The art of the sculptors of Egypt advanced wonderfully during the reigns of Khufu and particularly of Khafre. No work surviving from this period has excited so much speculation, admiration and wonder as the Great Sphinx at Giza, carved from the living rock with the face of a god-king surmounting the body of a colossal lion.
The really remarkable observation about the Great Sphinx, apart from the fact that it is perhaps the most famous piece of sculpture in the world and one of the largest ever made, is that it is virtually unique in the entire canon of Egyptian art. There are sphinxes in abundance, to be sure, particularly those made by the kings of the Middle Kingdom, which are particularly powerful and often rather baleful creations. The type reached a degree of culmination in the Avenue of Sphinxes (though ram - and not human-headed) which still gives an especially operatic look to the approach to the Temple of Karnak. But, singularly, there are virtually no other examples in all the length of Egypt of the sculptural adaptation of boulders, standing rocks, or cliff faces.28
Opportunities abounded, after all. To this day many rocks along the river and in the Libyan hills seem to be trying to give birth to a gigantic human or animal shape. The ingenuity of Egyptian engineers would certainly have been equal to the complex tasks involved; they would, one feels, have relished the challenge. The temptation for the living gods who occupied the throne to perpetuate their images amongst the living rock of the Egyptian landscape must have been well-nigh overwhelming. Yet they did not do so.
There must, presumably, have been some constraint, though certainly not self-imposed modesty or diffidence, which prevented them from doing this. Rameses II memorably caused effigies of himself and his consort to be carved in the rock face of their temples at Abu Simbel. Yet this is not quite the same thing as the adaptation of a standing rock outcrop such as a planner of genius in the Fourth Dynasty seized on and in doing so immortalized his king, through its sculpted monumentality. Rameses’ work is simple architecture; the creation of the Sphinx on the Giza plateau is art on a heroic scale, involving the adaptation of a landscape. The Great Sphinx is one of a kind; despite the depredations resulting from Turkish artillery practice, his enigmatic smile suggests that his creator knew that he would remain, aloof and unique.
The speculations about the age of the Sphinx have attracted much attention over the past decade. The issue is too complex to be examined here in any depth but the controversy which has arisen around this very singular survival has revealed a number of anomalies which prompt caution in dismissing outright the proposition that there may be more to discover about the Sphinx and its origins than has been suspected hitherto.
The evidence of what appears to be the effects of prolonged periods of rainfall on the rock from which the Sphinx is carved, seems convincing. Whether or not the head of the Sphinx is a portrait of Khafre, as it has traditionally been ascribed, bears little on the question of its origins and their dating. If the head is a portrait of the king (a proposition which is not without its sceptics) this does not necessarily determine when the monument itself was carved; it is perfectly possible that the head was carved or recarved in Khafre’s reign, but the ascription to him is unconvincing.
World History
