Original subtitles

It rises from the sands of the Egyptian desert, seeming to guard the great

pyramids of Giza. But surprisingly little is known about this great wonder

the ancient world.

How could ancient Egyptians, 4 ,500 years ago, sculpt a

statue as mighty as this thing?

It's just an amazingly monumental structure.

But it's silent. It doesn't tell us exactly everything we need to know.

For thousands of years, the Sphinx has guarded its many secrets.

The prevailing view is that you had human workers carving it away to make

Now another theory comes along that the bulk of it wasn't even done by human

beings. Now, we'll explore the top theories surrounding the origins and

purpose... of this mysterious monument.

Was the Sphinx built by the same person that killed his brother to become the

Pharaoh? It could be that the Sphinx is part of a celestial map.

In 1987, a team of researchers think they found hidden secret chambers that

located under the Sphinx.

Who built this massive statue?

And why was it made?

1403 BCE, the Giza Plateau of Egypt, home to the Great Pyramids.

Pharaoh Amenhotep II rules the land.

His younger son, Prince Thutmose, has come to Giza to hunt gazelle.

But this royal hunting ground has an extraordinary past.

If you go back around a thousand years, the Giza Plateau is a very important

place of monumental buildings.

It's there.

that some amazingly large pyramids are built.

However, at this time, it's fallen into disrepair.

Most of the structures have been covered or partially covered by the desert

sands, and it's largely ignored.

By the time of Prince Thutmose, the Giza Plateau is already over 1 ,000 years

old and already ancient. It's become this playground, really, for the royal

family. They race their chariots, they hunt, they use it for these different

expeditions.

So according to legend, Thutmose was out on a hunting trip and he was looking

for a place to get out of the hot, burning Egyptian sun.

And he found shelter next to this object. And as he got closer to it, it

out that this object was a massive stone head protruding from the desert sands.

He falls asleep and has a dream. And in this dream, a god comes to him, the god

Horus, who says, if you free my body from this sand, I will make sure that

you're king.

Because Prince Thutmose was not the heir apparent for the throne of Egypt, this

sounded like a great deal for him. And so Prince Thutmose then goes about

restoring this giant statue to its former glory.

Once the prince begins clearing away the sand, an extraordinary and mysterious

sculpture takes shape.

A towering figure carved from stone, now known as the Great Sphinx of Giza.

Its body is about 250 feet long, which is nearly a football

field long.

66 feet high.

And the shape of it is the head of a king and the body of a lion.

Some have estimated that it must have taken something like a million man

of labor to carve this thing. That would be the equivalent of something like a

hundred workers working full -time over the course of three years.

It is a marvelous statue.

And it's all made from one piece of limestone.

And Thotmose calls it Har Am Achit, which means Horus in the horizon.

Horus? who spoke to Thutmose in this dream, is a god associated with

but also with the sun god Ra.

And so after clearing the sands around this giant sculpture, Thutmose's dream

comes true. He does, in fact, become king in around 1400 BCE.

As king, Thutmose not only digs it out of the desert sands, but he also does

restoration work on the statue itself.

Analysis of pink remnants discovered on the statue reveal a fascinating truth

about its appearance.

Experts now believe the face and body of the Sphinx were painted a striking deep

red with dark eyeliner, while the Nemus, or royal headdress, bore the noble

colors of the pharaoh, a vibrant blue interlaced with gold stripes.

To commemorate his accomplishment, Thutmose places an engraved vertical

known as a stela between the statue's front paws.

King Thutmose, he put his dream on that stela and wrote it down, wrote exactly

what happened, that he fell asleep, that he had the dream, and the Sphinx made

him the next king of Egypt, all inscribed on the dream stela. Not only

tablet establish a connection between Thutmose and the Sphinx, but it

contribute seriously to the legend of this mysterious object known today as

Great Sphinx of Giza.

For a few hundred years, you have people traveling far and wide to come and see

the statue.

And that would include also travelers from outside the Egyptian kingdom.

So this is where we actually get the name, the Sphinx. It was called this

700 BCE.

It got this name from a Greek traveler who was coming to look at the statue and

thought it bared a resemblance to their mythological sphinx.

The sphinx of Greek mythology has the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and

wings. It's an altogether fearsome creature who, according to myth, asks

passerbys riddles, and if they can't answer, devours them.

