Who broke the Great Sphinx's nose?
The Great Sphinx of Giza is about 4,500 years old and has no nose. For two centuries one man has taken the blame, and he could not have done it.
A statue 20 metres tall lost a nose about 1 metre wide
The Great Sphinx has a lion's body and a human head. It is 73 metres long and 20 metres high, and it was cut straight out of the rock at Giza.
Most scholars say it was made about 4,500 years ago, for the pharaoh Khafre. The word "sphinx" comes from a Greek word that means "to squeeze", after a beast that strangled people who could not answer its riddle.
The Greek beast had a woman's head and wings. The Giza statue has a man's head and no wings, and scholars still argue about whose face it shows.
The nose was tiny next to the body, but you notice it first
Source: Wikipedia, Great Sphinx of Giza. The nose width is a commonly quoted estimate.
Almost everyone knows who did it: Napoleon
The tale says his soldiers used the Sphinx for target practice, or that a cannonball took the nose off. Some guides at the pyramids still tell visitors that Napoleon stole the nose and took it to the Louvre in Paris.
In one internet poll, 21 percent of people said they believed Napoleon did it.
A web poll is not a careful survey, so treat the number as a hint. The tale was already in print by the early 1900s.
Out of every 100 people polled, 21 blamed Napoleon
Source: The Napoleon Series, FAQ on the Sphinx. Self-selected poll, not a scientific sample.
Napoleon brought 151 scholars to Egypt, and they drew everything
In 1798 a 29-year-old Napoleon sailed to Egypt to cut Britain's road to India. He took about 55,000 soldiers, plus 151 civilian experts called "savants".
It was the first professional archaeology trip to the country. When he went home after Nelson sank his fleet, he left the army and the savants behind, and they kept working.
Sources disagree on the numbers: 34,000 to 55,000 troops, and 151 to about 167 scholars. The savants' book, the Description de l'Egypte, came out from 1809 to 1828.
The scholars were a tiny group, yet they made the best picture of Egypt Europe had seen
Sources: Linda Hall Library, Archaeology magazine.
Neither famous battle happened where its name says
The Battle of the Pyramids, on 21 July 1798, was fought about 16 kilometres (10 miles) north of Giza, at a place called Imbaba. The pyramids were only a distant view.
The Battle of the Nile was a sea fight in which the British wrecked the French fleet. So no cannon was set up in front of the Sphinx on either day.
A Danish captain drew the Sphinx with no nose in 1737
Frederic Louis Norden, a naval officer from Denmark, travelled up the Nile in 1737 and 1738 for his king. His drawings were printed in 1755.
His picture of the Sphinx's head shows no nose. Napoleon landed 61 years after that visit, and was not born until 1769.
An artist had no reason to rub out a nose. If it had been there, Norden would most likely have drawn it.
Years before Napoleon landed in 1798
Sources: Wikipedia, Norden, Smithsonian Journeys.
A medieval writer names a man: Sa'im al-Dahr, in 1378
Al-Maqrizi, a historian from Egypt, wrote that a Sufi named Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr broke the nose. He said villagers were leaving offerings to the Sphinx for better harvests, and the Sufi was angry about it.
An angry crowd then killed him. Al-Maqrizi was born in 1364, so he was only 14 in 1378 and wrote from what others told him.
Not everyone agrees. One report says a writer praised the nose around 1200, while others say it was damaged by the 10th century, and some blame the Mamluks.
Whoever broke it, the nose was gone long before Napoleon
Dates are as reported by the sources below. The sources disagree, so the shaded bar is a claimed range.
The face itself shows tool marks, so a person did this
Experts who studied the face found marks where long rods or chisels were hammered in. One is at the bridge of the nose and one is under the nostril.
The nose was then pried off, and the stone around it crumbled as it fell. In 2009 the Egyptologist Mark Lehner helped a team carve a copy of the nose with stone hammers and copper chisels to test how it could be done.
The marks show how it was broken. They do not show when, and the date is still argued.
Two places where tools were driven in
Sources: Wikipedia, Handshouse Studio.
Wind and sand wrecked the Sphinx's body, just not its nose
The Sphinx is carved from layers of limestone, and some layers are soft while others are hard. Wind and blown sand eat the soft layers faster, so the middle of the body has crumbled the most.
The head is cut from a harder layer, yet part of its headdress still fell off in 1926. In 1931 workers added a concrete collar to the neck.
Weather is a real enemy of the statue. For the nose, though, the tool marks point to a human hand.
Harder rock in the head, softer rock in the body
Schematic of layers described by Wikipedia and the Ancient Egypt Research Associates.
The Napoleon story lasts because it is a good story
A famous general facing a mysterious statue makes a great picture, and artists painted it. In 1886 Jean-Léon Gérôme painted Napoleon in front of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx in that scene already has no nose.
Zahi Hawass, Egypt's best-known archaeologist, has said Napoleon had nothing to do with it. Most experts now think a person with a chisel took the nose off, long before 1798, and the exact date and name are still unknown.
Why Napoleon gets the blame is our reading of the evidence. Nobody has proved it.
Painting: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bonaparte Before the Sphinx, 1886. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The case in six numbers
Years between Norden's 1737 drawing and Napoleon's 1798 landing
Wikipedia, Smithsonian JourneysYears between the reported 1378 attack and 1798
al-Maqrizi, via WikipediaSavants who went with Napoleon
Linda Hall LibraryTool-mark spots on the face: the bridge and under the nostril
WikipediaMetre, roughly, the width of the missing nose
Commonly quoted estimateShare of one web poll that blamed Napoleon
The Napoleon Series