S10E02

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. In this sequence of episodes we're travelling to the shores of the Nile and walking in the sand of ancient Egypt. Today I want to investigate the origins of the Sphinx as well as being the ancient world's most iconic statue, it's one of the most mysterious. Sands have hunted for clues to its nature for centuries and still debate the meaning of the hints they found. So let's saddle our steeds and set out from the safety of the city streets across the sands to the great Sphinx of Giza. Rah, the sun god is making his presence felt today. The harsh midday sun beats the back of your neck as you cross the dunes. You pull your hood over your head to protect you from its rays. It stops the burning sensation on your skin but does nothing against the immense heat. The flanks of your horse are hot against your thighs and you take pity on your loyal steed. As you reach the shade of some palm trees you dismount and give the poor beast some rest. Despite the cooling breeze in the shadow of the trees you keep your hood on to ward away the sand blowing in from the plain. Against the clear blue sky the pyramids of Giza stand out like giants teeth. The sight of them never ceases to amaze you, especially because their bright cladding reflects the daylight nearly blinding you. There are many stories about how they were built and for whom. You remember once overhearing a mystic talking about celestial alignment and the special positioning of the pyramids. Another time a priest of Rah pointed out how during the summer solstice you can see the sun set between the two great pyramids. In that moment nature imitates the hieroglyph that signifies the horizon. To witness that event you have to stand in a certain spot near a monument that is dwarfed by the pyramids. That is your destination now. You lead your horse out of the shade and across more dunes. Here and there outcrops of limestone jut above the sand. You observe their strange shapes as if they had been polished by the hand of Seth, the god of the desert and storms. Alone out here under the hard sun and against the gritty wind you feel very much that your fate is not in your own hands. As you approach the ridge the ground suddenly drops away to reveal a great ditch carved from the bedrock. At the centre of this quarry reclines a gigantic lion with the head of a pharaoh. Its blue and yellow headdress is striking against the brown sands and its fiercely red face makes the white of its eyes even brighter. You could swear that as you descend those eyes are following you. Luckily this mythological creature isn't real. It's a monster of stone made by the hands of men long before living memory. Some say it's a god, others say it's a guardian. But what exactly it's guarding no one can say. That is what you're here to find out. At the base of the statue you pull back your hood, roll up your sleeves and draw your blade. It's time to go exploring and you must be prepared for whatever you find. Assassin's Creed Origins allows us to see the Sphinx as it stood in 49 BCE. But the statue was already an antique mystery by then with its purpose long forgotten. Today I'm joined by Egyptologist Dr Chris Norton who not only knows a thing or two about the Sphinx but works tirelessly to make the study of ancient Egypt accessible to everyone. Welcome to Echoes of History Chris it's fantastic to have you here. Thank you very much for having me, great to be here. It's a pleasure. I can't wait to find out more about the Sphinx as well because I feel like it's one of those things that everybody knows about the Sphinx, everybody kind of feels like they know what it looks like, maybe it's something you could draw a picture of from memory even if you've never seen it. It's kind of a fairly ubiquitous image. But just to start us off with could you give us a description of what the Sphinx is and what it looks like please? Yes, it is essentially an enormous statue with a lion's body. It's a recumbent lion with four paws out on the ground in front as it were, its hind legs tucked underneath it and with the body of a human being wearing a particular kind of headdress, an Egyptian headdress which we call anemes and that is the sort of essence of the Egyptian Sphinx if you like. They can have various different animals for bodies and various different heads but lion plus human head is what we're looking at here. The whole thing is an enormous sculpture cut from the natural rock and it's weathered quite badly now in some places and it's been rebuilt on a whole series of occasions from ancient times down to more or less the present day. So if you look closely it's a bit of a mishmash of natural rock and blocks of limestone but that's the essence of it. So this isn't one of those occasions where people have bought tons and tons of stone to the spot to build it, it's actually carved from a piece of rock that was already there? Yeah it is exactly. So the Egyptians were very capable of bringing huge pieces of stone fashioned into the images of the king or gods normally into position wherever they wanted them but in this case this is far from the natural rock. So most probably this was at least partly a natural outcrop of rock which from the off naturally had the shape of something I suspect and the Egyptians had the idea. They were quarrying around it actually for stone to build other things and either from the beginning or at a certain way through that process somebody realises oh look maybe we could make a statue. I quite like the idea that someone's like what we're going to do this manky big piece of rock that's sticking out, I've got an idea. Yeah, yeah exactly. And funnily enough actually not to get to the conspiracy theories too early on in the pod but there are other areas of the natural bedrock of the Giza Plateau which have weathered or sort of part