How tall is the Great Sphinx of Giza?

How tall is the Great Sphinx of Giza?

The Great Sphinx of Giza stands about 20 m (66 ft) from the floor of its enclosure to the top of its head, the figure used on this site. That modest height hides how big the statue really is: it is about 73 m (240 ft) long from its outstretched paws to its tail and about 19 m (62 ft) wide across the rear haunches. Some published surveys give slightly finer figures, such as 20.22 m high, 73.5 m long and 19.3 m wide, and these are consistent with the rounded numbers once you allow for where on the worn rock each measurement was taken.

The height is measured from the bedrock floor around the body, not from the desert surface. This matters because the Sphinx sits in a hollow. Its builders did not raise it on a plinth; they quarried downward around a knoll of rock and left the statue standing in the pit they made. Seen from the plateau above, the head can look quite low, while from the enclosure floor the body rises like a cliff.

Carved from the bedrock, not built

Unlike the pyramids beside it, the Sphinx is a monolith. Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities describes it as carved directly from the bedrock of the Giza Plateau, and geologists identify the stone as layers of the Eocene-age Mokattam Formation limestone. Those layers are not uniform, and that explains a great deal about the statue's shape today. The head was cut from a harder band of rock and has kept its features well; the middle of the body sits in softer, crumbly beds that wind and windblown sand have worn back unevenly; the lowest part of the body and the legs are solid rock again.

The quarrying had a second purpose. Blocks removed while freeing the body appear to have gone into the temples built in front of it. The Sphinx Temple stands directly before the statue, and the valley temple of Khafre sits immediately to the south, so the Sphinx is part of a planned complex rather than an isolated carving. Work on that scale did not require an enormous labor force by pyramid standards. Research led by the archaeologist Mark Lehner, as summarized in popular accounts, estimated that a team of about 100 workers using copper chisels and stone hammers could have shaped the statue in roughly three years. Abandoned blocks and tools found in the enclosure suggest the work was never fully finished.

Who built it, and when

The traditional and most widely held view is that the Sphinx was carved for the pharaoh Khafre, who reigned from about 2558 to 2532 BC and built the second pyramid at Giza. Egypt's antiquities authorities follow that attribution, noting that the statue sits beside Khafre's valley temple and was made during the Fourth Dynasty (about 2613 to 2494 BC). That makes the Sphinx about 4,500 years old and the oldest known colossal statue of its kind in Egypt.

The evidence is circumstantial, though, and no inscription from the Old Kingdom names the Sphinx's owner. The Egyptologist Selim Hassan argued for Khafre in the 1930s while acknowledging that no contemporary text proved it. Rainer Stadelmann proposed Khafre's father, Khufu, on the basis of the headdress and beard style; Vassil Dobrev suggested Djedefre in 2004. Fringe proposals that push the date back many thousands of years, based on readings of the erosion patterns, have not been accepted by mainstream archaeology. What the scholars agree on is the face: it shows a king wearing the striped nemes headdress, with the body of a reclining lion as a symbol of royal power.

A statue that keeps getting buried

Most of the Sphinx's later history is a struggle with sand. After the Old Kingdom, drifting sand filled the enclosure, and by the First Intermediate Period the statue was buried to its shoulders. The best-known clearing came around 1401 BC under Thutmose IV, who set up a granite slab between the paws. The Dream Stele is about 3.6 m (12 ft) tall and weighs roughly 15 tons. Its inscription tells how the young prince fell asleep in the statue's shadow after a hunt and dreamed that the god promised him the throne if he freed it from the sand. By the New Kingdom the Sphinx was worshipped as Horemakhet, "Horus in the Horizon," and Amenhotep II had already built a temple beside it.

The sand came back again and again. In 1817 the Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Caviglia dug out the chest in the first modern excavation and uncovered the stele the following year. Auguste Mariette cleared parts of the body in 1853, and in 1925–36 the French engineer Émile Baraize removed the sand down to the floor of the enclosure, revealing the full 20 m height for the first time in centuries. Earlier visitors who measured the Sphinx from the sand line, rather than from the bedrock, recorded much smaller heights for exactly this reason.

