SPHINX

RADU ANTONIA , CLS A 6-A B

 The sphinx

A sphinx is a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion with the wings of a falcon.
In Greek tradition, the sphinx has the head of a woman, the haunches of a lion, and the wings of a bird. She is
mythicized as treacherous and merciless, and will kill and eat those who cannot answer her riddle . This deadly
version of a sphinx appears in the myth and drama of Oedipus.
 Etymology

The word sphinx comes from the Greek, associated by folk etymology with the verb ,
meaning "to squeeze", "to tighten up".This name may be derived from the fact that lions kill
their prey by strangulation, biting the throat of prey and holding them down until they die.
However, the historian Susan Wise Bauer suggests that the word "sphinx" was instead a
Greek corruption of the Egyptian name "shesepankh", which meant "living image", and
referred rather to the statue of the sphinx, which was carved out of "living rock" (rock that
was present at the construction site, not harvested and brought from another location), than to
the beast itself.
 The riddle…

The Sphinx is said to have guarded the entrance to the Greek city of Thebes, asking a riddle to travellers to allow
them passage. The exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not specified by early tellers of the myth, and was not
standardized as the one given below until late in Greek history.

It was said in late lore that Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from
her Aethiopian homeland to Thebes in Greece where she
asked all passersby the most famous riddle in history:
"Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed
and two-footed and three-footed?" She strangled and
devoured anyone who could not answer. Oedipus solved the
riddle by answering: "Man—who crawls on all fours as a
baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and then uses a
walking stick in old age".
Greece

In the Bronze Age ,the Hellenes had trade and cultural contacts with Egypt. Before the time
that Alexander the Great occupied Egypt, the Greek name, sphinx, was already applied to
these statues. The historians and geographers of Greece wrote extensively about Egyptian
culture. Herodotus called the ram-headed sphinxes Criosphinxes and called the hawk-headed
ones Hieracosphinxes.

There was a single sphinx in Greek mythology, a unique demon

of destruction and bad luck. According to Hesiod, the
Sphinx ,here called "Phix“, was a daughter of Orthus and either
the Chimera (probably) or Echidna According to
Apollodorus and Lasus, she was a daughter of Echidna and
Typhon.
Bibliography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx