Sphinx travel, tours and holiday packages

A short guide about Sphinx

The Great Sphinx of Giza (The Father of Fear) is a half-human, half-lion Sphinx statue in Egypt, and is the largest monolith statue in the world; standing at 73.5 metres long, 6 m wide and 20 m high. It is the earliest known monumental sculpture believed to have been built by the ancient Egyptians in the 3rd millennium BC. The Great Sphinx faces due east and has a small temple between its paws; it is built on the Giza Plateau and located on the west bank of the Nile River, within the confines of the Giza pyramid field. It is carved out of the surrounding limestone bedrock, making it the largest single-stone statue in the world. Blocks of stone weighing upwards of 200 tons were quarried in the construction phase to build the adjoining Sphinx Temple.

There are many conflicting stories regarding how the sphinx’s one-metre-wide nose came to be missing. Some legends claim that the nose was broken off by a cannon ball fired by Napoleon’s soldiers. However, sketches of the Sphinx by Dane Frederick Lewis Norden, made in 1737 and published in 1755, illustrates the Sphinx already without a nose. The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, writing in the fifteenth century, attributes the vandalism to Muhammad Saim al-Dahr, a Sufi fanatic from the khanqah of Said al-Suada. In 1378, upon finding the Egyptian peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest, Saim al-Dahr was so outraged that he destroyed the nose, but was then hanged for vandalism.

Throughout history the Sphinx has been a mythological figure, from its origins in the Old Kingdom of Egypt to the ancient Greek female monster, the "strangler". Tourabout has many travel packages to Egypt that include informative tours to the Valley of the Kings while exploring the Sphinx with a professional guide to help unravel its mysteries.