Grooming the Sphinx

Egypt’s Department of Antiquities staff repair the 5000-year-old Sphinx, at Giza, near Cairo. — Otago Witness, 26.1.1926 The Sphinx is being cleaned and repaved by M. Baraize. He (the Egyptian Sphinx was not a she, but a very masculine person indeed) is now for the first time since Ptolemaic days being disencumbered of the mass of sand that oppresses him and now for the first time we can see him from stem to stern, from the extremities of his forepaws to the curve of his tail, which last no man has seen for 20 centuries. The successive reparations of Thutmase IV, under the 18th Dynasty (1415BC) and under the Ptolemies are very interesting to observe.

Go to News Site