The Sphinx: Greek or Egyptian?

[Jinx]

What is the deal with Sphinx? It is mentioned in Greek mythology; yet, the statue appears in Egypt. Are the riddles of the Sphinx from the Greek, too?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

The Sphinx is a thousand years older than the earliest origins of Greek culture. It was part of their general historic/mythologic history just as it is of ours.

As for the rest, just check Wikipedia:

There was a single Sphinx in Greek mythology, a unique demon of destruction and bad luck, according to Hesiod a daughter of Echidna and of Orthrus or, according to others, of Typhon and Echidna — all of these chthonic figures. She was represented in vase-painting and bas-reliefs most often seated upright rather than recumbent, as a winged lion with a woman’s head; or she was a woman with the paws, claws and breasts of a lion, a serpent’s tail and eagle wings. Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Ethiopian homeland (the Greeks remembered the Sphinx’s foreign origin) to Thebes and, in Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, asks all passersby history’s most famous riddle: “Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?” She strangled anyone unable to answer. The word “sphinx” comes from the Greek Σφινξ — Sphinx, apparently from the verb σφινγω — sphingo, meaning “to strangle”. This may be her proper name, but The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology states that her given name was Φιξ — Phix. Oedipus solved the riddle: man — he crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age. Bested at last, the Sphinx then threw herself from her high rock and died. An alternative version tells that she devoured herself. The exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not specified by early tellers of the story and was not standardized as the one given above until much later in Greek history.[2] Thus Oedipus can be recognized as a liminal or “threshold” figure, helping effect the transition between the old religious practices, represented by the Sphinx, and new, Olympian ones.

[Shagnasty]

Believe it or not, nobody truly knows who built the Sphinx or even how old it is. Some estimates put it at thousands of years older than the pyramids. There is still an ongoing debates among academics and the not-so-academics who are trying to establish just the basics.

[CalMeacham]

To tell the truth, it’s not clear to me that the Greek and Egyptian sphinxes are closely related. They’re both creatures with lion bodies and human heads. I suspect the Egyptians didn’t call theirs “Sphinx”. The name “Sphinx} or }Phynx” means “Strangler” or “Asphyxiator” in Greek, which suggests that this is how it killed its victims (although you wouldn’t think that appropriate for a lion-bodied monster).

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Shagnasty

Believe it or not, nobody truly knows who built the Sphinx or even how old it is. Some estimates put it at thousands of years older than the pyramids. There is still an ongoing debates among academics and the not-so-academics who are trying to establish just the basics.

Well, only in the same way that there’s a debate between the scientists and the Creationists about evolution. That is, no debate at all.

I’m not sure what happened with the Wiki link I gave earlier but here it is corrected.