Whose Face Is on the Sphinx?

Today, this is the approach that most tourists would take. Here's the Sphinx in front of us with the Pyramid of Khafre behind. However, they'd be coming from Cairo. This wasn't how people saw it in the ancient world. They would have seen it slightly differently because they would have been coming from the south. Today, visitors come from Cairo to the northeast. But the ancient capital of Memphis lay in the opposite direction, meaning the people of Khufu's time saw things differently. Visitors would have been coming from Memphis. They would have been coming from the south. And so this would have been the first thing that they saw. They would see the Sphinx in profile, and they would see the Pyramid of Khufu, not Khafre. By seeing the Sphinx in profile and the Pyramid of Khufu behind, you have a sense of a two-dimensional rendering, which was very important to the ancient Egyptians. The Egyptians loved a profile, and not only in their carvings and paintings, even some of their sculptures were designed to be viewed from sideways on. And when you look at this as an ancient Egyptian, it appears as if the Sphinx is guarding Khufu's tomb. And that's not all. Dr. Hartwig turns her attention to the monuments of Khafre, Khufu's son, and the man assumed to have built the Sphinx. Khafre's pyramid lies directly behind the Sphinx. But Hartwig finds a clue in the layout of the causeway that leads from Khafre's pyramid down to his temple. So here's Khafre's causeway. Now, this is where the body of the king would have been brought up and then buried inside of the pyramid. But when you analyze the position, there's something that's just not quite right. You would expect the causeway to come right down here, like right in front of me, and then head due east. But instead, it swerves. Traditionally, the ceremonial path leading to a pharaoh's pyramid runs due east in a straight line, not this one. Khafre's causeway is set at an angle, and it appears to go around the Sphinx. It swerves. It's over here. And it swerves to avoid something. And that thing is the Sphinx, which means that the Sphinx existed there already before Khafre. If the Sphinx was already here, then that points to it being Khufu's creation. To confirm the theory, Hartwig leaves the Giza Plateau. She's come to the only place in the world where there's a confirmed likeness of Khufu, the Cairo Museum. What happens when we compare that image to the face of the Sphinx? When we look at the face of Khufu, he has very broad planes to his face. His ears are pushed forward. He has deep-set eyes. These are the same features that we see on the Sphinx, so it makes perfect sense that the Sphinx is Khufu. There seems to be a resemblance between the two. And there's another clue here. In every known statue of Khufu, he's shown wearing a ceremonial beard. But the Sphinx doesn't have a beard, and neither does the statue of Khufu. There's only one problem. This statue is less than 4 inches tall. In getting a positive ID, of course, you need more than just this small little statue. It's such a tiny thing to compare against something as massive as the Sphinx. In the end, there is so little evidence that we can be absolutely sure of whose face is on the Sphinx.