weathered partly being cut and which now look a bit like a sphinx which has got the conspiracy theories all jumping up and down because you know maybe there's another sphinx and there's not it's just a bit of rock that looks a bit like one. I'm definitely coming back to conspiracy theories in a bit though. Okay. And in terms of age when are we talking about for the creation of the sphinx originally? So the conventional view is that it was cut during the reign of Pharaoh Kaifra who is a Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, the fourth in the sequence in the fourth dynasty and he reigned somewhere around 2600-2700 BC. So early on in dynastic Egyptian history the reason I mention conspiracy theories is because it and indeed lots of the monuments at Giza are unlike some monuments elsewhere in Egypt not covered with inscriptions naming the person who is responsible for them. We're sort of not entirely short of inscriptions but there just aren't that many and this gives rise to questions over whether it was really built by Kaifra or whether in fact it was built slightly earlier by his predecessor Khufu or whether and you know the upper limit of the speculation is that it's maybe thousands of years older but the consensus conventional view is that it's coming up to sort of 4,700 years old. Which is pretty old. I mean it's an impressive thing to still be there as well. So you have an idea that you could give us of its dimension so obviously in the game you can clamber all over it but how big is it for someone who's never been to see it? Could you give us an idea of the scale? It's the size of sort of a, the sides of it are the size of a two or three story building and so if you found yourself on the back you know you'd be like a little sort of ant running around rather than a human being you know straddling the thing like you would ride a horse. It takes a good five or so minutes to walk around it to give you a sense that's a sort of leisurely walk in the sunshine around it but it's a very very large thing. A quite fancy leisurely walk in the sunshine around the Sphinx which I'm sure you've done before but I haven't. I have done a couple of times actually yeah I know I've been very fortunate to be able to do that it's the area immediately around it the quarried area is not accessible to the public most of the time but for things like TV projects I've had the chance to go down which is really really great because in fact it's quite it's not difficult but it you're inevitably because of the way the site is managed you're sort of led to certain points on the Giza plateau that give you a good view of the Sphinx and a good view of the pyramids and that sort of thing but it does it does mean you don't get to see things from all angles so when you get to walk around it you you see things you know the hind quarters I mean nobody's top priority is to see the Sphinx's bum but it is very interesting actually and it is cut very beautifully actually the body of the lion with the as I say these it's hind legs kind of tucked underneath it and it's its tail which is present curled around the side of its body around the right hand side of its body it's easy to miss those things in just looking at the the head and shoulders basically which is the famous the much more famous part of it and of course if you want to do that thing of going and taking a photograph of yourself sort of in position as if you were kissing it which is the thing to do and then then you know you need there is a certain spot you can go to to go and do that and most people go there you know take it all in and then go again and if you if you do get to walk around yeah there's a lot to see yeah fantastic and do we have a sense of what it would have looked like when it was new if we assume the conventional wisdom it's it's about four and a half thousand years old and it was carved from the rock would it for example would it have been painted yeah good question and so yes it would have been and in fact there are traces of paint still on it so I'm not sure to what extent those are visible when you visit but if you can get up close enough the flesh of the pharaoh's face is painted as you would expect in a kind of sort of reddish brown colour which is which is the convention in Egyptian art for human or male flesh I should say it's different for women the Nemez headdress it seems was was painted as well this is the same headdress by the way that Tutankhamun famously wears in the in the solid gold death mask so in that case the the stripes on of the headdress and the Sphinx's headdress is also striped they aren't always but this one is striped in the case of King Tut's death mask these and these are made of gold and royal blue lapis lazuli and there are traces of paint there too the other thing of course is that it has worn it did have a beard at one point and fragments of that are here and there you can go and see a chunk of that in the British Museum if you would like to there was a ureus and then I suppose as we mentioned at the start the body is is quite badly worn now and it's been restored so actually if you look closely it is a bit of a it is a bit of a mishmash now of eroded limestone and then patches of limestone blocks and I think we have to assume that you know originally it would have been cut smooth and in fact so whether where the limestone has weathered it's it's interesting I'm not a geologist but it's weathered more in certain layers in the rock than in others which gives it this kind of bumpy kind of surface and obviously that's the result of wind and perhaps to some extent rain runoff over the centuries but it would it would originally I think you know have been a kind of perfect a perfect looking thing and painted yes yeah what is a sphinx in Egyptian mythology why is it a creature that they would build a statue for there good question we don't