A History of the Great Sphinx of Giza
The Great Sphinx stands on the Giza Plateau, a stone's throw away from the Great Pyramids of Egypt. The statue faces directly east, some speculate as a guardian of the temple and pyramids that surround it.
When the ancients first came into the contact with this statue, a massive creature with the body of a lion and the head of a man they called it a Sphinx. In Greek mythology a sphinx is a winged creature with the body of a lion and the head of a woman. Gender differences withstanding the name Sphinx has been applied to the lion-man statue at Giza and to all similar statues found in Egypt.
What name the Egyptians originally gave the Sphinx is unknown. The earliest Egyptian writings mentioning the Sphinx come from almost a millennium after its original building and refer to it by several names: Hor-em-akht (Horus in the Horizon), Bw-How (Place of Horus) and Ra-horakhty (Ra of Two Horizons).
No other sphinx statue found in Egypt is either as old or as large as the Great Sphinx of Giza. It stands 65 feet tall, 20 feet wide and an astounding 260 feet long. Estimates of its weight (not precisely known) range upwards of 200 tons, making it one of the largest single stone sculptures in the world.
