SPHINX OF GIZEH

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 29, 4 February 1937, Page 11

SPHINX OF GIZEH

IMPORTANT DISCOVERY

An important discovery casts new light on the mystery of the great Sphinx of Gizeh, the enormous stone figure with a human head and the body of a lion, which gazes out across the Valley of the Kile, in Egypt. Professor Selim Hassan, of Cairo University, has unearthed a granite stela—a tablet—evidently of the 18th dynasty, bearing an inscription which furnishes an additional link in the story,of the great monument. For years Professor Hassan has endeavoured to solve th£ "problem of the Sphinx—who carved » out of the solid limestone rock, ana whom it was intended to represent? I* records that the-tablet was erected b* Amen Hotep the Second as a memorial of his pilgrimage to the Sphinx when he ascended the throne at the age or 18. It relates how he drove in his chariot from Memphis to visit the Great Pyramids, which are monuments to Cheops and Chefren, and how he paid homage at the Sphinx—the monument of Ha the Sun God—which was covered with sand except for the head and the shoulders. The discovery of the tablet, it is believed, indicates that the Pharaohs made pilgrimages from Thebes and elsewhere to Luxor, where they erected small temples in honour of Ba the Sun God.