The Ancients - The Great Sphinx

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

The Great Sphinx of Giza is one of the most iconic monuments from ancient history. 73 meters in length and 20 meters high, the huge limestone statue depicts a mythical creature with a lion's body and a human head thought to represent Khafre, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty during the Old Kingdom (c. 2570 BC).In this fascinating bumper episode of our special Wonders of the World miniseries, Tristan is joined by Dr Campbell Price from Manchester University to learn more about this world-famous effigy, from its shadowy origins, to its role as a tourist attraction for the Ancient Greeks & Romans, and of course its mysterious missing nose.This episode was produced by Joseph Knight and edited by Aidan Lonergan.We need your help! We’re working on something special and we need your questions about the Roman Empire. Let us know here.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, well, it was fantastic to see how well-received our Wonders of the World miniseries proved in March, and so we kind of decided to do an ancient encore, another great architectural marvel of antiquity, a monument that has become the face of ancient Egyptian culture alongside Tutankhamen and the pyramids. I am of course

talking about the Great Sphinx of Giza, one of the, if not the oldest surviving monumental sculpture in the world. It's colossal and still stands to this day. Now, a few weeks back, I headed to Manchester Museum to finally go and see their highly praised exhibition on ancient Egypt called Golden Mummies. It is fantastic, but only on for a few more weeks, so do make sure you go and see it before it's not too late. I've done some videos all about it on my Instagram page, at Ancients Tristan, if you need further convincing. Now, whilst I was at Manchester Museum, I caught up with this ancient Egypt curator, Dr. Campbell Price, because Campbell, he is also an expert on the Great Sphinx. So he is our guest for

today's episode. I really do hope you enjoy. And here's Campbell. Campbell, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Hello again, Tristan. Hi, it's a pleasure to be with you in person. We're doing it in person this time. And what a scenic place to do it. This is behind the scenes of the Manchester Museum too. Yes, this is our archery store that we're sat in at the moment. So bows and arrows and lots of books. We are talking about the Sphinx.

And this has to be one of the most recognisable and colossal statues, not just in ancient Egypt, but in the ancient world. Yeah, I think the Great Sphinx of Giza, which is associated with the pyramids of Giza, the Great Pyramid, and the two other pyramids there on the plateau, that is the largest single rock cut sculpture in Egypt. I can't speak for everywhere else in the world.

You have to fact check that. But in terms of ancient Egyptian sculpture, which, and the ancient egyptians loved a colossal statue that is the biggest one you mentioned there next to these other great pyramids and the great pyramid the wonder of the ancient world so i mean set the scene for us so we know exactly where we're talking about here where is this in ancient egypt so the site today called Giza is southwest of modern Cairo. It is actually on the fringes of the city. If you've taken a flight into Cairo, you can see the edge of the desert.

People imagine the pyramids are in the middle of the desert like a Hollywood movie. Actually, they are sort of encompassed by the conurbation. In ancient times, this was the royal cemetery. So we're talking about the fourth dynasty. So maybe around about 2600 BC. Wow. So it's a long time ago. And these are the tombs of the kings.

And they are big at the time. They're the biggest pyramids constructed in Egypt. And much debate concerns the date and the original identity of the Sphinx. So we'll leave the pyramids to one side. The kings who are responsible are King Khufu. He builds the Great Pyramid at Giza. His son and eventual successor, Khafre, builds the second one.

And then his son, Menkarey, builds the second one, and then his son Menkaure builds the third one. The Sphinx is this human-headed lion sculpture that is excavated, it's quite clear if you're visiting there, out of a quarry, what must have been used to extract stone, because for the most part the Giza pyramids are built of stone that was quarried very close by so it's the path of least resistance the really nice stone comes from opposite bank of the Nile the nice white limestone that would have faced it so you would have had and you can imagine almost being the architect that said hang on guys that area of the quarry kind of looks like a lion. So let's lean into that. Maybe it was an intention all the time. Let's sculpt it formally as an image of the king.

