The Sphinx

[مروان زين]

Nearby, the Sphinx of ancient Egypt, half lion and half philosopher, grimly claws the sand, and glares unmoved at the transient visitor and the eternal plain. It is a savage monument, as if designed to frighten old lechers and make children retire early.
The lion body passes into a human head with prognathous jaws and cruel eyes;the ancient civilization of Egypt that built it (ca. 2990 B.C.) had not quite forgotten barbarism. Once the sand covered it, and Herodotus, who saw so much that is not there, says not a word of it.Nevertheless, what wealth these old Egyptians must have had, what power and skill, even in the infancy of history, to bring these vast stones six hundred miles, to raise some of them, weighing many tons, to a height of half a thousand feet, and to pay, or even to feed, the hundred thousand slaves who toiled for twenty years on these Pyramids of ancient Egypt!Herodotus has preserved for us an inscription that he found on one pyramid, recording the quantity of radishes, garlic and onions consumed by the workmen who built it; these things, too, had to have their immortality.Despitethese familiar friends we go away disappointed; there is something barbarically primitive or barbarically modern in this brute hunger for size.It is the memory and imagination of the beholder that, swollen with history, make these monuments great; The sunset at Gizeh is also as great as the Pyramids.


Now...Let's hear from The Sphinx directly



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