Archaeology Magazine - September/October 1994 - 35

fhotogrammetric image of the Sphinx, left, shows the bedrock layers. The
Giza Plateau is part of the MokattamFormation, created from sedimentsdeposited by seawaters that engulfednortheastern Africa in the Eoceneperiod
more than 50 millionyears ago.

known from later texts. Atum is the creator of the
world in the Pyramid Texts, Egypt's oldest religious literature, inscribed on the walls of burial chambers in
pyramids of the later Old Kingdom. All matter in the
world evolved from his being, as did kingship, which
he passed down through Shu (atmosphere), Geb
(earth), and Osiris to Horus and to each living king.
Alan Gardiner, the great English Egyptologist, has
noted that the question of whether the generic Egyptian sphinx represents the king as a powerful lion, a god
as a powerful lion, a king in the leonine form of a god,
or a powerful god revealed in the person of the king, is
one that the Egyptians might have answered "all of the
above." The creation of the Sphinx must have had
something to do with an increased emphasis on the sun
in royal ideology. After all, it was in the reign of
Djedefre, who ruled briefly between Khufu and
Khafre, that pharaohs adopted the tide "Son of Ra."
are left to speculate about the meaning of the
We
Sphinx for its builders because there are no known Old
Kingdom texts that refer to it or its temple. It is possible that inscribed blocks from the Sphinx Temple remain to be discovered. We know that granite from
Khafre's temples and pyramid was reused in later
monuments, such as the 13th Dynasty Amennemhet I
pyramid at Lisht and the New Kingdom Ptah Temple
at Memphis. The absence of Sphinx Temple priests
and priestesses from the hundreds of Old Kingdom
tombs at Giza may be because the temple service was
never begun, for it is clear that Khafre's builders did
not finish his grand design. Although the Sphinx Tem-

September/October

1994

ple was stripped of its granite casing and alabaster
flooring in antiquity, anyone who visits it today can see
cuttings in the floor at the base of the walls and court
pillars, where the builders had finished covering with
red granite casing the gigantic limestone core blocks of
the walls. The colossal statues that graced the court fit
into deep sockets cut into the floor in front of the court
pillars. There are also sockets for the smaller pillars of
the colonnade. Ricke pointed out that these traces indicate the workmen had finished the interior of the temple. They were about to begin work on the exterior
when they quit the job.
In 1978 we found other evidence that Khafre's
builders had not quite finished the Sphinx complex. By
cutting the temple terrace lower than the Sphinx floor
the builders left a tall vertical bedrock ledge. To the
west, the ledge forms the north side of the Sphinx
ditch, but here the quarrymen did not finish cutting
the line. The point at which they stopped is just opposite the left forepaw. From here to the back of the
ditch, the unfinished part is a rock shelf of decreasing
width. Behind the Sphinx, the workmen were nowhere
near finishing the outline of the ditch. When they
stopped work they left a huge massif of hard Member I
rock, separated by only a few yards from the rear of
the Sphinx.
We cleared the top of this shelf and found rectangular humps, depressions, and channels. This kind of pattern is found in many places at Giza where work was
left unfinished; it shows how the ancient masons
worked a stone surface from the top down. They
would channel to isolate humps that they would then

Archaeology Magazine - September/October 1994

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - September/October 1994