When we say the word Sphinx, is that mythical beast, is it always a body of a lion and the head of a human? What do we know about the actual mythological animal of the Sphinx? the head of a human? What do we know about the actual mythological animal of the Sphinx? We are reliant on Greek sources often in Egyptology because they are the ones who encounter the Egyptians because they come along chronologically. Well, you know the story around and after the time of Alexander, you know best than most. But the Greeks have an idea of what a Sphinx is. In Greek mythology, the sphinx tends to be female. In Egyptian iconography, the sphinx is usually, but not exclusively, male. It has the body of a lion, no wings usually, and the head of the king. So the first sphinx, the great sphinx of dynasty

four, there may be a couple of precursors possibly representing royal women, but the great sphinx of Giza is simply to show, I think, the superhuman power of the king. It embodies something more than a human being. So the ancient Egyptians do this thing where they take something threatening and make it something protective or something divine or something positive. So hippos, crocodiles, scorpions, snakes, lions. So it's fairly likely the ancient Egyptians would have encountered lions on the desert fringes. They're quite scary things. So they take the idea of the power, the strength of the lion, and they give it the king's head,

and that makes the sphinx. The word sphinx comes from the Greek. The ancient word, well, it depends. There is one term called the seship ank, which means something like the living image. And I like that term because it gets to the heart of what Egyptian sculpture is really all about, ancient Egyptian sculpture,

and that is a vessel for spiritual entities. So images, statues are living. So the Sphinx is a living image. So it's not just a nice piece of artwork that they created. It has a lot of meaning. It's powerful. It's almost a magical object. Yes, yes. It's absolutely imbued with power it's to be feared and the modern arabic term for

the sphinx of giza abu hall which is something like the father of fear gets to the point which is the pharaoh is to be feared the pharaoh a scary, powerful intermediary between regular people, normal people, humanity, and the world of the gods. And so the Sphinx is a way of expressing that power. This is interesting, I guess, when you're talking about that kind of hybrid of an animal and a human. You also think, with those animals that you mentioned, you think of the Egyptian pantheon of gods and how they're depicted, aren't they? They always, time and again, they have that hybrid depiction. It almost seems to be a similar thing with the creation of the Egyptian pantheon of gods and how they're depicted aren't they they always time and again they have that hybrid depiction it's almost seems to be a similar thing with the creation of the sphinx yes and it's a kind of inversion of the usual pattern which is you have

animal headed gods here is a human headed animal and it just emphasizes and Egyptian art does this pharaonic art does this a lot you take one element of the uncanny what to us seems uncanny and strange looking bizarre looking and you then create this expression of difference and power so in the case of the gods yeah a jackal headed man or a lioness headed woman emphasize different divinities in some ways the sphinx starts out as a statement of the godliness of the pharaoh so it's the godliness of a living person now you mentioned the fourth dynasty and these pharaohs that are associated with creating those majestic monuments on the giza plateau when it comes to the Great Sphinx, which pharaoh do we think oversaw its construction? You're smiling when I ask you that question. Right, so much debate on this. Some people will

tell you that the Sphinx started out depicting entirely a lion and that it's 10,000 years old. I'm not sure I believe them. I'm not sure. I have good friends who worked on the sphinx at giza as archaeologists i have friends who are geologists and the balance of opinion seems to be the sphinx is made of different qualities of stone and the debate centers on how the stone is eroded for some people it looks like water erosion. For others, it's wind erosion and it's simply different layers of stone have eroded at different points. I do not think that the Sphinx started out as a lion. The relative size of the head, the human head on the Sphinx, is simply a result of it having been carved relative to people probably on the ground. It's not a

comment necessarily on the total form of the Sphinx initially. So the jury is out between King Khafre, so that's the builder of the middle pyramid at Giza, and then King Khufu, the big pyramid, the great pyramid builder. I could believe potentially that it was Khufu who conceptualised it and Khafre who finished it off. But we can say, if you look at a basic archaeological plan of Giza, the pyramid complex, is you'll see the causeway, this kind of connecting avenue between the pyramid and the temple near the Nile, kind of veers off as if to respect the Sphinx area. So it seems that Khafre's building complex included it. It existed already. So that's why I think either Khufu or his son Khafre were responsible. Before this time in the archaeology, is there any evidence that this idea of a Sphinx,

I mean, was it popular amongst Egyptian pharaohs? Or does this seem like something quite new at the time of the fourth dynasty? I think the idea of a sphinx, a human-headed lion, is fairly recent to the fourth dynasty. There's not much evidence of the existence of that kind of thing before. You get already at the foundation of the state, so-called, air quotations, King Narmer, who's the first king of Egypt, is shown on his famous palette, which is this monumental tablet showing the victory of Narmer, king of the south, over the people of the north.