know so yeah so sphinx is common in Egyptian art and more so almost in architecture most of the time when you see them they are statues which are lining things like processional roots you sometimes get them in pairs you do get them in pairs Egyptians are very keen on symmetry so you know typically you might have them either side of the doorway or something like that and then in some cases you have many many of them dozens and dozens of them you know lined up either side of the entrance route to the temple and they don't always take the same form so as I mentioned earlier they in this case we've got a lion's body and a human head head of Pharaoh that's not entirely uncommon but you can also get jackals sometimes involved and sometimes those are entirely jackal jackal body jackal head and sometimes Rams and jackal representing the god Anubis by the way so that would that would be a kind of Anubis has connections with the mummification of funerary rites so that would be in a funerary context ram headed ram sphinxes are connected with the god Ammon who was the Egyptians principal god certainly from the new kingdom onwards so so they would they would represent Ammon there's no consistency is what I'm heading towards saying here so there's no sort of rules and in the case of the Sphinx things are even sort of stranger in the again as I mentioned we're short of inscriptions and quite often it's not possible to be a hundred percent confident of identifying a god or goddess on the basis of what they look like or even on the basis of what they're doing the clincher is is the hieroglyphic inscription and we don't have those in the case of the Sphinx or rather we don't have inscriptions that are contemporaneous with its construction what we do have is a is a little stealer which was erected over a thousand years later and placed in between the pores just in front of the kind of chest if you like and that refers to the Sphinx as being a composite solar deity so in this case it seems to represent some form of the sun god but the other thing I suppose it's all about it is that it's it's without parallel they there's no other there's no other giant rock cut Sphinx like this anywhere else and it's it's on its own as well it's not it's not one of a pair in this case although as I mentioned there are people that want to see funny lumps of rock as being second Sphinxes at Giza and that inscription on on the stealer in between the pores as I mentioned is from over a thousand years later so we can't be absolutely certain the conception of what the Sphinx was in the new kingdom in the time of T and it just looked cool so they did it and you know and then years later somebody goes oh it's the sun god yeah desperately trying to read a big plan into something that was actually we've got a a lump of rock over there the easiest thing to do with that is to turn it into a Sphinx yeah exactly yeah I favor that um take on humankind take the easiest option um yeah so so when we when we talk about these Sphinx we're talking about this statue but a Sphinx is is kind of a catchall term for something that is representative of gods and can be a bit of a mash-up of animals and humans sometimes yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah absolutely right so the Sphinx is the big one at Giza a Sphinx can be yeah lots of different things and and that as far as I know you know they they don't necessarily have you know such such clear and great meaning they are they're sort of adornments a lot of the time but but not necessarily anything terribly significant so in Assassin's Creed the the Sphinx turns out to be a tomb that you can go into do we know if it's hollow was it ever designed to be a tomb there there are cavities within it um but without any clear sort of explanation as to what they are and some of those at least might have been natural fishes or voids in in the rock Giza is a cemetery and there are certainly hundreds of tombs there and indeed the pyramids were tombs but the Sphinx itself it seems to have been part of a plan to develop the landscape at Giza under Kaifrai if we're right in thinking that and so Kaifrai has a pyramid it's the middle one of the three main pyramids that pyramid is connected to what we imaginatively call a pyramid temple which is a little cult building directly next to the pyramid on the east side on the east face a causeway then leads down the plateau the plateau slopes downwards eastwards towards the Nile and at the base of that causeway is what we call a valley temple that's part of the standard pyramid complex by this point the sphinx is is sort of next to the bottom end of the causeway and directly in front of it and directly next to the valley temple of Kaifrai is another temple which we call imaginatively the sphinx temple and that all seems to have been part of a unity so if that's right then the sphinx is the sphinx and its temple is connected to Kaifrai's burial place cult place you know all the buildings that were provided for his his funeral and his afterlives but but other than that you know the sphinx itself is not a tomb and in what in in what way it's connected to Kaifrai's finry cult is not clear yeah and i guess if it was a much more opportunistic thing that it happened to be a piece of rock that looks something like that anyway it's it's less likely to have been carved specifically to be there to act as a tomb it's kind of a decoration maybe rather than a functional building yes i think yeah yeah i think so like like i say i mean there there are these voids there which have got people very excited but there's no clear there's no clear function to them they are not cut chambers you know as such they are just spaces and so you know you can read what you want to into that but it was very possible that there's there's nothing to it at all and the other thing in assassin's creed that you