old-timey pictures of the sphinx which are terrible

https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0137823/800wm/C0137823-Great_Sphinx_of_Giza,_18th_century.jpg

https://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/78/2013/03/Figure4.jpg

https://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/78/2013/03/Figure5.jpg

https://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/78/2013/03/Figure2.jpg

https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/field/image/The-Big-Egyptian-Sphinx-Cover-Up.jpg

https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/the-great-sphinx-of-giza-egypt-ken-welsh.jpg

https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/2/1325-untitled--ken-welsh.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Hogenberg_%26_Braun%2C_1572.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Jan_Sommer%2C_1591.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/François_de_La_Boullaye-Le_Gouz%2C_1653.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Olfert_Dapper%2C_1665.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Johanne_Baptista_Homann%2C_1724.png

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Balthasar_de_Monconys%2C_1665.png

https://w600.comps.canstockphoto.com/pyramids-of-giza-and-the-great-sphinx-eps-vector_csp33767581.jpg

i mean
https://i.imgur.com/iUELouE.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1478857556546183173/F-voHqp3?format=jpg&name=small

Lol, great thread idea.

sphinx is the greek for "strangler" (or i guess maybe "strangless") bcz that's what she did if you couldn't answer her annoying riddle abt legs

no.3 reminds me of this hanle y classic

PS Look how weird Kant looked

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HRP6G1/immanuel-kant-german-philosopher-HRP6G1.jpg

― Mike Hanle y, Wednesday, 10 October 2001 01:00 (twenty years ago) bookmarkflaglink

(sadly i had to find a less funny render of the kant pic bcz link-rot)

Played by Simon Pegg

so many of these look like george washington’s head, powdered wig & all

like yo have u even seen the sphinx

Many of those pictures get the pyramids all wrong too, good work lads.

https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2021/02/16/19/33/cat-6022127_1280.jpg

a couple of them seem to be depicting a sphinx and also a separate giant head

Relevant to my current DN interests

if they'd have commissioned Monet to paint the sphinx before the first b+w photos got out there, it at least would have give you a sense of location and the form and shape of it and position of it in relation to pyramids etc. These FAKE NEWS guys were taking the piss man!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Oedipus_lost_het_raadsel_op_Titelpagina_voor_A._Kircher%2C_Oedipus_Aegyptiacus%2C_Rome_1652-1654%2C_RP-P-BI-1459.jpg/800px-Oedipus_lost_het_raadsel_op_Titelpagina_voor_A._Kircher%2C_Oedipus_Aegyptiacus%2C_Rome_1652-1654%2C_RP-P-BI-1459.jpg

"Frontispiece to Athanasius Kircher's Oedipus Ægyptiacus; the Sphinx, confronted by Kircher's learning, admits he has solved her riddle"

Narrator: he had not solved her riddle (Wikipedia: "In Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Kircher argued under the impression of the Hieroglyphica that ancient Egyptian was the language spoken by Adam and Eve, that Hermes Trismegistus was Moses, and that hieroglyphs were occult symbols which "cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks, characters and figures.")

https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/athanasius-kircher-and-the-hieroglyphic-sphinx/8741299774_c91c4d54ae_o.jpg

AK (1602-80) was a pioneering egyptologist and the "last renaissance man" but (or perhaps that shd be so) he also just made a ton of stuff up

The 4th one, where the sphinx is Napoleon is my favourite!

Pyramids seemed a lot more pointy back in those days...

Pretty notorious that Napoleon's army used the Sphinx for artillery practice and shot off its nose.

notorious and also quite wrong: the second pic is from 1737 and the nose is clearly already not there

prior to that arab historians speculated that it was a religious defacement by sufi moslems in the 1300s to stop locals worshipping this big lummox of an idol and a US archeologist has studied the actual tool marks and concludes that the loss may date back to the 3rd century AD

Not clear to me why chopping off its nose would prevent people from worshiping it, but both Islam and the Christian iconoclasts object to representing divinity in human form, so it's believable they would have done some defacement. If so, they did a very half-assed job of it.

i honestly always assumed erosion, just cause it’s a smallish pointy part of a large statue &i assumed in sandblasting desert sandstorms that the nose would be first to go

Good thread

https://sunilshinde.typepad.com/my_weblog/WindowsLiveWriter/sphinx%20-%20Luigi%20Mayer.jpg

https://pastnow.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/flight-for-egypt.jpg

George Cruikshank for the illustration above obv only had reference to other wrong depictions of what pyramids look like.

