation for it but I think

you know that probably even in times when people were still visiting sites like this for religious purposes they can't have failed also to have done the equivalent of taking a selfie of themselves, you know, in front of the pyramid. And it would have been, I think you've got to assume it would have been a thing to do to go and see them. And certainly that even beyond the point at which they still hold any religious significance for people after paganism has died out, they do very much become something that people want to go and visit. And that's true of medieval Arab writers and then in later times, European and other visitors as well. I guess the crucial changeover point really is that point

at which this religious significance alters. But I suspect that there's, you know, the idea of wanting to go and just gawp at them has never gone away. Yeah. And I guess that fact, that continued finding of a reason to go there is part of the reason why they survive so well, because they might lose the immediate significance, the reason for which they're created, but they're still a thing to go and see, to blow your mind.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That is true. And yet, although it is the case that monuments get dismantled from time to time, not the pyramids. So sometimes monuments get dismantled in places where, let's say, sort of in a sacred space where the area in which you can build is very restricted. So if you want to build a temple and there's already a temple in the way, or there's not enough space, then you might dismantle somebody's temple and build your own.

Sometimes they were recycling stone. But I guess the main reason why the Great Pyramid is never dismantled is that it would have just been too difficult, apart from anything else. There might have been somebody saying, you know, hey, let's not dismantle that because, you know, good money for the locals in terms of tourism and that sort of thing. Undoubtedly, I sound like I'm joking joking but that would undoubtedly have been true but more than anything else i think it would have just been too difficult some of those blocks would just be too difficult to move and the the giza pyramids are so solidly built they haven't really needed any help to survive and it's worth pointing out as well that the outer most layer of stones were removed and so we're told partly used for the construction of medieval Cairo so you know whoever was doing that certainly didn't care that the the the outer casing was coming off they just they just wanted

the building materials but they they obviously didn't go further. And like I say, my guess would be maybe there was some sort of pride in it or some sense that these are too important. But I suspect it might also just be that it's just too difficult. Yeah. So if you want to be remembered for eternity, just build a monument that's far too difficult for anyone to get rid of. Yes, exactly. Yes.

And I guess the Sphinx, there's not so much the option to dismantle the Shinx in the sense that it's carved from a solid piece of rock it's not constructed there yeah exactly yeah yeah removing any part of that would have involved actually cutting stone and um and when people are recycling building material that that's what they're trying to avoid is cutting cutting stone what they want to be able to do is just lift a ready-made block out of a temple wall and move it somewhere else to build something else. So there's a story that the Sphinx has no nose because of Napoleon. Is there any truth in that or is that up with Napoleon firing his cannons at the pyramids as not quite true? There is no truth in it, no. And um fortunately because some of those travelers uh we're talking about who who visited

egypt to go and see the sites and did so before napoleon's armies arrived made drawings uh of the sphinx and although they are of sort of varying degrees of accuracy and realism they they make it very clear that the nose was was missing before that point so it's a nice well it's not a very nice story it's an unpleasant story but it's not true yeah fair enough and thank god that no one is ever relying on my drawings of historical monuments know what they look like because i can't draw to save my life neither can i and i've had to do drawing as part of my work in some cases. Yeah. Yeah, no.

Does the Sphinx need, does it have constant maintenance? Does it need restoration? How long could we expect it to last in its current state? Oh, that's another really good question, Matt. You've got a really great question. It's almost like you know what you're doing. I wouldn't go that far. Don't let news of that get out no sorry that sounded really awful and mean no of course i'm trying to say you're the pro here of course it reminds me that i was at i think it was actually darshan which is another of these pyramid sites a little while ago and looking i found myself with a with time on my hands and looking quite closely at some of the blocks that were used to build actually a minor pyramid.

