The Great Sphinx or Sphinx is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx. What is a Sphinx you might ask? It is a mythical creature with a lion’s body and a human dead. The Great Sphinx of Giza is the largest and oldest monolith statue in the world, standing 73.5 meters long, 19.3 meters wide, and 20.22 meters high (1).

To this day, nobody truly knows who built the Great Sphinx but most egyptologists think that the Sphinx was built by King Khafre. Khafre was the builder of the second of the pyramids at Giza who ruled around 2558-2532 BCE (2). The Great Sphinx was solely build off of man power. The Head of the Sphinx was made out of hard grey limestone while the body was made from soft yellowish limestone. In order to form the body, large stone blocks were quarried from the base rock in order to form the body (3). The excess rock was then used to build the temples surrounding the Sphinx.

This amazing piece of history was recently revealed and dug up in the 20th century revealing its body. In the 1980’s, during a six-year period, more than 2000 limestone blocks were added to the body of the Sphinx and various chemicals were injected in the hopes of preventing its further deterioration (3). Without further exploration and discovery, the mystery of when the Sphinx was created and by whom will further be unsolved.

1 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza

2 – http://www.howitworksdaily.com/history/who-built-the-great-sphinx/

3 – http://sacredsites.com/africa/egypt/great_sphinx_facts.html