Friday, December 12, 2008

What the Sphinx was made of



The next question I was going to ask was: "How did the structure of the Great Spinx hold up for so many years?"

Well like how the pyramids were built I thought the structure was similar to the Spinx, but they weren't... GRRR! Egyptians just want to make these projects hard on kids while they have better things to do... ugh... not cool Egyptians...

The Great Sphinx was made from a large knoll of poor quality limestone (not smart! one day the whole thing is just going to crumble because of a stupid choice they made!). Which at first I thought didn't make much sense because how could something made out of poor quality rock hold up for so long? (it didn't...) I thought it would be bound to wear down after a while with all of the sand storms that would come by because it was in the middle of a desert. (which it did...) Apparently the Sphinx did hold up or we wouldn't of known of it now a days. (but it didn't hold up that well because the beard and the nose fell off...)

Some scholars that studied the Great Sphinx tend to think that the knoll was a part of the quarry for Khufu's pyramid that was not exploited.

How the structure of the Sphinx compared to the pyramids differ is that the Sphinx is actually carved from a knoll of rock.

As I was saying earlier, I thought that maybe the weathering would wear down on the Sphinx since it was made of stone, which actually happened. Over the years erosion would wear on the Sphinx which made Egyptians have to use stone cladding throughout intervals in Pharaonic times. They also improved qualities of poor quality rock which helped keep the Spinx around long enough for us to discover it.

Something that I didn't know was that through the years, desert sand, wind, rain and sun have worn some parts of the stone on the Great Sphinx. The nose and beard have fallen off which I thought that it was just due to the fact of erosion but some part of the head might of been used as a target for gun practice during various times. Now scientists are treating the crumbling stones by treating it with special chemicals.

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