Sphinx

The Egyptian sphinx was never a single fixed form the way the Greek monster was. Alongside the familiar human-headed type of the Great Sphinx, Egyptian temples also lined processional avenues with ram-headed sphinxes, called criosphinxes by modern Egyptologists, such as the long avenue leading to the temple of Amun at Karnak, and with hawk-headed sphinxes, or hieracosphinxes, associated with Horus. Which animal head a sphinx received generally signalled which god's protective authority the image invoked, so that the human-headed royal type at Giza is only the best known member of a considerably broader Egyptian category of composite guardian figures.

A persistent modern legend blames Napoleon's soldiers for shooting off the Great Sphinx's nose during target practice during his Egyptian campaign of 1798, but the damage is documented in drawings and travellers' accounts made well before Napoleon ever reached Egypt, and most Egyptologists now attribute the loss to earlier, poorly recorded deliberate vandalism, quite possibly medieval, rather than to any specific eighteenth-century incident. The story persists mainly because it offers a satisfyingly concrete villain for damage whose real cause and date are, like much else about the monument's early history, simply not well documented.

Hesiod's Theogony, one of the earliest sources to mention the Theban monster at all, calls her Phix rather than Sphinx, naming her after Mount Phikion near Thebes where later tradition placed her lair; the name Sphinx that eventually became standard may itself derive from a Greek verb meaning to bind or strangle, fitting a monster that kills by throttling rather than by any other method, though ancient sources are not entirely consistent even on how she dispatches her victims, versus some later versions in which she devours them outright.

Accounts of her death vary as well. In some tellings she throws herself from her rocky perch to her own destruction the moment Oedipus answers correctly, unable to survive having her riddle solved; in others Oedipus kills her outright once the answer removes her power over him. Either version keeps the same underlying logic, that the sphinx's authority depends entirely on the riddle remaining unanswered, so that the correct answer is itself a fatal blow regardless of whether a human hand delivers it. Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, the most famous ancient treatment of the aftermath, never stages the riddle scene directly, taking the audience's knowledge of it for granted and beginning only after Oedipus has already won and lost the throne it earned him.