Pretty notorious that Napoleon's army used the Sphinx for artillery practice and shot off its nose.

p. sure this story gained currency as Napoleon's soldiers had form for this. In Milan, they *did* use Jesus's face in Leonardo's Last Supper for target practice!

VG: i have never been in a sandstorm so i don't know this for sure but i *believe* -- despite the image we have garnered from such documentaries as THE MUMMY (1999) of the dust-front as a mile-high wall of whirling doom -- that the scouring action almost all happens within a couple of feet of the ground (where gravity will keep most of the particles as wind in a desert is parallel to the ground)

i: hence sphinx-face not hugely eroded compared to sphinx-sides (see striation groove along same: the face is also fashioned of harder rock mind you)
ii: in the wikipedia entry there's a neat pic (see below) of a VENTIFACT (like artifact but for wind) from the white desert of farafra a few hundred mikles to the southwest of giza, making the argument that the harder sphinx-head is inspired by or perhaps actually carved out of such a phenomenon
iii: the white desert of farafra is full of huge chalky mushrooms where the base is much more worn than the bulbous top and some of the tops do look like monster's heads so

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Weisse_Wüste.jpg

Howard Vyse directed Perring in 1837 to drill a tunnel in the back of the Sphinx, just behind the head. The boring rods became stuck at a depth of 27 feet (8.2 m), Attempts to blast the rods free caused further damage.

old-timey archaeologists who were terrible

lol yes vyse was the worst, there's a bunch of ireperable damage in the great pyramid also thanks to his crazed boring

https://i.imgur.com/z0bvTet.png

Obelix broke the Sphinx's nose as I recall

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpG8DJVW0AEYkXW.png

ha, by Toutatis!

us archeologist mentioned upthread OTM

https://lab.syncer.jp/Travel/Tochigi/TOBU-WORLD-SQUARE/egypt-09.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Cornelis_de_Bruijn%2C_1698.png

looks like a Far Side cartoon

that's the top one but bigger and backwards and yellow (nice to see all the little detailed ppl clearer tho)

Actually one is a copy of the other - the sky, pyramids and numbers of people are different. Clearly the same rendition tho.

Why did these weirdos think the pyramids were needles (and short)?

any room for contemporary pictures of the sphinx which are terrible and also incorporate incredibly shit drawings of guitars? #onethread

http://i.imgur.com/bfqwLFW.jpg

http://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52701ddae4b0764939e3b98a/1393105470918-BI2HGON9U9TDSCT59OG9/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kN9BAWCuTsEAsYPRAGLKn-dZw-zPPgdn4jUwVcJE1ZvWQUxwkmyExglNqGp0IvTJZUJFbgE-7XRK3dMEBRBhUpw9IELqyvfoO1ftmpt3PRMAxBygYSXF-OUPVCErjuADt97eTh55TaOaDYmgAP_LmxM/sphinx_head4-2001.jpg

which led me to this:

https://www.handshouse.org/carving-a-new-sphinx-nose/
http://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52701ddae4b0764939e3b98a/1393106241540-JWI8PC0G5JREQ202NDVK/Mark-Lehner%2CJonathan-Bechard%2C-Rick-Brown%2C-Laura-Brown.jpg

1867, not terrible

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Handbook_of_archaeology%2C_Egyptian_-_Greek_-_Etruscan_-_Roman_%281867%29_%2814758374226%29.jpg/800px-Handbook_of_archaeology%2C_Egyptian_-_Greek_-_Etruscan_-_Roman_%281867%29_%2814758374226%29.jpg

I found this very web 1.0 page with several images.

https://freemaninstitute.com/sphinx.htm

lol

https://i.imgur.com/FLt4DYE.png

nailed it

Don Martin to thread!

harder to google than i would've presumed!

i suggest the freeman institute may be in error (or fvcking with us) but based on its design and site architecture that can't possibly be the case

https://media.mutualart.com/Images/2014_06/23/21/212410013/9c20dee5-03ac-4eeb-af59-13afe81e6273_570.Jpeg

"Any more riddles and I'll stuff you full of dynamite"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Norden%2C_1755_%282%29.png?1641502556442

this is from 1737 yet still some of the later drawings and engravings were obviously mimicking other terrible drawings and adding the nose. Perhaps some of these people were winging it or maybe some of them saw it had no nose and decided to take artistic license because maybe they thought people might not be as captivated at the idea of a great nose-less relic.

https://www.lindisfarneprints.com/ekmps/shops/lindisfarne/images/egypt-colossal-sphynx-head-pyramids-of-memphis-antique-print-1804-10045-p.jpg

colossal cybersphynx's head

If any of these have been found yet featuing the Sphinx holding an incredibly shit drawing of a guitar then ...

