Great Sphinx of Tanis
Unknown · c. 1900-1865 BC (reign of Amenemhat II), reused by later kings
Posted at the threshold of the Egyptian department, in a vaulted cellar under the south wing of the Cour Carrée, the sphinx does now what it did four thousand years ago: guards a doorway. The form fuses the body of a lion, the animal of solar power and ferocity, with the head of a king wearing the pleated nemes headcloth, the rearing uraeus cobra at the brow and the ceremonial false beard. It is not a portrait of a particular moment so much as a statement that royal intelligence governs raw strength.
The stone is pink granite quarried at Aswan, almost 900 kilometres upriver from where the statue ended its ancient life, and worked with stone pounders and copper tools before polishing. Run your eye along the flanks and the base and you will find cartouches of several different pharaohs cut at different depths and in different hands. Amenemhat II of the Twelfth Dynasty is generally taken as the original owner, but inscriptions of the Hyksos ruler Apophis, of Merenptah and of Sheshonq I were added later, each king appropriating the monument by writing his name on it. That practice of usurpation is exactly why the dating has been argued over for two centuries.
It was found in the ruins of the temple of Amun at Tanis in the eastern Delta around 1825, acquired by the British consul general and collector Henry Salt, and bought for the Louvre in 1826. It stood outdoors in the courtyard from 1828 to 1848 and then in the Galerie Henri IV before moving to this crypt in the mid 1930s. It is among the largest sphinxes anywhere outside Egypt.
Did You Know? At least four different pharaohs, spread over roughly a thousand years, carved their names onto the same sphinx, each claiming it as his own.
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