And a similar era, by the way, just slightly, in fact, slightly older than the Giza pyramids built during the reign of Pharaoh Sneferu, we think, first king of the fourth dynasty. And these exhibit those same weathering patterns where some parts of the limestone have weathered more quickly than others um so it's as though you know you can imagine in the in the natural rock layers layers are deposited over time and those layers although superficially they might they might look sort of similar actually are slightly differently composed and because of that they they weather at different rates and that's why Giza, where the rock's been exposed, including on the body of

the Sphinx, you get these lumpy, bumpy areas where the rock is eroding at different rates. It struck me when I was looking at these blocks that the Egyptians would never have known this. They wouldn't have known and they couldn't, you know, no one could ever know what's going to happen in the course of thousands of years the egyptians hoped that their monuments would last this long and they called their mortuary temples mansions of millions of years you know in the anticipation that they would last this long but they could have had no no way of knowing what was going to happen and i suppose to the same extent we have no way of knowing you know we can see what's happened in the last few thousand years to the natural rock presumably if nature were to have its way that process would continue eventually i mean i guess

eventually fast forward enough thousands of years and there'd be nothing left at all so the sphinx has been patched as i mentioned the last of that patching happened quite a long time ago now and i think probably rather subtler techniques would be used now than just you know adding on blocks of stone it's being monitored i suppose the thing is that the process the process of erosion happens so slowly there's no sort of urgent need or at least there's not it's not felt there's any urgent need to do anything at the moment but yeah i guess if we were to return to this subject in a future pod say in 50 000 years time we might well see that i don't know the sphinx isn't you know enclosed in an airtight dome yeah yeah but we'll have to come back in 50 000 years when we're both uh

frozen beards in the british museum and yes consider the state of the sphinx then yes exactly yeah and before we finish I just wanted to talk a little bit about uh so during lockdown during the pandemic you used Assassin's Creed as part of a project called Playing in the Past can you just tell us a little bit about that and why why you did that yeah gosh that was um yeah, an unexpected and extraordinary experience. Essentially, I was writing a book about Cleopatra, a book for children about Cleopatra, and the illustrator needed a kind of,

needed some visual references for what Alexandria would have looked like. Most of the story of Cleopatra, on the Egyptian side anyway, is set in Alexandria. And we know a certain amount about Alexandria and its buildings and can imagine what it might look like. And I knew there was a guy called Jean-Claude Gauvin, an Egyptologist and artist who is very well known within Egyptology, but published a load of reconstruction paintings of sites.

And I had those in mind and I wanted to find some of those to be able to send to the illustrator. This is in lockdown, so I was just, in fact, at my dad's house looking after him with an internet connection but no library and Googling, you know, reconstructions of Alexandria. And this game, Assassin's Creed Origins, kept on coming up. And I was thinking, well, this is no good to me because I'm not a gamer and I don't have the game

and I'm on a Mac, I can't get the game. And I got kind of frustrated enough with this and I just sort of yelped on Twitter, can somebody help? You know, I just need to get some images. And I'd done enough digging around by this point to know that there was a discovery tour, a sort of version of the game, or a part of the game, where you don't actually have to do the game playing. You can just walk around the environment. I thought, wow, this sounds amazing. I'd love to do this. you can just walk around the environment.

I thought, wow, this sounds amazing. I'd love to do this. And so a few helpful sort of gamer archaeologists, Egyptologists in my network on Twitter came back, one of whom is somebody called Gemma Renshaw, who's an Egyptologist, PhD student and gamer, who very kindly offered to show me around the game virtually via a Zoom connection. And a colleague of mine, friend and colleague of mine,

Kate Shepard, with whom I was doing a podcast at the time, said well you know I'll join too, this looks like fun. So the three of us had this virtual tour and Gemma it turns out had for a long time wanted to use Assassin's Creed as a way of teaching ancient Egypt. And so Kate and I, neither of us came as completely bowled over. Kate, by the way, is a professor of the history of science, specialising in Egyptology at the University of Missouri in the States. Yeah, and we were both absolutely blown away by the world of ancient Egypt in Assassin's Creed. I ended up buying an Xbox

from Argos up the road in North Cheen in Surrey and got the game. I'm useless at video games, but the discovery tool was great because I could just run around and not have to worry about being shot or killed. And it's amazing. I absolutely loved it. I absolutely loved it. And I got to know that, obviously, Ubisoft really do their research and had a team dedicated to making sure that everything you see, as far as possible, is based on whatever evidence we have available,

whether that's archaeology or descriptions from writers like Strabo, who left quite a comprehensive description of Alexandria. Already quite long story, slightly shorter. Gemma proposed to try to get some funding from her university, the University of Southampton, to run a series of online tours through various parts of the game, focusing on various aspects with me and Kate and a series of other sort of hand-picked experts. So we did this. We broadcast these sessions via Twitch. They were recorded and uploaded to a page at YouTube, although YouTube subsequently, I gather, just deleted all those videos.