That is very different from the Egyptian Sphinx, which has the head of a man and

the body of a lion, and is a guardian and protects the entryway to the next

life. Over the centuries, though, confusion has got these two mixed up,

such that we use the word Sphinx to describe this Egyptian artifact.

It's believed that for hundreds of years, the Egyptian Sphinx stood as a

of power and divine protection.

But as centuries pass and the kingdom of Egypt falls, the desert once again

begins to reclaim the mighty structure.

And so with it, the sands of time come back. They start to bury the Sphinx

until it's buried all the way up into its neck. It remains buried in this way

for thousands of years until 1817, when an Italian explorer rediscovers the

Sphinx and wants to figure out what's beneath it.

They set about to uncover the Sphinx from the desert sand. But unfortunately,

the task at hand is much harder than expected.

The sand keeps coming into their excavation pit, and it's just this near

impossible task for him to uncover the Sphinx, to the point where he actually

abandons the project altogether and gives up.

It's not until some hundred years later, when in 1922, the archaeologist Howard

Carter finds...

King Tut's tomb that reignites an interest in all things Egypt.

So now a French archaeologist mounts another expedition to go down and take a

closer look at the Sphinx, and he does a series of expeditions in the 1920s and

1930s. They're able this time to fully clear away the sand, and when they do,

they're just amazed at what they see, this, again, humongous sculpture of this

reclining lion with a human head.

Now that the Great Sphinx can be seen in all its glory, people around the world

are in awe of this ancient one.

The Sphinx is an icon.

When you see it for the first time, it's the world's largest mammoth statue,

at least for 4 ,000 years, and it's a mystery.

The kind of engineering and workmanship that would have been required to

construct this thousands of years ago is really quite remarkable.

But there's an even bigger mystery that still baffles the experts to this day.

What's most likely is that the Sphinx is a symbol of power to a pharaoh.

Now the question is, which pharaoh was it?

The first step in trying to figure out The architect who made the Sphinx is to

try to identify who the model was for the Sphinx's face. Almost certainly a

pharaoh. And so scholars have gone back and compared the image of the Sphinx to

the various statues that are still existing. And the closest match that

have found has been to the pharaoh Khufu, who was also the pharaoh who

the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is close by.

Khufu reigned Egypt for about 30 years, back in 2550

BCE. He has the biggest, most fascinating, most famous structure ever

created, the Great Pyramid of Giza, yet we only have one confirmed statue

that shows us his face.

The only named portrait that we have of Khufu is a tiny little statue that's

really only about three inches tall. It's got broad eyes across the face.

this small little three -inch statue didn't have a beard.

Most of the pharaohs that we see are depicted with a long beard. So the fact

that we have the sphinx head and we have the statue of Pharaoh Khufu, both

beardless, leads us to believe that maybe he's the one who had it built.

Khufu is probably more familiar to people as Cheops because this was the

Greek name for Khufu. And this is also why his famous pyramid

is called the Great Pyramid of Cheops rather than the Pyramid of Khufu for

people. The Great Pyramid of Cheops is massive. For around 4 ,000 years, it was

the tallest man -made structure in the world, around 482 feet high.

We know that the pyramids, of course, were burial tombs for the ancient

kings. But also for the kings, they would be a show of their power, their

majesty. So clearly, the Great Pyramid shows off the king's power.

And if Khufu wanted to show this in other ways, what better way than to

large sculpture combining his head with the body of a lion?

Some Egyptologists believe the artistic style of the Sphinx is consistent with

Khufu's era.

Scholars have found a lot of evidence of associations of lions with the reign of

Khufu. So it could very well be that whoever designed this monument was

on the lion as a metaphor for Khufu's reign.

If truly Khufu did order the sculpting of the Sphinx, then it makes

perfect sense, because looking at the Sphinx next to the Great Pyramid of

Cheops's Pyramid, it looks like the Sphinx is standing there with its

guarding the tomb of the king.

However, archaeologists have yet to discover any inscriptions or records

explicitly link Khufu to the Sphinx.

But if it wasn't Khufu, Who else had the power and ambition to build such a

bold monument?

Some people believe that the Sphinx was built by his successor, and specifically

one of his sons who rose to the throne through pretty scandalous means.

The enigmatic Sphinx has fascinated humankind for thousands of years, but

about its origins remain unknown.