come across is a stone tablet that suggests that the sphinx represents a pharaoh so maybe Kaifrai if it's attached to his pyramid kind of thing could there be any mileage in that could it be a representation of the face of a pharaoh or or is that reading too much into it no it's not no and in fact the conventional view is that it is the face of kafrai um again i mean again that's based on the fact that the sphinx and the temple appear to have been a part of a grand design for that part of the giza plateau and that grand design we attribute to kafra so if it's anybody it's him and you know colleagues of mine have tried to to look very closely at the face and you know scans have been done of the face and and and those have been compared to known statues of kafra there's a very famous one which was in fact found in the valley temple now in the egyptian museum you know and there are people that say oh yes it it's it's kafra's face and then there are other people to say no it's not kafra's face it's somebody else's face maybe it's jeddah fra his immediate predecessor on maybe it's kufu lots of Egyptologists me included will tell you that um very few statues are ever attempts to capture the likeness of anyone you know they're just idealized images so even if it was intended to be the image of of pharaoh kafra there's no way well i don't think it's a very it's a very safe way of doing it to to look at other statues and say oh look it looks the same must be him yeah and i i guess you know as a medievalist you look at medieval art and quite often that is an idealized version of what a king should look like it's not necessarily meant to be facially representative of exactly what he looked like what they're giving you is the ideal picture of a king right exactly yes exactly just imagine how much more handsome we would both be if uh if we had uh artists to create statues of us we could also imagine parts of our beard ending up in the the british museum yes exactly yeah so you've mentioned i mean i i probably need to get into this idea that there are lots of theories about what it was so it seems like you think it was kind of an opportunistic use of a lump of stone that was there and was almost the right shape anyway but what are some of the kind of wilder theories about what it was and how it came to be there the one that is the go-to for everybody is that um it is in somehow in some way connected with a lost hall of records which is underneath the sphinx which preserves all the knowledge of a lost a lost ancient civilization i don't know a great deal about this but there's a number of pseudo archaeologists who want to believe that such a thing does exist so that there was a much older civilization in ancient egypt which was very sophisticated in advance and um had lots of technology that subsequently became lost and um there was lots of um you know had lots of knowledge and that this was all set down uh somehow and and and preserved and it happened to be preserved in this this hall of records this chamber which is in the sphinx or under the sphinx or something like that and in fact it's this ancient civilization that was responsible for the construction of the sphinx and the construction of the pyramids so that's why uh you know i mentioned earlier that uh the the age of the sphinx is for some people is in is in doubt just to be absolutely clear the archaeological evidence all points to it the consensus view you know the fourth dynasty probably the time of kar-fra if not maybe one of his immediate predecessors or successes so you know roughly 2700 years ago but that that idea doesn't seem to want to go away for for people that want want to believe it so despite the fact that you know there is there is no chamber and all sorts of investigations have been done in and around looking for it and there are cavities and there are of course tombs cut all over the giza plateau including you know subterranean teams cut into the rock there are all sorts of spaces that if you really want to believe a space perhaps could could be could be seen to be a hall of records if you want to think like that but none of them found you know with any records in unfortunately but but why let evidence get in the way of a really good story yeah right yeah i think i it's one of those things it sounds like you know it's the idea that there is a version of the library of alexandria that's still there waiting to be found you know that all of this stuff isn't lost somehow and we might one day get to it and it's also got lots of elements of the indiana jones to it hasn't it that there is this mythological stuff hidden somewhere if only we could find it yeah yeah yeah exactly it seems to me that part of the thrill of um of archaeology and and of ancient egypt is the idea of something being hidden and then something and then that thing being revealed and and obviously the more interesting that thing is you know the better the better you know digging up a pencil sharpener or something is not it's not terribly interesting digging up something blingy like gold is very exciting you know and i think the discovery of the tomb of toutan commune which is almost too good to be true is is a large part of the reason why egyptology is so uh so popular with with people but i suppose if it's not sort of bling and treasure then the other thing that people are interested in is is knowledge yeah and for some reason this idea that there's this secret hidden mystery you know words like that that attach to this sort of stuff the idea that those things could exist if only we could find them or you know unlock the mystery it's sort of like the da Vinci code plays on that doesn't it and indiana jones like you say and from time to time that that stuff you know does that actually happen um you know metal detectorists might come across a horde of golden coins harold carter digs up an