Although the statue at Giza in Egypt is the most famous Sphinx, there is another.
According to Greek mythology, the original Sphinx was a female winged creature with the body of a lion that attacked travellers near Thebes and then strangled and devoured those who couldn’t answer her riddle:
“What creature has one voice yet becomes four-footed, then two-footed, then three-footed?”
Eventually, Oedipus defeated the Sphinx with the answer to the riddle:
“A human crawls on all fours when a baby, walks on two feet when grown, and uses a staff when old.”
In Egyptian mythology, the Sphinx is just as nasty but is wingless and male with the body of a lion.
Sphinx is the Greek word for “strangler.”
