Two Creatures, One Name

The Egyptian sphinx was never a single fixed form the way the Greek monster was. Alongside the familiar human-headed type of the Great Sphinx, Egyptian temples also lined processional avenues with ram-headed sphinxes, called criosphinxes by modern Egyptologists, such as the long avenue leading to the temple of Amun at Karnak, and with hawk-headed sphinxes, or hieracosphinxes, associated with Horus. Which animal head a sphinx received generally signalled which god's protective authority the image invoked, so that the human-headed royal type at Giza is only the best known member of a considerably broader Egyptian category of composite guardian figures.

A persistent modern legend blames Napoleon's soldiers for shooting off the Great Sphinx's nose during target practice during his Egyptian campaign of 1798, but the damage is documented in drawings and travellers' accounts made well before Napoleon ever reached Egypt, and most Egyptologists now attribute the loss to earlier, poorly recorded deliberate vandalism, quite possibly medieval, rather than to any specific eighteenth-century incident. The story persists mainly because it offers a satisfyingly concrete villain for damage whose real cause and date are, like much else about the monument's early history, simply not well documented.