intact tomb of pharaoh that's absolutely full of golden treasure the thing with the thing with the hall of records thing is that it's always the wrong way of doing archaeology of course to have it in mind that they have the thing that you want to find in mind and then look for that archaeology works the other way around you you go to the place and you see what's there and then you interpret it and that geezer an awful lot of seeing what's there has been done and as boring as it might be for people who want a hall of records it's not there have you ever wondered if the hanging gardens of babylon were actually real or what made alexander so great join me tristan hues twice a week every week on the ancients from history hit where i'm joined by leading academics best-selling authors and world-class archaeologists to shine a light on some of ancient history's most fascinating questions like who built stone henge and why what are the dead sea scrops and why are they so valuable and were the spartan warriors really as formidable as the history books say join me tristan hues twice a week every week on the ancients from history hit wherever you get your podcasts i think it's interesting how all of the space into which we we don't know for certain can be filled with all of these various things and i and i guess things like you know the pyramids there are still spaces in the pyramids that we don't know what they are we know the space is there but we don't know what they are and i guess all of that plays into this idea that there is still much more to be found out and it could be this or it could be that yeah absolutely right yeah yeah that that's that is the that is the problem it's where you've got those gaps there are there are voids in the pyramid um it's a it's a funny it's a funny situation um not that long ago the last couple of years you you probably know this um technique called muon tomography or muography has been has been applied to the great pyramids and they detected voids that was there was a little flurry of excitement around that and flurry of excitement in the media sad almost as it is to have to accept it at that point initially all we could say was there's some voids you know we can't tell you anything more than that and egyptology is so is so fortunate in having such a super abundance of inscriptions that literally tell us what things are when we don't have them we are so much at a greater disadvantage and the and the the the pyramids at this point in history were not inscribed so in fact in the last year or so one of those voids that was detected by the muon tomographers in the great pyramid has has now has now been inspected via a keyhole camera that was was pushed inside had a look round so we can now see what this is it's um it's a small room with a with a pented um a painted roof triangular we can't really say anything about it there's nothing in it there's no inscriptions um there's no precedent for this you know we've got no we've got no parallels so again you're you're absolutely right that the the door is then open that can be whatever you want it to be but um but if you if you lead from the evidence there does come a point unfortunately but this is terribly dissatisfying to people that does come a point in archaeology um of the of the ancient world particularly where you just have to say we don't know but you know based on what we do know from elsewhere this could be for storage or it could be for some you know ritual is the go-to isn't it for archaeologists when they don't know they don't know the answer but we can't really say much more than that yeah well i i could confidently talk about those voids because i watched a fantastic program on the tv with some guy called chris naughton talking to daro brean about the voids in the pyramid so oh yeah yeah we had we had fun with that yeah if the sphinx then was part of sort of a complex that maybe had some religious significance around the pyramids and lots of temples around it when does it lose that and sort of become more of a tourist attraction oh that's a really great question if we follow the consensus for you and the sphinx and those pyramids are cut in the fourth dynasty as royal tombs and associated buildings geezer then you are absolutely right has a has a life of its own that is is still going so that stele that i mentioned for example which is between the pause of the sphinx erected by pharaoh tatm nezoh the fourth of the 18th dynasty who reigned in something like 1400 bc so well over a thousand years after we think their parents were built part of part basically what that um what that stele says is it's a legitimizing tool for tatm nezoh the fourth who who we deduce must have had some reason for feeling threatened as pharaoh and he tells us that he went to have a snooze um by the sphinx um at a certain point um and the sphinx was completely covered in sand at this point or not or you know almost and the sphinx visits him in a dream and says look um mate if you can just clear the sand from around me then i'll make you king and that's hey presto that's what happens so he he's legitimate king but it of course you know by the by it shows us that the sphinx had sanded up um and there is there is other activity at the site there was a little temple built close to the sphinx in the time of amanoh set the second and predecessor of tatm nezoh the fourth so there was an interest and then um i mean i'm skipping through history um very rapidly here but you've got a you've got a whole spate of new tombs being cut around the causeway of kaifra and elsewhere in the 26th dynasty so the the site is still very much in use as a as a sacred space and as a cemetery site at this point and of course i suppose uh crucially at that time religious beliefs are not the same but it's still basically the same you know paganism same pantheon of egyptian gods there