So the recording still exists, but the YouTube page was taken down. I don't know why. A few gaming publications picked this up and eventually the news found its way to ubisoft um ubisoft wrote about it for their website we we had a journalist from ubisoft talk to us um online about what we were doing and the final session of our series of online tours was a panel discussion involving me jemma, Kate, Stephanie Moser, who's a professor of reception studies in the archaeology department at the University of Southampton, and a guy called Maxime, whose last name escapes me, who was the person at Ubisoft responsible for the development of the game, or the historical aspects of it anyway. So that seemed like an incredible kind of affirmation that what we

were doing was um was something sort of interesting and yeah yeah what else can i say uh i i was and still am knocked out by how how good the game is it's by far and away the best i think recreation of of ancient egypt that i've ever come across and to be able to immerse yourself in it in the way that the game allows you to do is is great and I'd encourage anybody to to have a go it's a fascinating way in which so the archaeology and history can intersect with modern gaming you know that it's easy to dismiss gaming as something that the youth do and it's irrelevant and it's a waste of time but actually there's there's there's value to it for academics as well and i find that really really interesting that that world is recreated well enough by a

video game company that academics enjoy exploring it and looking around it and getting a feel for being in ancient alexandria yeah absolutely i think alexandria is the is where origins is is at its best actually because and i've i've given lectures on alexandria since so little of the archaeology survives so you know we are really we're really dependent on Strabo's descriptions. And then, you know, what we can sort of say about the development of the city since ancient times, it sort of shrinks and it moves a bit in the medieval period. And then it gets completely swallowed up by modern Alexandria from the late 19th century AD onwards. from the late 19th century AD onwards.

But there's very little to show people. And in archaeology and Egyptology, we're very accustomed to being able to show people sites and monuments. You know, Egypt is a very, very visual culture, you know, and there's always tons of stuff, you know, whether it's a temple or a pyramid or, you know, houses just you know brightly painted objects of various kinds there's always stuff to show and alexandria kind of breaks that rule if you like it's it's really hard to show people what there is so for the team at ubisoft to have gone to the lengths they did to recreate that environment and and do it in such

an immersive way is really invaluable. I'm sure Ubisoft will be very happy to hear all of that affirmation of their hard work too and I'm sure the fiver is in the post for the ad. And we definitely need to get that YouTube channel resurrected somehow. And you're right, again, it's a really good way to engage with a generation who may not see the attraction of archaeology in ancient Egypt, but you tie it into a video game and all of a sudden it has a brand new appeal. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how it works for people, but I mean, I guess if you enjoy the game and then you realise, oh my goodness, this is a real place. And like I say, with Alexandria, you can't really go to ancient Alexandria, but, you know, to the Sphinx or the Giza Plateau. When it comes to places which do exist, those, for me, were every bit as much a knockout. It's great to be able to see Alexandria, which is so difficult to visualize,

but when you go to Giza or Saqqara or Dar al-Bahri down across the river from Luxor, they've paid so much attention to how those places would have looked at a specific moment in time in the late Ptolemaic. And the little details, you know, I mean, it's just really great. And you can, when I was giving presentations on this during the project, you can put photographs of what remains of these monuments side by side with screenshots from the game and you can totally see how they line up. Yeah, I found it very exciting.

That's why I'm talking so quickly now. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Chris. It's been absolutely fantastic to find out a little bit more about the Sphinx and what it is and what it isn't and what it might be and what it almost certainly isn't. And just to get a bit more of an idea of what it is and what it meant and what it still means today. And also to hear about how Assassin's Creed can help with archaeology and history and understanding some of those things a little bit better. So thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Matt.

It's been great. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Next time, we'll be donning our finest robes to enter the court of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar

in the wondrous city of Alexandria. We'll recount their struggle through the Great Siege when Caesar nearly lost everything. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts and if you're enjoying it you can leave it a review too. I'll see you next time amongst the echoes of history.