The Tail of the Sphinx
On most days, the internet is a helpful and informative tool necessary for casual research. On other days, it is a terribly frustrating cesspool of disinformation, outright lies and stupidly foolish bull for all kinds of fraudsters and pseudo- scholars pushing their twisted, harebrained notions of reality. (And no, if someone says something is true, we do not have to consider it equally with other researched facts especially when it is easily proven false, and then we are free to ridicule and laugh at it all we want.) So when I came across an informational tidbit the other day about the Great Sphinx of Giza having a carved tail, I was just slightly skeptical.
Disclosure; I have nearly a dozen replica statues, carvings and papyrus depicting ancient Egypt artifacts, and I am a very amateur historian of early civilizations. To begin with, a Sphinx is a mythical creature, (Egyptian, not Greek version), with the head of a human and the body of a lion. Which I am sure that there were many lions in the area of Northern Africa, so the Egyptians were quite aware of what they looked like. So it follows that when they carved the actual Sphinx, probably out of an existing, eroded rock some time back about 2550 BC, they would have put a tail on the thing. And, of course, there actually is a tail.
And no, there is not a temple or treasure room inside the sphinx or even underneath the carving, of which I have seen elaborate illustrations depicting one. As to the sphinx’s broken nose, Napoleon’s troops did not shoot it off in 1798, a drawing of the sphinx from 60 years before Napoleon shows it already broken. There is however, evidence that it was broken in the 14th century. The Sphinx has been often buried by sand and uncovered several times throughout history and bits and pieces and other repairs have been completed and added to by various noble people and scholars throughout its existance. All in all it is a beautiful and brilliant piece of ancient monumental sculpture, and one for the ages.
(Because of the huge amounts of disinformation that propagates through the internet, I often distrust otherwise factual news, this has led to an unhealthy skeptical attitude for almost everything I read, and is an exceptional annoying thing to have to deal with in our modern enlightened times. Below, the tail of the Sphinx.)
