The Great Sphinx

The Great Sphinx of Giza is a lion with a human head, carved directly out of the limestone bedrock of the Giza Plateau and facing east toward the Nile Valley. It is 73 metres long from paws to tail and 20 metres high, and is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt. Most Egyptologists date it to the Fourth Dynasty, around 2600–2500 BC, and link it to the pharaoh Khafre, builder of the second pyramid at Giza — though no inscription from the period names its maker, and some scholars argue for his father Khufu.

The builders appear to have shaped the head from a natural ridge of rock, then quarried away the surrounding stone to free the body, leaving the Sphinx in a hollow enclosure. The quarried blocks went into a temple in front of it that was never completed. Much of the body has weathered badly, and it has been restored many times, most recently by replacing layers of limestone blocks around the base.

For much of its history the Sphinx lay buried to the shoulders in drifting sand. Around 1400 BC the young prince Thutmose IV had its front paws dug out and set up a granite slab between them, the Dream Stele, recounting how the Sphinx promised him the throne if he freed it from the sand. By then it was worshipped as Horemakhet, "Horus in the Horizon". Its missing nose was not shot off by Napoleon's soldiers, as the legend goes: tool marks show it was deliberately pried off with chisels, and it had already been missing for centuries before 1798. Traces of red pigment survive on the face, and pieces of a ceremonial beard were found between the paws.

The Sphinx sits beside Khafre's valley temple and the unfinished Sphinx temple, at the foot of the causeway leading up to his pyramid, so that from the east the pyramids appear to rise behind its head. It is part of the Giza pyramid complex and the wider Memphis necropolis World Heritage Site.

Getting there

The Sphinx sits at the eastern edge of the Giza Plateau, on the western side of the Greater Cairo urban area, about 13 km southwest of central Cairo. Sphinx International Airport (SPX), which serves Giza and western Cairo, is about 28 km away. The Grand Egyptian Museum, which opened in full in November 2025, is about 2 km from the plateau and makes a natural pairing with a visit.