The largest and most famous is the Great Sphinx of Giza, sited on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile River, facing due east (29°58′31″N, 31°08′15″E), with a small temple between its paws. The face of the Great Sphinx is believed to be the head of the pharaoh Khafra (often known by the Greek version of his name, Chephren) or possibly that of his brother, the Pharaoh Djedefra, which would date its construction from the fourth dynasty (2723 BC–2563 BC). However, there are some alternative theories that re-date the Sphinx to the pre-Old Kingdom – and, according to one hypothesis, to prehistoric times. Other famous Egyptian sphinxes include the alabaster sphinx of Memphis, currently located within the open-air museum at that site; and the ram-headed sphinxes (in Greek, criosphinxes) representing the god Amon, in Thebes, of which there were originally some nine hundred. What name or names the builders gave to the statues is unknown. The inscription on a stele in the Great Sphinx dates it from one thousand years after the carving of the Sphinx,[1] gives three names of the sun: Kheperi - Re - Atum. The Arabic name of the Great Sphinx, Abu al-Hôl, translates as "Father of Terror". The Greek name "Sphinx" was applied to it in the Antiquity. But it has the head of a man, not of a woman.
There was a single Sphinx in Greek mythology, a unique demon of destruction and bad luck, according to Hesiod a daughter of Echidna and of Orthrus or, according to others, of Typhon and Echidna — all of these chthonic figures. She was represented in vase-painting and bas-reliefs most often seated upright rather than recumbent, as a winged lion with a woman's head; or she was a woman with the paws, claws and breasts of a lion, a serpent's tail and eagle wings. Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Ethiopian homeland (the Greeks remembered the Sphinx's foreign origin) to Thebes where, in Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, she asks all passersby history's most famous riddle: "Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" She strangled anyone unable to answer. (The word "sphinx" comes from the Greek Σφινξ — Sphinx, apparently from the verb σφινγω — sphingo, meaning "to strangle".
This may be her proper name, but The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology states that her given name was Φιξ — Phix.) Oedipus solved the riddle: man — he crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age. Bested at last, the Sphinx then threw herself from her high rock and died. An alternative version tells that she devoured herself. The exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not specified by early tellers of the story and was not standardized as the one given above until much later in Greek history.[2] Thus Oedipus can be recognized as a liminal or "threshold" figure, helping effect the transition between the old religious practices, represented by the Sphinx, and new, Olympian ones.