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Me8AAOSwytBc6Bp0/s-l400.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/yXIuQ75.png

https://img.posterlounge.co.uk/images/big/1874048.jpg

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach's dramatic take, he was a German proto-hippy and minor symbolist painter/nudist/commune leader type who I'd never heard of before tbh.

https://www.john-howe.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Sphinx1-port.jpg

A and I haven't been posted yet. from https://www.john-howe.com/blog/2010/07/15/the-sphinx-with-a-thousand-faces/

(that's a really big pic, so open image in new tab or whatever)

Oh wait, I missed One Eye Open's post, sorry.

https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/Anticvarium/07/556107/H18717-L64895752.jpg
https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/Anticvarium/07/556107/H18717-L64895754.jpg

Trying to get manageable images for the 2 I mentioned. Not sure if the second one will show up.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Rendering_of_the_head_of_the_Sphinx_from_Giza%2C_Egypt_-_Thevet_Andr%C3%A9_-_1556.jpg/483px-Rendering_of_the_head_of_the_Sphinx_from_Giza%2C_Egypt_-_Thevet_Andr%C3%A9_-_1556.jpg

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55000278x/f1.highres

nice pair

https://keltaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20210611_140848-scaled.jpg

norman mailer a welcome change from the massed george washingtons

Lol. I met his set once, but that is for another thread.

i swear to god that on the walk home today i passed a kid with her mom making a set of snow pyramids flanking a snow sphinx
i shoulda took a picture

this isn't terrible it's just old (18th or thutmosid dynasty aka 1550-1292 BC) (king tut was a thutmosid but there were like 16 others inc pharaoh ay who was an alien lmao)

https://i.imgur.com/6kzYeWw.png

source: https://gizamedia.rc.fas.harvard.edu/documents/zivie-coche_sphinx.pdf

stone postcard to give ppl fomo

That's how she appears at the Luxor in Las Vegas if I recall correctly

I can appreciate ancient linear carvings of pyramids that are done wrong to fit on the tablet, but all those European interlopers can get fucked!

Perhaps those represent pyramids that have not yet been rediscovered...?

"the hills* were higher** (when we were young)"!
—bryan ferry

*pyramids
**pointier

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/22/b9/fc/22b9fc8e3bc1639772fa8d9d11dd52ac.jpg

https://t1.thpservices.com/previewimage/gallil/eed74b289aa112e27c9966a34784c684/dae-88016145.jpg

https://c8.alamy.com/compes/2b75drh/esfinge-andro-esfinges-androsfinge-egipto-egipto-giza-gran-esfinge-en-gizeh-dibujo-de-linea-vintage-o-ilustracion-de-grabado-2b75drh.jpg

https://media.istockphoto.com/illustrations/great-sphinx-in-the-old-book-encyclopedic-dictionary-by-a-granat-vol-illustration-id1267506720

Great Sphinx in the old book Encyclopedic dictionary by A. Granat, vol. 3, S. Petersburg, 1896

watch ad from 1897

https://www.atticpaper.com/prodimages/081111small/elgin.jpg

xp

just saying from that vantage point there is a distant pyramid on the horizon, not a miniature one right behind it!

the facial expression on the sphinx from the Russian encyclopedia (ruminative, somewhat bitter but also resigned)is reminding me of a specific image, but I can't place it

looks a bit like a young MES

"buddy, they wont even let me fuck it"

Conceptio artis, 1894 #akseligallenkallela #symbolism pic.twitter.com/Hijo4E3F6X

— Akseli Gallen-Kallela (@AkseliGallenArt) January 26, 2022

picture is not terrible tho

cant see the sphinx when the air is thick with sand tapping_head_wisely.gif