Amazon Quiz: Which ancient monument is shaped as a combination of a man and this animal?

Amazon Quiz (August 7, 2021): Which ancient monument is shaped as a combination of a man and this animal?

Here are your options: 

a. Pyramids of Giza

b. Petra

c. Sphinx

d. Stonehenge

Answer: Sphinx

Sphinx, a mythological creature with a lion’s body and a human head, is an important image in Egyptian and Greek art and legend. The word sphinx was derived by Greek grammarians from the verb sphingein (“to bind” or “to squeeze”), but the etymology is not related to the legend and is dubious. Hesiod, the earliest Greek author to mention the creature, called it Phix.

The most renowned sphinx in legend was supposed to have tormented the populace by demanding the answer to a riddle taught to her by the Muses—”What is it that has one voice and yet becomes four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?”—and consuming a man each time the riddle was answered incorrectly. Oedipus eventually provided the correct answer: man, who crawls on all fours as a child, walks on two feet as an adult, and leans on a staff in old age. The sphinx then committed suicide. This storey apparently spawned the idea that the sphinx was omniscient, and the sphinx’s intelligence is still proverbial today.

The huge reclining Great Sphinx at Giza, Egypt, dating from the reign of Monarch Khafre (4th king of the 4th dynasty, c. 2575–c. 2465 BCE), is the earliest and most famous example in art. This is known to be a king’s portrait statue, and the sphinx remained a royal portrait type throughout most of Egyptian history. Arabs, on the other hand, refer to the Great Sphinx of Giza as Ab al-Hawl, or “Father of Terror.”