Unlike the pyramids, which were assembled from quarried blocks, the Sphinx was sculpted directly from the bedrock of the Giza Plateau during the Fourth Dynasty, roughly 2500 BC. This makes it the largest monolithic statue of the ancient world. The limestone varies in hardness by layer: the head was carved from a dense, erosion-resistant stratum, while the body sits in softer rock that wind and sand have eaten unevenly over the millennia. The lowest portion, including the legs, is solid bedrock. It is this geological luck -- hard stone for the face, soft stone for the body -- that explains why the Sphinx's features remain recognizable while its torso looks like melted wax. The Sphinx may have also worn a ceremonial pharaonic beard, fragments of which now reside in the British Museum, though whether it was part of the original design or added later remains debated.

A thousand years after the Sphinx was carved, a young prince named Thutmose fell asleep in its shadow. In a dream, the Sphinx -- speaking as the sun god Hor-em-akhet, or "Horus at the Horizon" -- promised him the throne of Egypt if he would clear the sand burying its body. Thutmose did, became Pharaoh Thutmose IV, and installed the Dream Stele between the Sphinx's front paws to record the bargain. The stele's text also contains the damaged cartouche of Khafre, which Egyptologist Thomas Young completed in the early nineteenth century -- a crucial piece of evidence linking the Sphinx to the Fourth Dynasty builder. But when the stele was re-excavated in 1925, those very lines flaked off and were destroyed, leaving scholars to rely on earlier transcriptions. By the New Kingdom, Amenhotep II had built a temple northeast of the Sphinx dedicated to Hor-em-akhet, cementing a cult that would persist for centuries.

The most persistent myth about the Sphinx is that Napoleon's army shot off its nose with a cannonball. Frederic Louis Norden's detailed sketches from 1737, published in 1755, show the nose already missing -- more than sixty years before Napoleon reached Egypt. Examination of the face reveals chisel marks: long rods or chisels were hammered in at the bridge of the nose and below the nostril, and the stone was pried away. Tenth-century Arab authors attributed the damage to iconoclastic attacks. Al-Minufi, writing in the fifteenth century, connected it to a specific act: Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr broke the nose, and the Alexandrian Crusade of 1365 was said to be divine retribution. In medieval times, Arab writers described the Sphinx as a talisman of the Nile; Al-Maqrizi called it a guardian upon which the flood cycle depended. Those seeking government posts reportedly brought incense offerings to the monument.

Giza was already a tourist destination in Graeco-Roman times. The Sphinx was cleared of sand in the first century AD to honor Emperor Nero, and a monumental stairway over twelve meters wide was built leading to a pavement before its paws. Pliny the Elder described the face as painted red and provided measurements. A stele from 166 AD commemorates wall restorations. After the last emperor associated with the site -- Septimius Severus, around 200 AD -- the sand returned. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, European visitors described the Sphinx as having a woman's face, neck, and breast. Andre Thevet in 1556 called it a colossus made by Isis. George Sandys in 1615 declared it a harlot. Japanese samurai posed before it in 1864. Emperor Pedro II of Brazil sat at its feet in 1871. The first modern archaeological dig, supervised by Giovanni Battista Caviglia, uncovered the chest in 1817. Today, with the sand cleared for good, the Sphinx gazes east as it always has -- toward the sunrise, and toward whatever comes next.