is obviously a change at the point um at which paganism is supplanted by christianity in egypt and then subsequently by islam but the pyramids and the sphinx never stop being something that people want to go and see so even when the site was still in use as as a cemetery a sacred place place for the worship of pagan gods yeah i think we can imagine that people might have gone there for those reasons you know in order to be pious and religious there's almost like a pilgrimage site in ancient egypt yeah i think i mean in fact geezer geezer comes to be supplanted that way by sakara which is another pyramid cemetery site slightly slightly further to the south which is there's much more activity there in later times it's closer to the ancient city of memphis it may be you know it could could be that that's at least a part of the um the explanation for it but i think you know that probably even in times when people were still visiting sites like this for religious purposes they can't have failed also to have done the equivalent of taking a selfie of themselves you know in front of the pyramid and it would have been i think you've got to assume it would have been a thing to do to go and see them and certainly that even even beyond the point at which they still hold any religious significance for people after paganism has died out they they do very much become something that people want to go and visit and that's that's true of medieval arab writers and then and then in later times european and other visitors as well i guess the crucial change over point really is is that point at which its religious significance alters but i suspect that there's you know the the idea of warnings going to just gawp at them has never gone away yeah and i guess that fact that continued finding of a reason to go there is part of the reason why they survive so well because they they might lose their the immediate significance the reason for which they're created but they're still a thing to go and see to blow your mind yeah yeah that's true that is true and yet although it is the case that monuments get dismantled from time to time not the pyramids so sometimes monuments get dismantled in places where let's say sort of in a sacred space where the where the area in which you can build is very restricted so if you want to build a temple there's already a temple in the way or there's not enough space then you might dismantle somebody's temple and build your own sometimes they were recycling stone but i guess the main reason why the the great pyramid is never dismantled is that it would have just been too difficult apart from anything else there might have been somebody saying you know hey let's not dismantle that because you know good good money for the locals in terms of tourism and that sort of thing undoubtedly i sound like i'm joking but that would undoubtedly have been true but more than anything else i think it would have just been too difficult some of those blocks would just be too difficult to move and the the geezer pyramids are so solidly built they haven't really needed any help to survive and it's worth pointing out as well that the outer most layer of stones were removed and so we're told partly used for the construction of medieval Cairo so you know whoever was doing that certainly didn't care that the the the outer casing was coming off they just they just wanted the building materials but they they obviously didn't go further and like i say i my guess would be maybe there was some sort of pride in it or some sense that was you know these are too important but i suspect it might also just be that it's just too difficult yeah so if you want to be remembered for eternity just build a monument that's far too difficult for anyone to get rid of yes exactly yes and i guess the sphinx there's not so much the option to dismantle the sphinx in the sense that it's carved from a solid piece of rock it's not constructed there yeah exactly yeah yeah removing any part of that would have involved actually cutting stone and and when people are recycling building material that that's what they're trying to avoid is cutting cutting stone what they want to be able to do is just lift a ready-made block out of a temple wall and move it somewhere else to build something else so there's a story that the sphinx has no nose because of napoleon is there any truth in that or is that up with napoleon firing his cannons at the pyramids as not quite true there is no truth in it um no and um fortunately because some of those travelers uh we're talking about who who visited egypt to go and see the sights and did so before napoleon's armies arrived made drawings uh of the sphinx and although they are of sort of varying degrees of accuracy and realism they they make it very clear that the nose was was missing before that point so it's a nice well it's not a very nice story it's an unpleasant story but it's not true yeah fair enough and thank god that no one is ever relying on my drawings of historical monuments know what they look like because i can't draw to save my life and i've had to do drawing as part of my my work in some cases um yeah yeah um does the sphinx need does it have constant maintenance does it need restoration how how long could we expect it to last if in its current state oh that's another really good question matt you've got a really really great question it's almost like it's almost like you know what you're doing i wouldn't go that far don't let news of that get out no sorry that sounded really awful mean no of course uh i'm trying to say you're the pro here of course it reminds me that i was at i think it was actually darshaw which is another of these pyramid sites a little while ago and looking i found myself with with time on my hands and looking quite closely at some of the blocks that you used to build um actually a um a minor pyramid