Nice to see Egypt has almost restored the nose & face two centuries after Napoleon's drunken cannoneers pounded them.
Posted on 12/13/2004 5:36:33 PM PST by blam
I diddled the frenchmans sphincter Sol said.
No, sweetie, that's the Luxor....
Are you a turtle?
It's a shame the Egyptians didn't have duct tape; they could have fixed it sooner. http://www.napoleonseries.org/faq/sphinx.cfm It may not have been Napolean, but, dare I say, a Muslim fanatic...
"Dr Dobrev re-examined graffiti carved by workers at a site called Zawiyet el-Aryan..."
"For a good time, call Cleo"
"Tut was here"
"Kufu + a large, half-jackel, mythical demigod = TLA"
Interesting, I'd never heard that, didn't know they grew
anywhere in Egypt.
I am of the opinion that the head is a woman and represents the change between the ages of Leo and Virgo.
And if the Egyptians had had duct tape the Sphinx would still have a nose:)
Actually the damage is courtesy of The Religion of Peace.
From: http://www.sis.gov.eg/sphinx/html/sphnx001.htm
Although popular legend blames Napoleon and his troops during the French campaign in Egypt (1798-1801) for having shot the nose off the Great Sphinx, in fact this story just isn't true. I have yet to locate an original source for this myth. The idea that Napoleon was to blame for the Sphinx's missing nose dates at least to the beginning of the twentieth century.
One traveler to Egypt around the time of World War One wrote the following: "To take our photos sitting in front of the Sphinx on a camel was the aim of another....And so, repulsing the hordes of robbers on all sides, we came to the wonderful, inscrutable, worth-millions-of-pounds-to-authors Sphinx. The great riddle of the mysterious East. How many reams of rubbish have been written about this misshapen block of stone. Napoleon, a practical man, fired a few cannon balls at its face. High explosive shells were not invented in those days." [From: Sommers, Cecil. Temporary Crusaders. (London: John Lane, 1919) Chapter VI. "19th April."]
Another book from about the same time, In the Footsteps of Napoleon (1915) by James Morgan (p 85), states "There is a tradition among the Arabs of the Pyramids that all the scars of time and the wounds of a hundred wars, which the Sphinx carries, were inflicted by Napoleon's soldiers, who used its mystifying and majestic countenance as a target. That, however, is only a legend for the tourist. Long before the discovery of gunpowder, the Arabs had laid iconoclastic hands on the beard of this god of the desert..." Though the Arab guides may have originally spread this tale, this myth appears to have been perpetuated over the years by countless teachers the world over who have passed this bit of "history" on to their students.
A poll conducted on the Internet found that fully 21% of respondents believed Napoleon was responsible for the Sphinx's missing nose. One of the most recent examples of the persistence of this falsehood was Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March" speech where he said: "White supremacy caused Napoleon to blow the nose off the Sphinx because it reminded you [sic] too much of the Black man's majesty." And the perpetuation of this myth in "Afrocentric" circles was even the subject of a segment of the U.S. television investigative journalism program "60 Minutes."
This error has persisted in spite of the fact that the truth can be readily found in such common reference sources as the Encyclopedia Americana (Danbury, CT: Grolier, 1995). vol.25, p.492-3 under "Sphinx", which states: "Over the centuries the Great Sphinx has suffered severely from weathering...Man has been responsible for additional mutilation. In 1380 A.D. the Sphinx fell victim to the iconoclastic ardor of a fanatical Muslim ruler, who caused deplorable injuries to the head. Then the figure was used as a target for the guns of the Mamluks." In the book The Egyptian Pyramids: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), p.301, the author, J.P. Lepre, adds the fact that, in addition to the 14th century damage, "The face was further disfigured by the eighteenth century A.D. ruler of Egypt, the Marmalukes [Mamluks]."
In National Geographic, April 1991, page 36, Mark Lehner, an archaeologist from Chicago's Oriental Institute who created a computer reconstruction of the Sphinx, writes: "I sought clues from history and archaeology for the computer reconstruction of the Sphinx. An early 15th-century Arab historian reported that the face had been disfigured in his time. Yet to this day the damage is wrongly attributed to Napoleon's troops." Again, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2001. Vol. 1, p. 30) also states of the perpetrator of the missing nose, "This accusation is most often leveled at Napoleon Bonaparte, who is said to have shot the nose off the Sphinx -a claim that is manifestly incorrect, not only because earlier western representations of the Sphinx depict it with its nose missing (for example, the drawing published in 1755 by Frederick Norden) but also because medieval Arabic texts attribute the damage to a Muslim fanatic in the fourteenth century CE."
European visitors to Egypt prior to Napoleon's expedition had already discovered the vandalism to the Sphinx. In 1546, for example, when Dr. Pierre Belon explored Egypt, he visited "the great colossus." "The Sphinx," writes Leslie Greener in The Discovery Of Egypt (London : Cassell, 1966), p.38, by this time "no longer [had] the stamp of grace and beauty so admired by Abdel Latif in 1200." Greener goes on to say: "this exonerates the artillerymen of Napoleon Bonaparte, who have the popular reputation of having used the nose of the Sphinx as a target." Frederick Norden, an artist and marine architect who visited Egypt in 1737, accurately depicted the Sphinx without its nose in his 1755 Travels. (Richard Pococke, who visited Egypt in the same year as Norden, depicts the Sphinx with its nose, but the engraving is generally considered a copy of that of Cornelius de Bruyn's earlier drawing.) The charge against Napoleon is particularly unjust because the French general brought with him a large group of "savants" to conduct the first scientific study of Egypt and its antiquities.
Finally, an article by Ulrich Haarmann, "Regional Sentiment in Medieval Islamic Egypt," published in the University of London's Bulletin Of The School Of Oriental And African Studies (BSOAS), vol.43 (1980) p.55-66, states that according to Makrizi, Rashidi and other medieval Arab scholars, the face of the Sphinx was vandalized in 1378 A.D. by Mohammed Sa'im al-Dahr, a "fanatical sufi of the oldest and most highly respected sufi convent of Cairo." The nose and ears are mentioned specifically as having been damaged at this time. According to one account, Haarmann states, the residents in the neighborhood of the Sphinx were so upset by the destruction that they lynched him and buried him near the great monument he ruined. (Thanks to Ann Macy Roth's article in the online Ancient Near East Digest (University of Chicago, Oriental Institute) for the information on Haarmann's article). This confirms information published in Selim Hassan's book The Sphinx: Its History in Light of Recent Excavations (Cairo: Government Press, 1949. P. 81-83) which states that Sa'im al-Dahr pried off the Sphinx's nose with crowbars.
That might be, but the former animal neck was incompletely chopped away.
I agree with Schoch/West theory as well. The water damage is very evident.
sounds to me more like Russian. Simple - Russians invented it and then it was hit by truck while crossing the road.
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It's kind of pathetic that the wealthy and technologically advanced world we live in now won't build monuments that would last many centuries.
The Sphinx is like Rushmore. It was essentially there before the artwork. The surface erodes and gets hammered, but the rock is already there and is going noplace very fast.
No, the Sphinx was there as a mushroom, tens of thousands of years before anybody even lived along the Nile. The neck and body were carved later, and finally a face was put on the mushroom.
Anyway, you cannot rule out importation! The ancients knew their mushrooms.
Egypt was "wet" up until about 7,000 years ago.
Lenny: Hey Carl, when'd we start worshipping cats?
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