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Muvico Egyptian 24 Arundel Mills Mall in Hanover, MD.. I removed background details that suggested "modern day"surroundings. Red/Cyan 3D glasses required for viewing.
The Sphinx. Giza, Egypt. Color photography by Donna Corless.
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Sphinx
One of a number of large stone statues with the body of a lion and the head of a man that were built by the ancient Egyptians.
I like the detail....but I miss the framework in the other. I saw this adorning a roof from an apartment on a lower level....as I walked by I just thought, there was no way this was something that many others would have snapped a pic of. I thought it might almost be unique...
YEAH, riiighhht... on my last night, back in Athens and awaiting the ride back for an early flight out, I saw a coffee table book, with almost this exact picture and angle right on the cover... *sigh* My heart was in the right place though!
Day 2, Visited Pyramids and Sphinx, Saqqarah area, Imhotep Museum and Memphis
After decades of research, American archaeologist Mark Lehner has some answers about the mysteries of the Egyptian colossus
* By Evan Hadingham
* Smithsonian magazine, February 2010
The face, though better preserved than most of the statue, has been battered by centuries of weathering and vandalism. In 1402, an Arab historian reported that a Sufi zealot had disfigured it “to remedy some religious errors.” Yet there are clues to what the face looked like in its prime. Archaeological excavations in the early 19th century found pieces of its carved stone beard and a royal cobra emblem from its headdress. Residues of red pigment are still visible on the face, leading researchers to conclude that at some point, the Sphinx’s entire visage was painted red. Traces of blue and yellow paint elsewhere suggest to Lehner that the Sphinx was once decked out in gaudy comic book colors.
For thousands of years, sand buried the colossus up to its shoulders, creating a vast disembodied head atop the eastern edge of the Sahara. Then, in 1817, a Genoese adventurer, Capt. Giovanni Battista Caviglia, led 160 men in the first modern attempt to dig out the Sphinx. They could not hold back the sand, which poured into their excavation pits nearly as fast as they could dig it out. The Egyptian archaeologist Selim Hassan finally freed the statue from the sand in the late 1930s. “The Sphinx has thus emerged into the landscape out of shadows of what seemed to be an impenetrable oblivion,” the New York Times declared.
The question of who built the Sphinx has long vexed Egyptologists and archaeologists. Lehner, Hawass and others agree it was Pharaoh Khafre, who ruled Egypt during the Old Kingdom, which began around 2,600 B.C. and lasted some 500 years before giving way to civil war and famine. It’s known from hieroglyphic texts that Khafre’s father, Khufu, built the 481-foot-tall Great Pyramid, a quarter mile from where the Sphinx would later be built. Khafre, following a tough act, constructed his own pyramid, ten feet shorter than his father’s, also a quarter of a mile behind the Sphinx. Some of the evidence linking Khafre with the Sphinx comes from Lehner’s research, but the idea dates back to 1853.
That’s when a French archaeologist named Auguste Mariette unearthed a life-size statue of Khafre, carved with startling realism from black volcanic rock, amid the ruins of a building he discovered adjacent to the Sphinx that would later be called the Valley Temple. What’s more, Mariette found the remnants of a stone causeway—a paved, processional road—connecting the Valley Temple to a mortuary temple next to Khafre’s pyramid. Then, in 1925, French archaeologist and engineer Emile Baraize probed the sand directly in front of the Sphinx and discovered yet another Old Kingdom building—now called the Sphinx Temple—strikingly similar in its ground plan to the ruins Mariette had already found.
Despite these clues that a single master building plan tied the Sphinx to Khafre’s pyramid and his temples, some experts continued to speculate that Khufu or other pharaohs had built the statue. Then, in 1980, Lehner recruited a young German geologist, Tom Aigner, who suggested a novel way of showing that the Sphinx was an integral part of Khafre’s larger building complex. Limestone is the result of mud, coral and the shells of plankton-like creatures compressed together over tens of millions of years. Looking at samples from the Sphinx Temple and the Sphinx itself, Aigner and Lehner inventoried the different fossils making up the limestone. The fossil fingerprints showed that the blocks used to build the wall of the temple must have come from the ditch surrounding the Sphinx. Apparently, workmen, probably using ropes and wooden sledges, hauled away the quarried blocks to construct the temple as the Sphinx was being carved out of the stone.
