Great Sphinx of Giza

The Sphinx was carved directly from a single mass of limestone bedrock left over from the quarrying of stone for the nearby pyramids, rather than built up from separately cut blocks — an approach that makes it, in effect, one enormous sculpture rather than a constructed building. It measures roughly 73 meters (240 feet) long and about 20 meters (66 feet) high, making it one of the largest monolithic statues in the ancient world.

Later restoration work, both ancient and modern, has added stone blocks to reinforce sections of the body and paws, since the relatively soft limestone of the core has always been vulnerable to weathering — a genuine ongoing conservation concern for a structure of this age.

The Sphinx's human head, widely believed to represent Pharaoh Khafre himself, wears the traditional pharaonic nemes headdress; the missing nose and a now-vanished ceremonial beard (fragments of which are held in the British Museum and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo) are among its most-discussed missing details. The Dream Stele, a large granite slab placed between the Sphinx's front paws by Thutmose IV, records the pharaoh's own account of the statue speaking to him in a dream.

The Sphinx sits directly in front of the Pyramid of Khafre, one of the three Great Pyramids of Giza, and this pairing — pyramid and guardian statue together — is part of what makes the site's layout so visually and symbolically powerful.

The Sphinx sits on the Giza Plateau on the edge of the Sahara, just outside modern Cairo, in direct view of all three Great Pyramids. The surrounding desert landscape, largely unchanged in its broad outlines since antiquity, is part of what gives the site its enduring visual power, even as Cairo's urban sprawl has crept closer to the plateau's edges over the past century.