Given the location of the Sphinx and its orientation with respect to the

pyramids on the Giza Plateau, including the Great Pyramid of Cheops, most

scholars think that there's a definite relationship between them and that all

them together project the majesty and power of the Egyptian kings.

Some believe the Sphinx wasn't built just to honor Khufu, but for a far more

sinister reason, one which could reveal its true maker.

Scholars believe that Khufu intended to leave his throne to his eldest son,

Khawav. But as so often happens in history, royal bloodlines don't end up

according to plan.

It is clear that there is a problem after Khufu's reign, and this gives his

younger sons a lot of time to kind of bicker amongst one another and decide

takes the throne. And the best way to take the throne was to get rid of the

person in front of you.

Prince Khawab was next in line to become the next king of Egypt.

Prince Khawab died suddenly while Khufu was still a king.

When one of the sons dies, the first in line to succession, there's always the

speculation, anyway, that maybe the death was deliberately carried out by

someone to make way for the next in line to succeed.

And as it turns out, that son who does succeed, Khufu, is Jadefra.

So not only was Jadefra not first in line, to succession and born of a lesser

wife of Khufu. He was sort of a black sheep of the family who was not very

popular with the people.

We know Jadefra experienced a lot of kind of chaos and discontent during his

rule. And so Jadefra probably would have been really concerned with

consolidating his power and making sure that the people understood that he was

in charge and that he was the rightful successor to his father.

Some researchers believe.

Jadephra tried to restore his good name by building the Sphinx. So it makes a

lot of sense that Jadephra would have been undertaking a lot of building

projects to commemorate and honor his father, who was a lot more popular than

was. And this might be why he had the Sphinx built, protecting his father's

pyramid. If Jadephra was the pharaoh who built this monument to his father, not

everyone appreciated his efforts.

In addition to having the nose of his statue, broken

off. His cartouches, these are Egyptian hieroglyphics that contain the name of

the king.

Those were damaged and defaced as well.

And this would mean that in the afterlife, he would be nameless. He

unknown.

The Sphinx may not be the only way Jadephra tried to memorialize his

a stunning archaeological find at Giza revealed.

So during excavations around the Great Pyramid of Giza in 1954, archaeologists

discovered a large pit that was covered with limestone slabs. And when they

eventually removed these limestone slabs, what they found was a large

boat from ancient Egypt, over 144 feet in length and over 4 ,500 years old.

A lot of scholars hesitate to decide what the boat was for.

And theories could be the boat was made for the king's body to be in, to come

all the way across the Nile and land right in front of the pyramids. But then

found no remnants whatsoever that the boat was ever used.

So the other theory, which is more likely to be the case, that the boat was

of a symbolic boat for the afterlife.

The stone slabs that covered over the pit in which the boat lies had

inscriptions on them which include the name of Jadephra. So it's quite possible

that Jadephra had this boat constructed for his deceased father Khufu. It

therefore, like the Sphinx, could have been made by Jadephra in honor of his

father.

But some experts dispute this claim.

Essentially, there isn't enough archaeological evidence to support the

he was the king who commissioned the Sphinx to be built. But this doesn't

out that it was one of Khufu's successors who had the Sphinx made. It

been another successor and not Jadefra.

Around the year... 2550 BCE, after roughly a decade on the throne, the

Jadephra dies.

Some scholars believe he may have been murdered.

It is believed that just as Jadephra killed his brother in order to take the

throne, Jadephra in turn was killed by his half -brother Khafre, who took the

throne from him.

During his reign, Khafre also showed an interest in building large -scale

structures. leading some to wonder if he might be the Sphinx's true architect.

All you have to do is take a look at the massive statues that were made for

Khafre, particularly in his valley temple at Giza.

Once you overlay the face of these statues on the Sphinx, you can see that

is resemblance.

But the problem is, Khafre had representations that showed him with a

looking at the Sphinx, The Sphinx doesn't have a beard.

During examination of the Sphinx in the 1980s, scholars actually noticed that

there was essentially a bump underneath the chin that might indicate that there

used to be a beard there.

It's quite possible that there originally was a stone beard on the

would make it more in Capra's likeness than his father, Pharaoh Khufu, and that

the beard might have just been lost to time, maybe vandalism, or it could be

lost due to essentially long -term erosion in the desert.

That's not the only potential link between Pharaoh Khafra and the Great

Khafra, like his predecessors, built a lot of structures on the Giza Plateau.

