Sphinx in Pictures
The Sphinx by Zangaki, before 1880.
Thousands of photographs were taken of the Sphinx as the age of
photography got under way, by amateurs as well as professionals as the business of photography in the field became simpler and more reliable after
about 1880. Before that, there was a ready market for prints of Egyptian antiquities sold by professional photographers like Beato,
Bonfils, Hammerschmidt, Lekegian, Sebah and Zangaki. Their photographs chart chiefly
the swamping and clearance of the sand about the monument.
A striking picture by Hammerschmidt, in which foreground trees grow out of
half-submerged ruins on the slope of the Giza Plateau, shows the Sphinx head
peeping out of the sand below the Great Pyramid of Khufu: it was taken in 1858,
at about the time that Mariette was excavating at the Sphinx. Despite Mariette's work, the sands soon invaded the breast area of the monument again
and photographs from the 1860s show no front paws, no chapel, no stela - all
this was once more buried under a sand drift.
The Sphinx by unknown nineteenth-century photographer.
One of Zangaki's photographs shows picturesque camels at the Sphinx's
breast, sitting on a sandbank that hides the forelegs, chapel and stela below,
with the photographer's traveling darkroom drawn up alongside the upper right
flank of the monument. A picture by Sebah, taken from the north-east, with Menkaure's pyramid in the background, shows particularly clearly the great
fissure at the hindquarters and the severe gouge in the left-hand side of the top
of the head. Another, by an unknown photographer, also shows this deep (and
inadvertently rather characterful) cut in the top of the head, with a sentinel
figure sitting above the uraeus: the pyramid to the right of the picture is that of
Khafre. A second photograph taken by Sebah shows the Sphinx's head with the Khufu pyramid behind it and the valley temple of Khafre in the foreground, first
excavated by Mariette: the plain granite pillars and lintels of the temple interior
are clearly seen, together with some of the massive (and highly eroded) limestone blocks of the core construction of this building. Though cleared by
Mariette, sand is seen in this photograph to be reinvading the interior. A picture by Fiorillo of 1882 shows members of the British Army disporting
themselves on and around the Sphinx in the year when the British under Sir Garnet Wolseley asserted Britain’s imperial power in Egypt.
It was partly to give tourists something extra to see in Lower Egypt (which,
despite the pyramids, could not rival Upper Egypt for spectacular ruins) that
Maspero undertook further excavations at the Sphinx in 1885. After that, the
Sphinx remained on fuller view than before. A photograph by Lekegian documents the erosion of the southern flank of the Sphinx, with the cavernous
fissure of the haunches at the left, and shows the ancient masonry work that was
added to build up the eroded body of the monument.
- An Introduction to the Great Sphinx
- The Great Sphinx Temples
- The Meaning of the Great Sphinx
- Conservation of the Great Sphinx
- Age of the Sphinx
- Sphinx in Pictures
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Design, Layout and Graphic Art by Jimmy Dunn, an InterCity Oz, Inc. Employee
All content, Graphic Art, Design, Layout, and Scripting Code Copyright 1996 by InterCity Oz, Inc.