A king in the form of a lion
The Great Sphinx at Giza is a colossal limestone figure with a lion’s body and a human head, wearing the royal nemes headcloth. Most Egyptologists identify the face with the Fourth Dynasty king Khafre, partly because of the Sphinx’s position beside his causeway and valley temple. No inscription from his reign states this, so the identification rests on context and style. How the statue was physically made is a separate subject, and this article looks at meaning.
In Egyptian thought, the lion was a powerful, protective animal, strongly associated with kingship and the sun. A statue joining the lion’s body to the king’s head expressed the idea that the ruler had the strength and guardian power of the lion. Sphinxes of this type are usually male and wear royal regalia. They commonly appear as guardians at the entrances to temples and along processional ways, a role seen in later Egyptian sites with avenues of sphinx figures. The Giza Sphinx is much larger than any other and is unusual in being set within the cemetery of a pyramid complex.
Royal and solar meanings
Interpretation of the Giza Sphinx involves several linked ideas. The first is royal power: a monumental image of the king as protector, watching over his funerary monument. The second is the sun. The Sphinx faces due east, toward the rising sun, and in the New Kingdom it was identified with the sun-god in the form Horemakhet, “Horus in the Horizon.” Whether the original builders intended a solar meaning is not documented, but the connection between lions, the horizon and the sun is well established in Egyptian religion. A third idea is guardianship of the sacred ground, since the figure stands at the edge of the plateau near the valley temples and the approach from the Nile.
Scholars are cautious about claiming too much. We do not have texts from the Old Kingdom explaining the statue, so interpretations draw on later evidence and general patterns in Egyptian art. The Sphinx may have combined several of these meanings at once, which was common in Egyptian symbolism.
Worship in the New Kingdom
By the New Kingdom, roughly a thousand years after construction, the Sphinx had become a cult image. Kings left chapels and offerings, and the area was treated as a sacred site connected with the sun god. The best-known text is the Dream Stele of Thutmose IV, which stands between the paws. According to its inscription, written in Egyptian hieroglyphic script, the young prince rested in the Sphinx’s shadow while hunting. The Sphinx spoke to him in a dream and promised him the kingship if he cleared away the sand that covered it. After he became king, the stele records, he did so. Historians read the story as royal propaganda that linked the king’s legitimacy to a revered monument, and it is also evidence that the Sphinx was already partly buried by sand. Amenhotep II had also built a chapel near the Sphinx. New Kingdom people also used the name Horemakhet for the whole figure, and some visitors left votive offerings.
The idea of a king as a lion guardian also appears in other royal contexts. Hatshepsut’s reign includes images of the female pharaoh in sphinx form, showing how the type could be adapted to different rulers.
Greek and later interpretations
The Greek word “sphinx” probably comes from Greek tradition rather than Egyptian, and its meaning changed. In Greek myth the Sphinx is a winged female monster with a woman’s head, famous for the riddle she put to travellers at Thebes in the Oedipus story, told in Oedipus the King. That figure belongs with other Olympian gods and monsters of Greek myth and is not the same as the Egyptian guardian, though the two traditions share the idea of a hybrid creature. Greek visitors in the Greek and Roman periods saw the Egyptian monuments as marvels and applied their own word to them. Roman authors mention the Giza figure, and some visitors left graffiti at the site.
In the medieval Arabic tradition, the monument was known as Abu al-Hol, usually translated “Father of Terror.” Writers described it with awe, and later stories developed around it, including the claim that its nose was shot off by Napoleon’s troops. That claim is wrong: drawings made before Napoleon’s expedition already show the nose missing, and some medieval accounts attribute deliberate damage to a religious zealot in the Middle Ages, although the details are uncertain.
Why the Sphinx remains a symbol
In modern times the Sphinx has become a stand-in for the whole of ancient Egypt, and for the idea of an unanswered riddle. It is worth remembering that this is a modern use of the symbol. The original Egyptian meaning was probably about order, kingship and protection, not secrecy. Understanding the layers of meaning, Egyptian first and Greek later, helps us avoid reading the Greek riddling monster back into the Egyptian monument.