That Khafre arranged for construction of his pyramid, the temples and the Sphinx seems increasingly likely. “Most scholars believe, as I do,” Hawass wrote in his 2006 book, Mountain of the Pharaohs, “that the Sphinx represents Khafre and forms an integral part of his pyramid complex.”
But who carried out the backbreaking work of creating the Sphinx? In 1990, an American tourist was riding in the desert half a mile south of the Sphinx when she was thrown from her horse after it stumbled on a low mud-brick wall. Hawass investigated and discovered an Old Kingdom cemetery. Some 600 people were buried there, with tombs belonging to overseers—identified by inscriptions recording their names and titles—surrounded by the humbler tombs of ordinary laborers.
Near the cemetery, nine years later, Lehner discovered his Lost City. He and Hawass had been aware since the mid-1980s that there were buildings at that site. But it wasn’t until they excavated and mapped the area that they realized it was a settlement bigger than ten football fields and dating to Khafre’s reign. At its heart were four clusters of eight long mud-brick barracks. Each structure had the elements of an ordinary house—a pillared porch, sleeping platforms and a kitchen—that was enlarged to accommodate around 50 people sleeping side by side. The barracks, Lehner says, could have accommodated between 1,600 to 2,000 workers—or more, if the sleeping quarters were on two levels. The workers’ diet indicates they weren’t slaves. Lehner’s team found remains of mostly male cattle under 2 years old—in other words, prime beef. Lehner thinks ordinary Egyptians may have rotated in and out of the work crew under some sort of national service or feudal obligation to their superiors.
Read more: www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Uncovering-Sec...
Gustave Moreau, Paris 1826 - 1898
Ödipus und die Sphinx / Oedpius and the Sphinx (1864)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Moreau, at mid-career, made his mark with this painting at the Salon of 1864. It represents the Greek hero Oedipus confronting the Sphinx outside Thebes: he must solve her riddle to save his life and those of the besieged Thebans. Remains of victims who failed the test appear at bottom right. Moreau's mythological theme and archaizing style reflect his admiration for Ingres’s 1808 version of the same subject and for the work of the early Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna. In emulating these exemplars, Moreau diverged from the Realist sensibilities shaping French art in the 1860s.
Source: MET
One of the Sphinxes on Victoria Embankment, London.
Kodak TMax 100 in an Olympus OM2SP.
Scanned using a Canon MG8150.
TIFF file edited in Photoshop Elements 11.
The Sphinx statue brightly lit at night outside of the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.
© Al Andersen Photography, LLC.
All Rights Reserved.
Website: www.alandersen.com
In the background is the pyramid of Khafre and the smaller pyramid of Menkaure can be seen on the left.
Sphinx found on the Antirhodos Island near to the priest carrying Osiris-Canopis. He was found by the Franck Goddio Society.
©Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation
Source : www.franckgoddio.org/Sitemap/Gallery/Gallery.aspx?Gallery...
Consulté le 09/04/12
I found this Sphinx moth caterpillar in Western PA in a forest with oak, tulip poplar, black cherry and grape around.
The Sphinx is perhaps the most enigmatic of Egypt's monuments, the largest free-standing sculpture of the ancient world, carved from the living rock of the Giza plateau.
The massive figure with a lion's body and a human head is believed to date from the reign of Pharaoh Khafre, owing to the similarity of the head to statues of the king and the fact that the Sphinx also sits beside the causeway connecting Khafre's pyramid to his valley temple. The body has eroded badly over the centuries and the lower parts (including the massive front paws) had been augmented with an outer face of masonry even in ancient times, much of which has undergone restoration in more recent times.
The head wears the traditional nemes head-dress of a king and originally would have been crowned by a ureaus cobra on the forehead and a platted beard on the chin (fragments of which are preserved in museums). The lower parts of the head-dress beside the neck had been lost to wind erosion long ago, leaving the head the rather fragile appearance it has in old drawings and photographs. New masonry was added to reinforce the neck and restore a semblance of the original outline in the early 20th century to save it from further damage.
There is some speculation that the Sphinx could be much earlier owing to its heavily weathered body, Khafre's causeway making its route around the sculpture as if it already existed, and the head being too small for the body, perhaps a sign that it had later been recarved into its current human form. If the Sphinx did have an incarnation then Anubis the jackal god of the necropolis would have been the strongest candidate, with some seeing the body as more canine than feline. Either way, the Sphinx remains the powerful guardian of the Giza Necropolis and its monumental pyramids as he has done for millennia before.
The Giza Pyramids need no introduction, the largest and most famous monuments of antiquity and the sole surviving of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World.
