The Great Sphinx was identified as Horemakhet — Horus-in-the-Horizon — from the New Kingdom onward, the colossal lion body housing the falcon god who rises with the sun between the two mountains of the horizon.
The Great Sphinx guards the entrance to the Duat at the western horizon, its position at the Giza necropolis marking the threshold where the dead begin their journey through the underworld toward resurrection.
The Great Sphinx guards the Giza necropolis, standing sentinel over the pyramid complex for over four and a half millennia as the most ancient and monumental protector of Egypt's royal dead.
Pharaoh Khafre is credited with commissioning the Great Sphinx around 2500 BCE, carved from the limestone bedrock of the Giza Plateau. The monument's face is believed to bear Khafre's likeness.
⚠ The attribution to Khafre is the scholarly consensus based on architectural alignment and geological evidence, but no contemporary inscription confirms it. Rainer Stadelmann and others have argued for Khufu.
Thutmose IV erected the Dream Stela between the Great Sphinx's paws around 1400 BCE, recording how the sand-buried monument appeared in his dream and promised him the throne of Egypt if he cleared the sand.
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