He built a huge pyramid for himself as well that's only a few feet shorter than

the Great Pyramid of Cheops. He also had a valley temple built there for

himself.

To a lot of Egyptologists, this close proximity makes us think that this was

part of one plan, right? To have the Sphinx built at the same time, maybe, as

this causeway connecting the temple to his pyramid.

The position of the pyramids, the temple, and the Sphinx line up during

celestial events with breathtaking results.

This temple has 24 stone columns, and...

24, of course, are the hours of the day.

There are also, in the Sphinx Temple, two niches on either side of the temple,

one on the east side and one on the west side. In the Sphinx Temple, on the

equinoxes, the sun rises in the east through the niche and then sets to the

west niche inside of the Sphinx Temple.

So it... puts together an interesting sort of tableau because you have the

Sphinx Temple, you have the Sphinx itself behind it, and behind that you've

the Pyramid of Khafre, all three of them being lined up to celebrate a celestial

event.

The spring and the fall equinox. Only those two days.

No other day. That's how perfectly calculated they were. It wasn't a

coincidence. The alignment of the stars.

the Sphinx looking at the dad shining in the morning in the form of a sun, and

the equinox day making the Sphinx and the great pyramids of his dad come into

one as a shadow.

Could Capra have built the temple, Sphinx, and pyramids as interconnected

structures to ensure his journey alongside his father into the afterlife?

Ancient Egyptians had a very strong astronomy field of study.

And you can tell from all the buildings they've built how aligned with the stars

they were.

And the reason is because they believed that they come from the stars and

eventually, when they are done with this life, they go be immortal up in the sky

with the stars.

So if the Sphinx was actually built by King Capra, this would make perfect

sense.

Modern science has found another link between Capra and the Sphinx, revealed

microscopic organisms hidden within the rock itself.

So when we look at limestone, limestone is a compilation of mud, sand, and

also sea organisms.

Pneumolites is what we call them. We look at these as the fingerprints of the

limestone, and it suggests...

that Khafre may have been the one that built the Sphinx because the same stone

is used in the Sphinx as is used in the structures that Khafre built.

According to some of these theories, they had originally sculpted the Sphinx

then later used the stone that was chiseled away from that for use in

other building projects.

But not everyone agrees this was all Khafre's doing.

Some scholars are skeptical whether he actually built his valley temple and

carved the Great Sphinx at the same time.

The Great Sphinx of Egypt has fascinated scholars and historians for centuries.

But who built it, and why, has long remained a tantalizing mystery. Is it

possible modern science can finally solve the questions around its origin?

In the 1980s, archaeologists make a great leap forward when it comes to

unraveling some of the mysteries of the Sphinx.

They begin to use radiocarbon dating techniques to try to determine the age

the pyramids. And if you can determine the age of the pyramids, you might know

the age of the Sphinx. Since you can't carbon date stone, they focus on the

organic materials they find.

Wooden coffins, human bones, reed mats.

The hope is to pinpoint when the tombs were being used.

This would mean that Giza was active, and if it was active, you have a rough

idea of when it may have been built.

Radiocarbon dating of a lot of these organic materials sets the building date

most of these temples and pyramids during the reigns of Khufu to Khafra,

that doesn't necessarily link or tell us when the Sphinx itself was built.

Some people suggest that the Sphinx was built earlier.

than the pyramids on the Giza Plateau. They think that, in fact, it was an

earlier ruler who ended up building the Sphinx.

One piece of evidence that has given rise to some theories that the Sphinx

date from a much earlier period than the nearby pyramids is something called the

inventory stela, which was discovered in 1858.

in that area.

The inventory stela, we think, dates to sometime in the 600 BCE.

The inventory stela lists everything being found in that location at the

It says that King Khufu's pyramid was built in the shadow of the

Sphinx, which led many...

Scholars to suggest that the Sphinx was already there when the Great Pyramid was

built. If the Sphinx predates the pyramids, then who is the architect of

colossal monument?

One clue may be hidden in the shape of the Sphinx's head.

The proportions between the head of the Sphinx and its body suggest that perhaps

there was a different head on the body of the Sphinx originally.

which was then recarved and reshaped to look like a human head. The head appears

to be too small in proportion to the body of the Sphinx. And this is unusual

because Egyptian art is usually very proportional.

Some suggest that the original statue's head may have ties to the underworld.