and a similar era by the way just slightly in fact slightly older than the nagiza pyramids and built during the reign of ferris snifferu we think first king of the fourth dynasty and these exhibit those same those same weathering patterns where some parts of the limestone have weathered more quickly than others and so it's as though you know you can imagine in the in the natural rock layers layers are deposited over time and those layers although superficially they might they might look sort of similar actually are slightly differently composed and because of that they they weather at different rates and that's why at giza where the rock's been exposed including on the body of the sphinx you get these lumpy bumpy areas where the rock is eroding at different rates it struck me when i was looking at these blocks that the egyptians would never have known this and they would they wouldn't have known and they couldn't you know no one could ever know what's going to happen in the course of thousands of years the egyptians hoped that their monuments would last this long and they called their mortuary temples mansions of millions of years you know in the anticipation that they would last as long but they could have had no no way of knowing what was going to happen and i suppose to the same extent we have no way of knowing you know we can see what's happened in the last few thousand years to the natural rock presumably if nature were to have its way that process would continue eventually i mean i guess eventually fast forward enough thousands of years and there'd be nothing left at all so the sphinx has been patched as i mentioned the last of that patching happened quite a long time ago now and i think probably rather subtler techniques would be used now than just you know adding on blocks of stone it's being monitored i suppose the thing is that the process the process of erosion happens so slowly there's no sort of urgent need or at least it's not felt there's any urgent need to do anything at the moment but yeah i guess if we were to return to the subjects in a future pod say in 50 000 years time we might well see that that i don't know the sphinx is you know enclosed in an airtight dome yeah yeah but we'll have to come back in 50 000 years when we're both uh frozen beards in the british museum and yes consider the state of the sphinx then yes exactly yeah and before we finish i just wanted to talk a little bit about uh so during lockdown during the pandemic you used assassin's creed as part of a project called playing in the past can you just tell us a little bit about that and why why you did that yeah gosh that was um uh yeah unexpected um and extraordinary experience and essentially i was writing a book about um cleopatra a book for children about cleopatra and uh the illustrator needed a kind of um need some visual references for what alexandria would look would have looked like most most of the story of cleopatra on the egyptian side anyway is set in cleop is set in alexandria and we know a certain amount about alexandria and its buildings and can imagine what it what it might look like and i knew there was a guy called jon-clo goldvan an egyptologist an artist who who is very well known within egyptologies but published a load of reconstruction paintings of of sites and i had those in mind and i i wanted to to find some of those to be able to send to the illustrator this is in lockdown so it's just in fact at my dad's house looking after him um with an internet connection but no library and googling you know reconstructions of alexandria and this game assassin's creed uh origins kept on coming up and i was thinking well this is no good to me because i'm not a gamer and i don't have the game and i'm on a mac i can't get the game and this got i got kind of frustrated enough with this and then i just sort of yelped on on twitter can somebody help i you know i just need to get i need to get some images um and i i'd done enough digging around by this point to know that there was a discovery tour a sort of version of the game or a part of the game where you don't actually have to do the game playing you can just walk around the environment i thought well this this sounds amazing i'd love to do this and um so a few helpful sort of gamer archaeologists egyptologists in my network on on twitter came back one of whom uh somebody called gemma renshaw who's an egyptologist phd student and gamer who very kindly offered to show me around the game virtually via zoom connection and a colleague of mine friend a colleague of mine kate shephard with whom i was doing a podcast at the time said well you know i'll join too this looks like fun so the three of us had this virtual tour and gemma it turns out had for a long time wanted to use assassin's creed as a way of as a way of teaching ancient egypt and so kate and i neither of us game is completely bowled over kate by the way is um is a professor of the history of science specializing in in egyptology at the university of missouri in the states yeah we were both absolutely blown away by the world of ancient egypt in assassin's creed i ended up buying an xbox from argos up the road in north chine in sari and um and got the game i'm useless at video games um but the discovery tool was great because because i could just run around and um and not not have to worry about being shot or killed and it's amazing i absolutely loved it i absolutely loved it and i got to know that obviously ub soft really do their research and uh had a team you know dedicated to making sure that everything you see as far as possible is based on whatever evidence we have available whether that's archaeology or or descriptions from writers like strabo who who who left quite a comprehensive description of alexandria already quite long story slightly shorter jemma proposed to try to get some funding from her