The king can take on the form of a bird. So there's already this idea of the king can be an animal and then you get a representation of monstrous mythical kind of animals which are they look feline but they have very long necks so the idea of a superhuman animal already exists then so in some ways I think the Sphinx is a kind of logical progression. What made the Egyptians create that idea on such a scale at that time? I can't tell you. That's a mystery. Well, you hinted at earlier how the local stones, they are used in the construction on the Giza Plateau a lot. Yes. So do we know much, I mean, with the pyramids, we have like the Red Sea Scrolls and stuff like that, but do we know much about the actual construction of the Sphinx?

Oh that's a good point, yes. So we do know something about at least the scheduling, if not the actual technical know-how of constructing pyramids, thanks to papyrus sources. Actually carving the Sphinx, no we don't. It's scooped out of this kind of bay this kind of basin and if it were like other Egyptian sculptures of any size you would expect two teams to be working on it so you have two distinct groups working on the same project whether it was like that then we have no definitive evidence more evidence comes from later on in its history, and I mean centuries and millennia after the first carving, where people go along and patch it up. So there is a lot of repair work, which continues to now, to the present day. So no, we can say almost nothing about the techniques

of its construction. We can say it was painted vividly. You know, I kind of imagine the recreation Sphinx outside the Luxor Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas is an approximation, but maybe it's not that far from the original appearance of the Sphinx. So the headcloth, the Nemi's headcloth,

would be yellow and blue stripes. Oh, that's the iconic headdress we see on pharaohs, yes. Like Tutankhamen's famous mask. And then the flesh be yellow and blue stripes that's the iconic headdress we see on pharaohs yes yeah like toot and carmen's famous mask and then the flesh seems to have been a ready brownie color because there are traces you can even see still there whether those were the traces from the original painting i'm skeptical of i think it was given several recoats over the thousands of years of its veneration but we can say it was painted the style of the face is consistent with the fourth dynasty so we have other sculptures we

can compare it to of course it's conditioned by the the size of the sculpture i guess but i'm quite happy saying yes it's a fourth dynasty conception it was finished in the fourth dynasty but then it goes on to have this rather interesting afterlife we'll get to that very soon but a really important question first of all did the original sphinx have a nose yes yes it was not carved without a nose good well actually one last thing on the building we think of the sphinx itself the colossal statue but was there any buildings almost surrounding the sphinx was it just the sphinx or was there a whole enclosure almost oh now this is interesting there is evidence well surviving right in front of it is a sphinx temple

so a temple dedicated to the sphinx the date of this is also somewhat vexatious it's quite confusing so the structure of it seems to be consistent with the fourth dynasty right but the construction is quite it appears quite archaic even for the fourth dynasty so the temple in front of the sphinx was conceptualized in the fourth dynasty so it's consistent it's contemporary with the Sphinx was conceptualised in the 4th dynasty, so it's consistent, it's contemporary with the Sphinx. Then there's maybe slightly later, Khafre has his own temple, valley temple constructed. So they are an important part of the...

You know, no Egyptian monument is really totally isolated. You always have some ancillary buildings. So at Giza, with the Sphinx later on, and we're talking hundreds of years later, a thousand years later, other buildings start to pop up. Can I also ask quickly about the wall, the potential wall which surrounded the whole Sphinx too?

Because I know this is something you've had a bit of a look at. I have, and I am fascinated by this. So one word for the enclosure of the Sphinx that we have from sources, hieroglyphic sources, is setepet. And the setepet means literally the most select or the most restricted. Okay. So maybe, gosh, a thousand years after the Sphinx is constructed. Kings in the New Kingdom come along and they enclose that area in a mud brick wall. And I've had a good look at the mud brick wall myself. And it's consistent with the New Kingdom. So a thousand years after the construction of the

Sphinx. And this would suggest that it creates a space that is this select area where only those and such as those could get in. But it also highlights what for me is a fascinating aspect of the Sphinx. People couldn't just wander up to it and touch it. You had to be a priest to get in. And we know this of temples. Major temples had big intimidating walls around them. Bigger statues also did. There are other cases of this. So I think this is what happens with the Sphinx. There is a big construction that stops this magical powerful statue being touched by the hoi polloi. And it also is the practical function of keeping away the sand

which is always threatening to encroach the the body of the sphinx which indeed happened several times in this history but do we have no idea then if there was any original wall at the time of the fourth dynasty if this purely a late construction or could it have been built on top of an earlier i think there must have been something there. I mean, how archaeologically attested that is, I'm not sure. What remains there now seems very clearly to be much later. But as you say,

