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With lion paws, the head of a ram, a falcon or a human, with wings or without, the Sphinx is a weird beast. In Greece it towers on a pillar and pronounces riddles, she obviously has breasts and is a female. But on the other side of the Mediterranian Sea? There a pharao’s head is on top of the lion’s body – and the sphinx is obviously male. In European Baroque and Classicism master stone masons reorganised the different ingredients once again, combined Greek and Egyptian features and integrated the resulting composit figure with its pharao’s head and female breasts into the cityscapes.
The most famous sphinx can be found in front of the pyramids at Gizeh, but the New Museum, home of the Egyptian collection in Berlin, offers ample material to add to this “gender debate”.