The mythical creature with the head of a man and the body of a lion was a popular figure in Egyptian and Greek myths. In both cultures, this creature, to one degree or another, served as a "guard", blocking a person's path to certain secrets and treasures, allowing only a select few to access them.
Greek sphinx
In Greece, the sphinx was not only a feminine creature, but also a proper name. The Sphinx in Greek mythology is the daughter of Typhon and Echidna, or the dog Orpah, the brother of the many-headed Cerberus, and the 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 originally a deity of destruction and bad luck, later - the keeper of the entrance to the hundred-domed Thebes. She asked every traveler a riddle and no one could answer it. Anyone who gave the wrong answer was choked and then devoured by the Sphinx.
For a long time, the famous "riddle of the Sphinx" was invented by each storyteller to his taste, but then two canonical versions appeared. The first said that the Sphinx asked about who walks at four in the morning, at two in the afternoon, and at three in the evening, and the answer to this riddle is 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 gives rise to the other, meaning 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 come to the city, also unintentionally, he married mother, than brought a terrible curse on Thebes. When the reason for the anger of the gods was revealed and Oedipus learned 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 her death.
Egyptian sphinx
Unlike the Greek, the Egyptian Sphinx has no history or gender of its own. Moreover, in comparison with the Greek version, he can even be called benevolent, but in no way good-natured. The Egyptians placed images of a man with the body of a lion at the "service" entrances to temples and near the tomb, the sphinx had to let the clergy through and severely punish anyone who encroached on treasures or secret knowledge. Later, staircases and entrances to palace chambers began to be decorated with figures of sphinxes, in this case the monster was assigned the functions of a "guard" for a royal person.
The most famous Egyptian Sphinx is the Great Sphinx, a giant soft limestone sculpture at Giza. Under the protection of this sphinx, there are as many as three pyramids - Cheops, Herfen and Mikerin.
Sphinx in European culture
The Egyptian Sphinx, as the keeper of secret knowledge, has become one of the symbols of the Freemasons. The mystery of the Greek Sphinx was the subject of many literary works. Interest in the sphinxes in the 16th century led to the emergence of the "French Sphinx" - naturalistically executed sculptures with the body of a lioness and the head of a beautiful woman. In this form, the sphinxes existed in art until the 19th century, when, in the wake of neoclassical trends, the Greek and Egyptian sphinxes "returned" to art.