it could be placed on top of an original wall. And one other thing on the fourth dynasty, let's say it was King Khafre that oversaw its final piece and it's Khafre who's looking at you there. That whole idea of accessibility, I mean, do we know much about Caffrey's reign? Was he someone who would have wanted to create one of those statues and the hoi polloi would see from a distance his face in this mythical, magical

creature? I mean, is this a key part of Caffrey's story? Do we know much about that at all? Well, sadly, Tristan, we don't know much about Caffir anyway and this is all just a supposition as it often is in egyptology so we don't know anything about him as a personality but we do know his dynasty think of themselves and say that they are directly the sons of the sun god they style themselves sa ra in ancient egyptian son of the sun god. So maybe his own conception of his own divinity would have matched someone who would want to be depicted as a king-headed lion. So you can't build a massive sculpture like the Sphinx and not want to declare some statement. But I think the main audience for that statement contrary maybe to

popular belief nowadays was the gods it's not the general population sure of course people would marvel at the pyramids and you would take some of the credit I guess by having a sculpture of yourself created there but there's no definitive inscription that says this is Caffrey. There's no name preserved. It is only later kings, new kingdom kings, that use the name Caffrey in their own texts, which talk about the Sphinx. So it's all kind of supposition. okay i've got to ask then because other sites in that similar time and i'm thinking because

i've been there quite recently orkney and mace how and you sure yeah yeah like i think it's on the shortest day of the year that the sun shines through into the center of the chamber and it's beautiful and stonehenge a similar kind of thing as well you mentioned this association with the fourth dynasty in the sun god is there any potential alignment with the sphinx with the sun or like any sort of kind of astronomical link in its design? Well, it's orientated to phase due east. So it's looking at the sunrise. So we can take that as read. But the pyramids behind also are orientated correctly,

pretty much to the cardinal points. What happens later is the Sphinx develops another exclusively divine identity. The association with Khafre is almost forgotten and the Sphinx is worshipped as a god in its own right. So the stone is divine and the name the Egyptians choose to give the Sphinx is Har-em-Akhet and that means literally the god Horus in the horizon. So there is something, a kind of reinterpretation maybe going on, which may have gone on for centuries but it's

only written down or spoken about directly in the New Kingdom around 1400 BC, where the Sphinx, which if you look at it from a certain angle, is the head between two pyramids. And we do have actually some ancient depictions of the Sphinx in that arrangement. The two pyramids could be thought to write the word Akhet, which means horizon. So Horus in the horizon is simply a form of the god Horus, also a form of the sun god.

These two ideas can be simultaneous in the horizon so it's kind of a 3d writing of a hieroglyphic idea which the ancient egyptians loved upon so i don't think the egyptians were as bothered about alignments celestial alignments as we are you know i think you're exactly right and i think it's the same i think we sometimes really want to try and find an alignment but sometimes look for one that isn't there and you see it with monuments all across the world and sometimes they're linked to more difficult interpretations yes yes i yes i do think that's right and i think maybe it is that certain monuments are built in respect to each other rather than to celestial phenomena yeah well let's go on to this we've been hinting at you've been mentioning little hints of it for long enough now let's

go on to this kind of revival of the sphinx revival the sphinx survival but also in ancient egyptian times which is kind of weird to say but that just really emphasizes just you know how long ancient egyptian culture lasts so when are we talking with the revival of the sphinx in ancient egypt so we know there's kind of a period of silence between the fourth dynasty pretty much and the new kingdom clearly things are happening at giza a new kingdom that second millennium bc this is yeah second millennium bc into what we would call the bronze age and other parts of the world and archaeology in general. So we're talking in Egyptological terms about particularly the reign of King Amenhotep II and King Thutmose IV. So this is father and son.

And they are around in the 1400s BC. So remember, this is over a thousand years after the Sphinx has been carved. Amenhotep II comes along and he plonks a fairly nice temple right in front of the Sphinx. It is visible today. You can visit it today.

