The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and the German Archaeological Institute recently completed a repair operation that revealed two huge limestone statues purported to depict an ancient Pharaoh in the form of a Sphinx. During recent repair work on the statues of Memnon and the “Temple of Millions of Years” on the western mainland in Luxor, southern Egypt, an Egyptian-German archeological team uncovered the statues, which were formerly around 8 meters (26.25 feet) in length.
The sculptures were most likely situated at the entrance of a procession road, which ran between a mortuary temple column and a courtyard filled with wall relief, according to Dr. Horig Sorosian, the chairperson of the archeological team. “This discovery revealed the processional route from the third pylon to the Peristyle Court,” Sourouzian told Al-Monitor, a Middle East news website. “The newly unearthed pieces of a wall relief in the peristyle depict new scenes of the Heb-Sed, a king’s festival that began after 30 years of rule and was repeated every three years thereafter.”
The sphinx is a legendary monster with the head of a human, the body of a lion, and the wings of a falcon. It is generally linked with ancient Egypt. The Great Sphinx of Giza, a 73-meter-long (240-foot-long) sphinx statue dating from the reign of Khafre (2558–2532 BCE), is without a doubt the most famous. The sphinx’s exact meaning has been lost to time, and there are numerous interpretations of what this renowned mythical beast meant. According to certain interpretations, the animal represents awe-inspiring authority and the sun’s sacred might.
Because sphinxes also feature pharaohs’ faces — the Great Sphinx of Giza’s visage looks to represent the pharaoh Khafre – some have viewed them as emblems of how ancient Egypt’s great royal dynasties inextricably linked to the divine. That is one explanation, but it is also possible that they just meant to mislead archeologists in 3,300 years.
Something even more amazing was spotted by Lehner. The sun appears to drop into the shoulder of the Sphinx and, beyond that, into the south side of the Pyramid of Khafre on the horizon, if you stand in the eastern niche around sunset on the March or September equinoxes.
