What is wrong with the Sphinx?
Have you ever thought there was something seriously wrong with the Sphinx? Next time you are there (assuming you are so fortunate as to be able to go), just stop and look closely. What do you see?
PROFESSOR ROBERT TEMPLE (an excellent author) has made some notable observations about the sphinx:
- “The Sphinx is a gigantic statue the size of an ocean liner with a tiny pimple for a head. Does that look right to you? If we know anything about the ancient Egyptians and their statues, we know that they always got the proportions right. In fact, we could say that they were evidently obsessed with correct proportions in everything. So why would they carve what is still even today the world’s largest stone statue and get the proportions wrong?
- Why is it sitting down there in a hole in a ground like that? If you wanted to carve the world’s largest stone statue, would you stick it in a hole in the ground? Even if you suffered from excessive modesty yourself, would it not be irreverent to the gods to put a sacred statue down in a pit below surface level? Isn’t that a bit like sticking a crucifix in a dustbin? Wouldn’t any normal person want to flaunt the world’s largest stone statue rather than hide it? After all the Great Pyramid is not built in a pit, it is built on a hill. So why is the Sphinx so hidden that from the pyramids you can barely even see it sticking up a bit from a hole in the distance?
- Why is it that the Sphinx, which we have always been told is a lion does not actually look like a lion at all? Do lions look like that? You have to ignore the lion-like paws, because they are a more recent construction, purposely made to resemble lion’s paws by people doing what they call ‘restoration’. We have no idea what the original paws looked like, since they had been rendered unrecognisable by Roman times. But if anyone has ever been to the zoo, he or she knows that lions do not look like that. When Olivia and I first saw the Sphinx we both blamed ourselves, we thought we did not have a certain ability which other people obviously had, an ability for seeing lions. We thought that we must be lion-dyslexic. We looked and we looked and no matter how hard we looked there was still no lion. Continuing to stare did not help. There is no rising chest, no mane, there just is nothing there which is remotely leonine at all.”
It was really obvious that the Sphinx had once had a much larger head.
It was obvious that there must have been a reason for putting the Sphinx in a hole in the ground.
and as Temple noted, the Sphinx didn’t look much like a lion, but rather a crouching dog.
“That made sense, because crouching dogs looking outwards with their backs turned towards something are guard dogs, protecting what is behind them. And in this case, behind the Sphinx was the sacred necropolis of Giza. So the Sphinx was symbolically protecting Giza. And who was the traditional guardian of the necropolis in Egyptian tradition? It was the god Anubis, and Anubis was a dog. Furthermore, the best known image of Anubis is the Anubis statue found inside the tomb of King Tutankhamun, which shows him as a crouching dog.” (Temple)
Photograph by Olivia Temple
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