Situated on a desert plateau to the south west of Cairo (and indeed on the very edge of the city's modern urban sprawl) the pyramids of Giza form the heart of an extensive ancient necropolis with the monumental tombs of three of Egypt's earliest Old Kingdom pharaohs marked by the vast structures. Each of the pyramids is a colossal mass of near solid masonry, without adornment and with only a few passages within each leading to burial chambers long since emptied and robbed in antiquity.
The earliest is the Great Pyramid of Khufu (sometimes referred to by the Greek title 'Cheops', or by his full pharaonic name 'Khnum-Khufu'). It is also the largest; the structure is simply enormous and remained the World's tallest building until well into the Middle Ages.
The following pyramid was built by Khafre (also called 'Khephren') and is similarly vast (often appearing in photos of the whole group as larger due to its more central position) but is significantly smaller than Khufu's monument. The smallest of the three (at around less than half the size) was built by his successor Menkaure. Both his and Khufu's monuments have much smaller satellite pyramids at their base (some in more ruinous condition) to house the tombs of their queens.
Originally all the pyramids had a smooth outer covering of white stone but this was quarried away by later generations (much of which was used for some of Cairo's greatest Islamic monuments) leaving the rough inner blocks exposed. A small section remains at the apex of Khafre's pyramid (suggestive of a snow-capped mountain) to give a sense of the original finish and overall mass.
Today the site remains the most popular in Egypt and an astonishing testament to the skill and determination of it earliest builders.
Standing guard at the approach to the Pyramid of Khafre, the Sphinx is the earliest known monumental sculpture of ancient Egypt.
It can be dated to around 2500BC. It stood 66 foot high with an elongated body,
outstretched paws and a royal headdress framing a fleshy face, thought to be of Khafre himself. Apparently it had been carved from an outcrop of natural rock, augmented by shaped blocks around the base added by repeated renovations from the New Kingdom onwards
Sphinx very intently, upside down, watching the British Women's Curling team, on the Winter Olympics BBC 2 show! Watching upside down can be fun too!
Plus rare que le Moro sphinx et encore plus beau avec ses couleurs vives, le Sphinx gazé ou encore Sphinx du chèvre feuille... Son comportement est le même que celui du Moro sphinx...
Le "Gazé" doit son nom commun à la transparence de ses ailes. L'appellation scientifique fait quant' à elle référence à la bordure rougeâtre desdites ailes (Hemaris), et d'autre part à l'abondante pilosité de la bestiole, laquelle lui donne un aspect "en forme de bourdon" (fuciformis).
En regard de la coloration plutôt "tristounette" du Moro-sphinx, la livrée du Gazé se fait joliment polychrome et plus conforme au plumage souvent très coloré des colibris, également connus sous le nom d' "oiseaux-mouches".
Le Sphinx-Gazé ou Sphinx du chèvrefeuille – Hemaris fuciformis est une espèce de papillon de la famille des Sphingidae, très proche du Moro-Sphinx avec lequel il partage de nombreux caractères. Avec une envergure qui varie entre 40 et 47 millimètres, l’adulte du Sphinx-Gazé a des ailes presqu’entièrement dépourvues d’écailles comme chez les autres lépidoptères; ses ailes sont plutôt transparentes marquées par une large bande marginale brun-rouge.
Le corps du Sphinx du chèvrefeuille est ramassé et dominé par une couleur vert olivâtre, une ceinture abdominale brun-rouge et des touffes latérales de poils blancs et noirs, des détails visibles en photographie ou quand ce papillon est au repos. Le Sphinx-Gazé se rencontre particulièrement les long des orées forestières, dans les bois clairs, les prés-bois secs, sur les pelouses maigres mais aussi les jachères pauvres et particulièrement sur les terrains riches en calcaire. L’espèce est en forte régression dans une bonne partie de l’Europe.
À la différence des autres Sphinx, Le Sphinx-Gazé (Hemaris fuciformis) et le Moro-Sphinx présentent une activité diurne. Comme des bourdons, ces deux Sphinx butinent activement les fleurs en plein jour sans jamais se poser; ils butinent en vol stationnaire. Très difficile à photographier en raison de son hyper-mobilité et de son hyper-activité, le Sphinx-Gazé de croise dans toute l’Europe : de l’Angleterre au Caucase jusqu’à l’ouest de la Sibérie. Dans les zones montagneuses, il peut s’élever à deux milles mètres d’altitude.