And it's quite high up. So if you step out of the front door of this temple, you're eyeballing the front door of this temple, you're eyeballing the Sphinx kind of from the side. Now, Amenhotep II has a son, Thutmose IV, as he becomes king. Now, he leaves us the great dream stealer, which is this enormous limestone tablet tablet which is between the sphinx's paws when you go and visit today or you see photographs there is this monument in between the paws of the

sphinx this belongs to king tutmos the fourth and he tells this vivid story of being a kind of boy racer as a prince not expecting to be the king and he goes out to Giza to go hunting so he's got his bows and arrows presumably hence appropriate we're in the Manchester Museum archery store at the moment and he goes out for a hunt he's hunting lions and he does his hunting he stops for a nap and he sleeps in the shadow of the sphinx because it's a hot day and the sphinx provides some shade now there is a little religious added meaning here that the sphinx itself is said to have the shade of the god on it. Sphinxes have this especially divine quality and often in two dimensional art when a sphinx is shown you will see the image of a fan, a shade behind the sphinx, right? So the fact that Thutmose IV says he has a nap in the shade of the sphinx means that the

shadow of godliness and kingship is on him, right? So there's a deliberate reference there. So in this dream, he has a dream while he's asleep. He dreams that the Sphinx comes to life as a god and speaks to him. And the god says, please, I'm covered in sand. If you remove the sand from around my body you will become the pharaoh of egypt so when he wakes up he says to his flunkies okay chaps i want to clear the the sand away and sure enough he becomes the pharaoh of egypt he becomes tutmose the fourth now the part of the story that is not emphasized is the fact that i've already told you tutmose IV, his dad has already constructed a temple next to the Sphinx. So the Sphinx is being worshipped anyway

and the Egyptian Egyptologist Hassan Salim excavated the area of the Sphinx in the 1940s and in his excavations he encountered lots of these stele, these monumental stones dedicated in the name of Thutmose IV's brothers. So they all seem to have gone along and worshipped the Sphinx but their names and their images were attacked. So it seems quite like Thutmose IV, you know, pushed some of his brothers out of the way

in order to become the king and then the bit of granite that he uses for his enormous stele, the famous one, the dream stele, the one that people know the history of, he actually recycled the stone from the temple of Caffrey. So he's maybe a recycler, certainly a bit sharp elbowed. And that's the aspect of the story in his ascent to the throne using the sphinx as a legitimating tool all the god said if you do this you'll become the legitimate king even later kings kings like rameses the second engrave walls create a little chapel a little room in front of the walls at the pause of the spx, where it's almost like every king of Egypt,

when he eventually takes the throne, has to go for the blessing of the Sphinx and the Sphinx will confirm the king's right to rule. Oh, that's interesting. Even if it might be in slightly dubious, maybe even fratricidal circumstances. Yes, maybe fratricidal. That it's revived.

But it's interesting how even, you know, we mentioned Mames like Ramesses II. So when they've moved down to Luxor, de Thebes, further up the River Nile, they still go to the Great Sphinx. That's still an important part of kingship for them. Yes. Which is interesting. Yes. And we actually, despite all the many, many, many lines that have been written about this in Egyptology books, there's no actual for an a ritual that we'd call a coronation

it's not like westminster abbey but maybe going to the sphinx and having a kind of moment with the sphinx that is something like a coronation who knows yeah because it was like later on you know me as i mentioned at the beginning i'm big on alexander the great and what happens how his tomb in alexander becomes a place of pilgrimage for Romans and Greeks who admired Alexander maybe kind of a pilgrimage idea for the Sphinx too we don't know but it's interesting yeah and I think Alexander has this famous story of going to Siwa to the Oracle of Amun and there's some kind of confirmation happens there who knows I suspect if I was Alexander the Great I would go to Giza and maybe there was some kind of equivalent because the god represented the sphinx the god you know

manifested by the sphinx is much older than Amun in religious terms so you get more legitimacy maybe from this pyramids and the the monumental landscape of Giza. So we see this whole revival of the Great Sphinx at the time of the New Kingdom. Do we see then the beginning of the reproduction of the image of the Sphinx on other statues at that time? Yes, there's a great brand of what I guess we could call Sphinx tourism so you get these small stele these commemorative quite modest commemorative stones from the reign of rameses the second so a few years a couple of centuries even after tutmos the fourth where people have themselves shown worshipping the sphinx and it seems in this case the people shown are scribes and they go and visit say of Saqqara,

they go and visit the step pyramid of Djoser that's older even than the Sphinx and then they go also to Giza which would be a major tourist attraction let's be frank. You would go take a picnic and have a, as people do today, have a holiday and go and visit, walking on the west of the city of Memphis. So the reproduction of the Sphinx as a form, I think, gets an added boost, a kind of added impetus from these visitors, these tourists going, literate tourists who maybe can read the inscriptions nearby. And how do these later pharaohs, how do they embrace the Sphinx? Because I see later, you mentioned the name like Saqqara, and I've, of course, I've been to Luxor, inscriptions nearby. And how do these later pharaohs, how do they embrace the Sphinx? Because

