Sphinx
Mythological Narrative
A creature with the body of a lion, wings of an eagle, and head of a woman. She terrorized Thebes, devouring travelers who failed to answer her riddles until Oedipus solved her puzzle.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## The Theban Riddler
The Greek Sphinx is a winged lion-woman sent against Thebes. She asks the riddle of the creature that walks on four, two, then three feet; Oedipus answers 'man,' and she throws herself from the rock. Apollodorus and tragedy fix the episode as the city's entry-exam.
She is not the Giza guardian. Thebes's Sphinx eats the unlettered; Egypt's recumbent king watches the horizon.
## Sent against Thebes
Hesiod's *Theogony* calls her the Phix, a child of Echidna and Orthus, bane of the Cadmeans. Hera or Dionysus is named as the god who sent her, depending on the source. The riddle itself is not in Hesiod; it appears in later tradition and the scholia, and in Sophocles' *Oedipus Tyrannus* it is the answer to the riddle that makes Oedipus king of Thebes and so sets up his catastrophe.
Classical Art & Museum Artifacts
High-resolution museum artifacts, classical sculptures, pottery reliefs, and bronze idols preserving authentic historical representations of Sphinx.
Marble stele (grave marker) with a youth and little girl, and a capital and finial in the form of a sphinx
Sphinx of Amenhotep III, possibly from a Model of a Temple
Sphinx of Hatshepsut
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Sphinx.
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