The mythical creature with the head of a man and the body of a lion was a popular figure in Egyptian and Greek myths. And in one culture and another, this creature, to one degree or another, served as a "guard", blocking a person’s path to certain secrets and treasures, allowing only the elect to access them.
Greek Sphinx
In Greece, the sphinx was not only a female being, but also a proper name. The sphinx in Greek mythology is the daughter of Typhon and Echidna or the dog Orff, brother of the many-headed Cerberus, and Chimera. This creature had not only the head of a woman and the body of a lioness, but also the wings of an eagle and a snake instead of a tail. The Greek Sphinx is initially the deity of destruction and bad luck, later - the keeper of the entrance to the head of Thebes. She asked each traveler a riddle and no one could answer her. The Sphinx choked everyone who gave the wrong answer, and then devoured it.
For a long time, each storyteller invented the famous "riddle of the Sphinx" to his taste, but then two canonical versions appeared. The first said that the Sphinx asked about who walks in the morning at four, in the afternoon at two, and in the evening at three and the answer to this riddle, a man crawling in infancy, independently moving on two legs in adulthood and leaning on a stick to old age. The second, less common, version is that the Sphinx asked a riddle about two sisters, each of which begets the other, referring to night and day. The future king of the city - Oedipus, solved the riddle of the Sphinx, but the path that the monster opened to him did not lead him to happiness - it was on the way to Thebes that Oedipus killed his father without knowing it, and then, having arrived in the city, also unintentionally married mother, which brought a terrible curse on Thebes. When the cause of the wrath of the gods was revealed and Oedipus found out what he had done, the unfortunate man blinded himself and went into exile.
After Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx, she threw herself from a high cliff and crashed to death.
Egyptian Sphinx
Unlike the Greek, the Egyptian sphinx does not have its own history and gender. Moreover, compared with the Greek version, it can even be called friendly, but not good-natured. The Egyptians placed images of a man with a lion’s body at the “service” entrances to temples and near the tomb, the sphinx was supposed to let worshipers pass severely and punish anyone who encroaches on treasures or secret knowledge. Later, the figures of the sphinxes began to decorate the stairs and the entrances to the palace chambers, in this case they assigned the functions of a "guard" to the monster under the royal person.
The most famous Egyptian sphinx is the Great Sphinx - a giant sculpture made of soft limestone in Giza. Under the protection of this sphinx there are as many as three pyramids - Cheops, Herfen and Mykerin.