I see later, you mentioned the name like Saqqara and I've of course, I've been to Luxor and you see between Luxor and Cunard, you see this avenue of the Sphinxes. So what are these great avenues of Sphinxes? They are remarkable in their own way. Yes, well avenues of Sphinxes are familiar to modern tourists because that's what you see when you go to Luxor now. Interestingly, the person who seems to invent these is another favourite. Oh, no, the favourite of mine. If I were to meet a historical personage from ancient Egypt, it wouldn't be Ramses the Great, it wouldn't be Caffrey, it would be Queen Hatshepsut.

I think she's such an interesting character. She invents the Avenue of sphinxes. The first known processional route that's flanked on either side by dozens of sphinxes is hers, right? Now, there are interesting reasons for that. Hatshepsut is a female pharaoh. Not the only female pharaoh, but the most successful undoubtedly. And she has this kind of iconographical conundrum. Maybe it seems like a conundrum to us and wasn't a conundrum to

her. She is of the female sex, but you can perform gender. She is a king and kings are coded male. So she appears with male attributes. And the sphinx in a way is a human head on a lion's body. And so it overcomes any question about sex or gender because it's just a superhuman body. And it seems that Hatshepsut is someone who really popularises the sphinx form. And it's after her that you get these sphinx avenues they do exist to be clear sphinxes exist in the middle kingdom the pharaoh can be shown as a sphinx so a few hundred years before Hatshepsut and also princesses royal women can be shown as sphinxes so it is not just men I want to emphasize that so after Hatshepsut, people like Ramesses II come along, Tutankhamun

as well, Akhenaten even, the probable father of Tutankhamun, and they want sphinx avenues. And they focus between the temples of Luxor and Karnak down in the south of Egypt. And so often you read about these things being kind of protective guardians. It's not really that sphinxes are guardians. It's just that they manifest divinity. And one of the key purposes of the Avenue of Sphinxes is to allow images of gods, statues of gods to be taken by priests on model boats and to be carried as part of rituals like the opit festival and so the sphinx avenue just creates an area which wouldn't be used by many people and this is always a problem and i say to people who visit egypt everything is set up now for huge

numbers you know thousands of tourists every day you've been been to Luxor, you know it. It's really a busy tourist destination. These spaces were never made to be frequented by large numbers of people. You could go if you were a priest or a priestess. The point is to make an environment suitable for the gods. So the point of Sphinx Avenues is simply to, yeah, manifest divine power. So does the Sphinx avenues is simply to manifest divine power. So does the Sphinx always kind of retain this royal importance?

I was thinking like the swan being owned by royalty today. Or was the fact that in its long history and how it's reinvented by the ancient Egyptians, I mean, maybe not even elite nobles could portray themselves as a Sphinx. Is it only just royalty who could use this mythical animal? Yes, that's a really good point. And I've not thought of it like that. You're right, only royalty. So the king, notably, the queen of Egypt, the king's wife,

and a royal child, a daughter of the king could also be shown at different points as a Sphinx. Non-royal people, even the top echelons of, you know, the vizier, the kind of chief minister of Egypt, they are not permitted to be shown as sphinxes. No, you're right. Just royalty. Occasionally, very late on, you get a form, a kind of fully divine form of a god who takes off in the Ptolemaic and Roman period of the god called Tutu. And this may be a play on the word for statue, actually. And he takes the form of a sphinx. So that's a god shown as a sphinx. But you're right. No, normal people, even wealthy,

powerful people are not shown as sphinxes. Interesting. I mean, of course, the main focus is the great sphinx at Giza. I mean, we have the avenue of sphinxes and the sphinxes. Oh, interesting. I mean, of course, the main focus is the great sphinx at Giza. I mean, we have the avenue of sphinxes and the sphinxes are smaller, but still really interesting. I'm pretty sure I've seen really small depictions of sphinxes too, almost as little statuettes.