university the university of south ampton to run a series of online tours through various parts of the game focusing on various aspects with me and kate and a series of other sort of handpicks experts so we we did this we we broadcast these sessions via twitch they were recorded and uploaded to a page at youtube although youtube subsequently um i i gather just deleted all those videos so they the recordings still exist but the youtube page was taken down i don't know why a few gaming publications picked this up and eventually the news found its way to ub soft um ub soft wrote about it for their website we we had a journalist from ub soft talked to us um online about what we were doing and the final session of our series of online tours was a panel discussion involving me jemma uh kate stephanie mosa who's professor of reception studies in the archaeology department at the university of south ampton and a guy called maxime his last name escapes me who who was the person at ub soft responsible for the development of the game or the historical aspects of it anyway so um so that seemed like uh um an incredible kind of affirmation that what we were doing was um was something sort of interesting and yeah yeah what else can i say i i was and still am knocked out by how how good the game is it's by far and away the best i think recreation of of ancient egypt that i've ever come across and to be able to immerse yourself in it in the way that the game allows you to do is is great and i'd encourage anybody to to have a go it's a fascinating way in which so the archaeology and history can intersect with modern gaming you know that it's easy to dismiss gaming as something that the youth do and it's irrelevant and it's a waste of time but actually there's there's there's value to it for academics as well and i find that really really interesting that that world is recreated well enough by a video game company that academics enjoy exploring it and looking around it and getting a feel for being in ancient alexandria yeah absolutely i think alexandria is the is where origins is is at its best actually because and i've i've given lectures on alexandria since so little of the archaeology survives so you know we are really we're really dependent on strabo's descriptions and then you know what we can sort of say about the development of the the city since ancient times it sort of shrinks and it moves a bit in the medieval period and then and then it gets completely swallowed up by modern alexandra from the late 19th century ad onwards but there's very little to show people and in in archaeology and egyptology we're very we're very accustomed to being able to show people sights and monuments you know egypt is a very very visual culture you know and there's always there's always tons of stuff you know whether it's whether it's a temple or a pyramid or you know houses even or just you know brightly painted objects of various kinds there's always stuff to show and alexandria kind of breaks that rule if you like it's it's really hard to show people what there is so for the team at ubisoft to have gone to the lengths they did to recreate that environment and and do it in such an immersive way is is really is really invaluable i'm sure ubisoft will be very happy to to hear all of that affirmation of their hard work too and i'm sure the fiver is in the post for the ad and we we definitely need to get that youtube channel resurrected somehow and you're right again that it's a really good way to engage with a generation who may not see the attraction of archaeology in ancient egypt but you tie it into a video game and all of a sudden it has a brand new appeal yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah these i mean i don't know how it works for people but i mean i guess if you enjoy the game and then you realize oh my goodness there's a real place and like i say with alexandria you can't really you can't really go to ancient alexander but you know to the sphinx or the giza plateau when it comes to places which which do exist those for me were every bit as much a knockout it's great to be able to see alexandria which is so difficult to visualize but when you go to giza or scarra or dar al-bahri down across the river from luxor they've paid so much attention to how those places would have looked at a specific moment in time in the in the late tolemaic and the little details you know i mean it's just it's really great and and you can and i did when i was in when i was giving presentations on this during the um during the project you can put photographs of what remains of these monuments side by side with screenshots from the game and you can totally see how how they they line up it's yeah i think i found it very exciting that's why i'm talking so quickly now well thank you so much for joining us chris it's been absolutely fantastic to find out a little bit more about the sphinx and what it is and what it isn't and what it might be and what it almost certainly isn't and just to get a bit more of an idea of what it is and what it meant and what it still means today and also to hear about how assassin's creed can help with archaeology and history and understanding some of that thing those things a little bit better so thank you so much for joining it's been an absolute pleasure thank you man it's been great i've really enjoyed it thanks i hope you've enjoyed this episode of echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hit next time we'll be donning our finest robes to enter the court of cleopatra and julia caesar in the wondrous city of alexandria we'll recount their struggle through the great siege when caesar nearly lost everything don't forget to subscribe and follow echoes of history wherever you get your podcasts and if you're enjoying it you can leave it to review too i'll see you next time amongst the echoes of history