There are some theories this body could have originally been with the head of a

dog, which could mean that it was representing the Egyptian god Anubis. He

the god of funerary rites. He was actually the one that would kind of help

people get into the afterlife.

So this would make a lot of sense for then why later pharaohs want to build

their pyramids, their tombs right next to him.

Anubis was one of the oldest Egyptian gods. It's associated with mummification

in the afterlife.

He was popular during the first dynasty, which is long before the reign of Khufu

and his sons.

Some speculate that a much earlier ruler carved the Sphinx with the head of a

dog or jackal as a celebration of Anubis. But then, centuries later, after

Anubis has declined in popularity, another ruler, maybe Khufu, one of his

descendants, has the Sphinx re -carved in his own image.

Now, if that's the case, it would mean the Sphinx is centuries older than

previously thought.

Then, in 1998, new evidence emerges that backs up this idea.

A geologist by the name of Colin Reeder examined the erosion on the Sphinx.

And in his view, the head appears to be eroded from sand and wind,

whereas the lower portions, the body, of the Sphinx looks to be water erosion.

The base being subject to water erosion brings a lot of questions because

obviously we're in the middle of the desert.

But we do know that Egypt had this period known as the Neolithic Wet Phase,

anywhere from 4 ,000 to 9 ,000 years ago.

And that's 7 ,000, 8 ,000 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza was even

And if that is true, then there was a whole civilization that have created

this thing over 7 ,000 years before ancient Egypt as we know it.

Some scholars have tried to actually look at the sedimentary evidence around

Giza Plateau to try to figure out if the whole Giza Plateau was more like a

savanna with lush vegetation.

And what they found is that there is a now dried out...

canal or branch of the Nile that actually existed close by where the

located today.

Evidence of an ancient canal may indicate a civilization even older than

previously believed, one whose ruler could have built the mighty Sphinx.

If Colin Reeder is somehow right, the horizontal erosion that was on the side

walls of the Sphinx suggests that the Sphinx could have been there.

during the Neolithic time, the Wet Era.

In 2023, New York University publishes a study that might upend everything we

think we know about how the Great Sphinx was constructed.

Even though the prevailing view is that you had a king decide to do this, here

we are in 2023.

And now another theory comes along that the bulk of it wasn't even done by human

beings. A team of researchers decides that they want to see if they can

replicate what could have become this naturally occurring sphinx 4 ,500 years

ago in Giza.

The team from NYU found new evidence to suggest that perhaps more powerful

forces were at play even before any chisels hit the rock.

So the New York team was drawing on research from the 1980s by a geologist

space scientist, Farouk Elbaz.

So Elbaz spends his later career studying how desert landscapes form

using satellite imagery, using various geological surveys. He's trying to

out how landforms develop and how they evolve over time.

He has theorized that you can form these kind of features on the surface of the

Earth and other planets as well through wind and sand erosion that create a

large natural geological structure.

These are naturally occurring formations that are known as mud lions,

largely because what happens is that the softer mud floats away and that the

harder mud that's left often becomes the figure of a recumbent lion. And

they are found all over the world, largely in desert areas, but also are

on Mars.

According to this theory from Elbaz, rather than starting from scratch and

carving this whole thing, they might have seen this naturally occurring

formation that maybe resembled a lion or some form of animal and then worked on

it after the fact.

Could desert winds also be responsible?

for helping to create the Great Sphinx.

Researchers were determined to find out.

So this research team tried to recreate the geological conditions by getting

some soft clay and embedding within it harder bentonite clay and

then running water over that so that it would erode the soft clay on the

exterior, exposing some of that harder bentonite clay.

They simulated the weather conditions, what would have happened in the desert

under flooding.

The team uses 3D optical scanners to record how the shape changes as the clay

structure erodes.

The results were really surprising.

In fact, it was the natural formation of a lion that was left.

Not only do these erosion patterns create a lion shape, but they even...

give more perhaps distinctive features, things like paws and neck and even the

head of a lion as well.

So after a long time of that mound of limestone has been there, a king

or an engineer thought, and it looks to them like a body of a lion sitting with

its paws out.

So it may very well be, and it was nature that created it. And then ancient

Egyptians came in, just put their final touches.

and mated the mighty Sphinx.

Still, there's no way to be certain whether nature truly shaped the Sphinx.

skeptics have suggested that we know that erosion has been eating away at the

Sphinx since it was created, but this doesn't necessarily mean that these same

forces were used to create the statue in the first place.