Is there ever any attempt to create another colossal depiction of a sphinx? At least we know of from ancient Egypt. Nothing on that scale. There is one at Memphis. There's the second biggest, maybe, extant Sphinx. May belong to Hatshepsut. I think Hatshepsut's a prime candidate for the

identification, but there's no name preserved. Yeah, I mean, up in the north at Saqqara, you get an avenue of Sphinxes. One resurgence, real resurgence in Sphinx construction, one resurgence real resurgence in sphinx construction in sphinx carving seems to happen around the time of dynasty 30 so connect to nebo number one or two second one or two they take a real interest in sphinxes and then the early ptolemies think this is you know the quintessential way an egyptian pharaoh is shown so as macedonia Macedonian Greeks, they want to get in with the Egyptians. And then it trails off. Occasionally you get later Ptolemies or maybe Roman emperors,

but it's really a mass interest in sphinxes in this period around 350, 300 BC. I didn't know that at all. So even though like Ptolemy I, say for instance, maybe not Alexander, but so even he, we have evidence of him portraying himself as a Sphinx too. Wow, I had no idea about that.

It goes back to Hellenistic times as well. So if we go on, you mentioned how it seems to kind of maybe fade away a bit in Roman times, but is it ever, like, fully engulfed by the sands? What do we know about its legacy as we go away from ancient history? Well, I think the Sphinx is unusual because it's a monument, like the pyramids, most big pyramids they are never lost they're never

completely covered in sand for a lot of its existence I think the great Sphinx of Giza would be covered up to the shoulders but it gets cleared sporadically certainly in the new kingdom but then we've got accounts in the Middle Ages in Arabic, where you have scholars from around the Middle East coming, travelling to Egypt, writing in Arabic, describing its features. Then as Europeans start visiting Egypt from the 1600s on, you get depictions of it. And then, as I say, it's an Egyptian Egyptologist, Hassan Salim, or Salim Hassad, sorry, who excavates it. And then there are these very iconic pictures, even from the Second World War, where it's sandbagged up to its chin.

So just in case there's some fighting that might threaten the actual integrity of it. And now it's in this enclosure where you can visit with a ticket, but you can still see it from far away. So even though direct access to it is restricted and would have been an ancient privilege, you can still see it and maybe you can address your prayers to it from afar. It's something that is so iconic of ancient Egypt. Images of it are so often reproduced. It's lovely when you're there and people are blown away by just being in the presence of the sphinx it's got a real power that maybe other monuments don't i think you're right it does i remember looking over that giza plateau and when the sun was setting as

well and you see obviously the sun kind of on the pyramids but then you see the sphinx in the foreground and it is an absolutely astonishing thing to actually see in the flesh and it's interesting also that legacy as we kind of wrap up now it's also my mind always goes to that Napoleon painting isn't it when he's in front of the Sphinx and it is just almost the head that's still there I mean do we know from the records

when the nose is lost because if it's always mentioned that people different people see it I mean it depends which accounts you believe there seems to have been damage done in the middle ages but this idea that it was the French or the British doing target practice using cannons there's no definitive evidence of that I don't think but the fact that it survived in such relatively good condition for over four and a half thousand years is is pretty amazing it is

pretty amazing in itself Campbell this has been absolutely brilliant. Is there anything else you'd like to mention about the Sphinx before we completely wrap up? No, I mean, if you can just go and visit it. It's really worth a visit. And in the Cairo Museum, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, possibly about to be moved to the new Grand Museum, which is just down the road from the Sphinx at giza about to be opened very soon we hope there is a depiction of a scribe from the the reign of ramses ii and it is the only depiction of the sphinx with the two pyramids in the background and it's such a an iconic image but so rarely depicted by the egyptians themselves look out for that the next time or if you manage to get to cairo what a chestnut to leave it on.

And last, but certainly not least, talk to us a bit about your exhibition, Golden Mummies, that is ongoing at Manchester Museum. Yes, so our exhibition, Golden Mummies of Egypt, is closing in the middle of April 2024. And then I have a book coming out

with the great Greg Jenner. Greg is starting a new history series, Totally Chaotic History. And the first book, Ancient Egypt Gets Unruly, comes out in April. Well, Campbell, this has been awesome

and it just goes me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Campbell Price talking all the things

the great Sphinx of Giza. As I mentioned at the start an encore episode to our wonders of the world miniseries i hope you enjoyed it now last thing from me wherever you're listening to the ancients whether that be on apple podcasts on spotify or elsewhere make sure that you are subscribed that you click that follow button so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. And also, make sure to share these episodes if you've enjoyed them with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.