The missing nose and other damage

The face is about the width of a small house, and the most famous thing about it is what is missing. The nose was not lost to weathering: marks on the face show it was deliberately levered off with rods or chisels. Tenth-century Arab authors already wrote about damage to the statue, and the historian al-Maqrīzī blamed a fourteenth-century Sufi named Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr. The often-repeated tale that Napoleon's soldiers shot the nose off in 1798 is a myth; drawings made by the Danish traveler Frederic Norden in 1737 already show the face without it.

Fragments of a stone beard, probably added in the New Kingdom, were found by Caviglia at the base of the chest; pieces are now in the British Museum and in Cairo. Twentieth-century work did damage of its own. Gypsum mortar and cement used in restorations between the 1920s and 1980s trapped moisture and salts against the soft limestone, speeding up flaking. A later program, finished by 1998 under Egypt's antiquities service, replaced that work with a lime-and-sand mortar closer to the original stone and re-faced parts of the lower body with new limestone blocks.

Height comparisons: how big is the Sphinx really?

Twenty meters is roughly the height of a six-story building, but the Sphinx's length makes it feel larger in person. The table compares it with other monuments on this site.

Two comparisons stand out. First, the Sphinx is dwarfed by the pyramids behind it; the Pyramid of Khafre, which forms the classic backdrop in photos, is almost seven times taller. Second, its head alone is larger than many statues. A single presidential face at Mount Rushmore is about 18 m tall, so the entire Sphinx, from floor to head, is only a couple of meters taller than one of those carved faces. You can try these pairings yourself in the 3D height comparison tool, which lets you put the Sphinx beside a person or any other landmark at true scale.

Why the Sphinx faces east

The Sphinx looks due east across the Nile valley, toward the sunrise. That orientation fits its later identity as a solar deity, Horemakhet, and the close relationship with the temples in front of it, which some researchers have linked to the sun's movement at the equinoxes. Whatever the original intent, the alignment means the face is lit by morning light, while the long body and the pyramids catch the afternoon sun. For photographers, the classic view that frames the head against the Pyramid of Khafre is taken from the south-east, near the valley temple.

Hidden spaces inside and beneath the statue

Treasure hunters and explorers have tunneled into the Sphinx many times, and several passages are known. A shaft in the top of the head was described by a sixteenth-century traveler, who claimed priests could hide there and "speak" for the statue; Baraize capped it with a metal hatch in 1926. In 1837 the British explorers Howard Vyse and John Perring drilled into the back, where their rods jammed at about 8 m (27 ft). A passage in the rump was opened and then forgotten for more than half a century before being re-excavated in 1980. None of these openings leads to a hidden chamber; they are dead-end cavities, some natural fissures and some made by people searching for treasure. Seismic surveys in the early 1990s reported possible cavities beneath the paws, but later investigations found nothing that supports claims of a buried "hall of records."

Visiting the Sphinx

The Sphinx is part of the Giza Plateau archaeological site, which also holds the three main pyramids, and Egypt's antiquities authorities manage access and charge site entry fees. Visitors approach along a path beside the valley temple of Khafre, from which there is a terrace overlooking the enclosure and the face. The statue itself is fenced off: the limestone is too fragile for people to walk on, and access to the enclosure floor is restricted to conservation and research teams.

Because you see the Sphinx from slightly above or level with its chest, the height can feel smaller than the numbers suggest. The best sense of scale comes from comparing the people on the path with the outstretched forepaws, which alone run for many meters in front of the chest. If you are planning a visit and want to picture the size beforehand, the landmarks hub lists every monument on the site by height, and the height converter will turn any of the meter figures above into feet and inches.

A monument measured in more than meters

Few statues have been measured as often as the Sphinx, and few have been so often measured wrong. Travelers who saw only a head and shoulders rising from the sand recorded heights far below 20 m; others, impressed by the face, exaggerated it. The modern figures, about 20 m high, 73 m long and 19 m wide, come from surveys made after the enclosure was cleared to bedrock, and they describe a sculpture that is long and low rather than tall. Its importance rests on its age and its place in the oldest surviving monumental landscape on Earth, not on its height. Standing in front of it, what impresses most is how much of a hill the builders had to carve away to find a lion inside it.