The Sphinx Gets Something to Smile About

The Sphinx is at least 45 centuries old, but the last few years have been tough ones.

First, there was a disastrous restoration project in the early 1980s in which many of its ancient stones were discarded and its north side was shored up with a layer of concrete 9 feet thick in spots. It later was found that, besides being ugly, the salt-laden concrete harmed the Sphinx’s limestone core.

Then there was the day in 1988 when a 700-pound hunk of the statue’s shoulder fell off, setting off a new, frenzied debate over how best to save what is one of the world’s best-known ancient monuments.

Finally, there has been almost a decade of slow preservation work during which the Sphinx has been crawled over, poked, prodded and sheathed in scaffolding, to the dismay of tourists.

But all that appears to be behind the Sphinx now.

With its inscrutable smile, it can look forward to being left alone, at least for half a century or so, restorers say.

In a gala ceremony Monday--complete with symphonic and operatic performances and a sound-and-light show--Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak declared the Sphinx healed after its recent traumas. The monument was then officially reopened by Federico Mayor, head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, who observed: “We have worked together to make sure the Sphinx of Giza remains a wonder of the world to come.”

For Egypt, it is a matter of pride that the entire $2.5-million repair job was carried out by its own experts--geologists, archeologists, artists and restorers. Zahi Hawass, the antiquities director of the Giza Plateau, who oversaw the project, got a presidential medal in gratitude.

Throughout the 20th century, monuments from Egypt’s rich history have suffered from well-intended but misguided attempts at preservation. Foreign archeologists have tended to give the Egyptians good marks for the effort to repair the Sphinx this time. But they deplore the fact that so much old stone had to be replaced with new. That, however, was unavoidable, because the ancient stones were misplaced after the 1982-87 restoration, the one that Hawass said almost “killed” the Sphinx.

Carved from the limestone of the Giza Plateau to guard the ancient Egyptian necropolis, the Sphinx was a tourist attraction even in ancient times. It was first restored by Pharaoh Tuthmosis IV, 1,000 years after it was built. Various Roman emperors, including Nero and Marcus Aurelius, also touched it up. But it survived most of its existence buried up to its neck in the sands that blow in from the western desert of Egypt.

When that cover was permanently cleared in a 1925-26 excavation by French architect Emile Baraize, the world found that the Sphinx’s surface had been eaten away by erosion, although flecks of the original red color preferred by the ancient Egyptians could still be seen.

In the years since, the monument has suffered a slow crumbling and flaking away of stone. The deterioration has increased year by year, with some experts blaming environmental factors such as air pollution and ground water seepage.

Hawass said the ground water problem was solved in the 1980s when a sewage system was installed for the village nearest the Pyramids; air pollution does not seem a major problem. He said the most important factor in the monument’s decay is the poor quality of the original limestone from which its core was carved.

“We took the covering stones out, and we found that the solid rock inside is nothing,” he said. “It is powder! Powder! And this is exactly what the architects . . . faced 4,500 years ago.”

The use of concrete to shore up the Sphinx’s northern flank in the 1980s damaged the inner limestone because moisture and salts were trapped there, accelerating the chemical process that was turning the core limestone into dust, he said. The new limestone casing lets the original stone “breathe.”

Recent scholarship has concluded that the Sphinx was an integral part of the funerary complex for Chephren, the 4th Dynasty pharaoh who is also known as Khafra and whose pyramid is second largest of the three Great Pyramids of Giza. The Sphinx, a lion’s body that is 66 feet tall, 242 feet long and topped with the head of a man, was meant to be a “manifestation of Khafra reborn as the sun god,” archeologists Vivian Davies and Renee Friedman have written. The monument was oriented so that the sun’s rays would illuminate the inner sanctum of its accompanying temple exactly on the first day of spring and autumn.

It was carved from layers of 50-million-year-old limestone that vary dramatically in quality. The head and face, modeled on Chephren himself, are in good shape because the stone there is the strongest. But the torso is badly worn. To slow the deterioration, restorers have coated threatened areas with a mortar made of sand, lime and water, the same materials used by the ancients.

To replace the stone casing on the sides of the Sphinx, 12,478 new limestone blocks were hewn from a quarry in Helwan, a few miles up the Nile. The stone was chosen to match the original as closely as possible.

Hawass said the Sphinx’s place in world culture cannot be overestimated. “If you ask any individual about the Temple of Karnak, they will never know it. But if you say the Sphinx, every child in every place in the whole world knows it,” he said.

Nasr Ramadan, an antiquities authority inspector looking over the final preparations for the gala ceremony, observed: “I spent seven years here to restore the Sphinx, and I am very, very happy. Because the whole world loves the Sphinx. . . . Now he has good health.”