We may never know with certainty who built the great Sphinx.

But the more compelling question may be, what else is it hiding?

While some Egyptologists and scholars have debated the age of the sphinx,

other groups have actually debated what potentially lies beneath the sphinx,

including the wild theory that there are secret rooms and chambers of hidden

knowledge located below the statue itself.

According to this theory,

There was a central library established somewhere in one location with all

of the wisdom and technology of the age in a repository of knowledge about a

vanished civilization.

And there are some who believe that that library is located below the Great

Sphinx of Giza. And if that's true, it's been buried there for thousands of

years.

Explorers have spent the last hundred years looking for hidden passageways in,

around, and under the Sphinx.

As it turns out, there actually are subterranean passages beneath the

In the 1920s and 30s, archaeologists did find some passages there. They found

one at the rear or the rump of the Sphinx.

and also another one between the paws of the Sphinx. However, when they

investigated these passages, they stopped in a dead end.

A half a century later, in 1977, American researchers are able to use new

-imaging technology to look further into these subterranean tunnels, and they

find some anomalies that they can't explain.

They're not really able to explore it further until 10 years later in 1987

a Japanese team was able to use an electromagnetic sounding survey to look

this further.

The Japanese research team from Waseda University in Tokyo, using

electromagnetic sounding to try to map underneath the Sphinx, found a water

pocket 8 to 10 feet underground, a couple of cavities behind the hind paws.

of the Sphinx and another cavity some six feet away which seemed to also

other anomalies within it. They also think that chamber located to the east

the Great Sphinx potentially contained some ancient artifacts within it. This

finds increased interest in trying to explore these anomalies that were being

found underneath the Sphinx.

But ultimately, for the safety of the monument, the Egyptian officials decided

not to continue exploration of these underground anomalies.

In 2019, though, the Egyptian government did give permission to research teams

to do some digging. And so they were able to investigate some of these

and passages under the Sphinx.

But alas, they didn't find anything.

Despite the dead ends, explorers continue visiting Giza.

to search for this legendary lost hall of records in 2021 dr manu this

is the day used new scanning technology and he did find what he believes to be a

man -made room that is about 40 feet by 30 feet

under the sphinx and he believes it's man -made because it has perfect

square right angles.

The fact that they found this man -made room under the Sphinx that scans have

revealed suggests that perhaps the Sphinx was constructed specifically to

or perhaps even to hide the location of this library.

Now, according to the scans, though, this room is flooded with water. That

that if there were all these records in there, they would have been destroyed by

water long ago.

One Roman historian suggested that the chambers beneath the Great Sphinx are

guarding knowledge, but instead protecting a mysterious tomb.

Proponents of the theory of a burial chamber find evidence in an ancient

the natural history of Pliny the Elder, who visited the Great Sphinx and around

77 or 79 CE.

He recorded his observations about the great structure in his book, Natural

History. Pliny wrote, The

problem

is no one has

been able to identify

that there ever was anyone named King Harmaeus. There is a list from the

of Siti of the 75 pharaohs, and he is not included among them at all.

We know, though, that this list omits many of the older pharaohs. So if

King Harmaeus was one of them, it would make the Sphinx even older than the

oldest current estimate.

Researchers continue to debate what the chambers beneath the Great Sphinx might

hold. But until archaeologists are able to excavate underneath the ancient

monument, the mysteries remain hidden.

Unfortunately, the Egyptian officials haven't granted any more permission to

actually dig and find out what is in this really interesting cavern. And so

there are people who are critical who say that the Egyptian government is

these secrets of the Sphinx. But really, until we can dig down there and see for

ourselves, we're just not going to know.

For decades, scholars have poured over every inch of the Sphinx trying to solve

the many mysteries associated with it.

For every time they think they come up with an answer, they always end up with

more questions about it. And to this day, the Sphinx is still a subject of

endless debate.

All across centuries, the Sphinx has been this mystical figure that is full

secrets. You just don't know what it is and who built it and why.

And today, the Sphinx has been associated with all these secrets. It's

that if you want to keep a secret, they...

They say, silent as the Sphinx. And it's true.

This structure is an enigma.

Even so, researchers continue trying to solve the riddle of this impressive

monument, hoping that one day new technologies will finally reveal who

built the great Sphinx of Giza and why.

I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.