The Great Sphinx of Giza is one of the most immediately recognisable monuments on Earth, yet standing in front of it still manages to catch most people off guard. Carved from a single ridge of limestone bedrock around 2500 BCE during the reign of Pharaoh Khafre, it stretches 73 metres long and rises nearly 20 metres high — the largest monolithic statue in the world. It bears the body of a crouching lion and the face of a king, though whose face exactly has been debated by Egyptologists for centuries. What's certain is that it once served as a guardian figure for the Giza necropolis, gazing due east toward the rising sun with an authority that millennia of wind erosion have done little to diminish.
Monument