It's hard to find a monster with a longer history than the sphinx. A majestic creature with the body of a lion and the head and bust of a human, the sphinx has been the stuff of legends for over five thousand years. In ancient Egypt, where it was first introduced, the sphinx was a symbol of royalty, fertility, and life after death. Its image was often associated with the annual flooding of the Nile, which brought life to the parched Egyptian desert, and statues of sphinxes were placed outside most Egyptian tombs and temples.
      The most celebrated of the Egyptian sphinx statues is the 240-foot-long, 66-foot-high Great Sphinx, which lies on a strip of desert known as the Giza Plateau. More than 4,500 years old, this colossal limestone carving joins the rippling, powerful body of a lion with the regal head of an Egyptian pharaoh, or king. Most historians believe it is a tribute to the ancient Egyptian ruler Khafre, whose pyramid sits nearby.
      From ancient Egypt, the myth of the sphinx made its way across the Mediterranean Sea to the lands of Mesopotamia (modern-day Syria and Iraq) and ancient Greece. In these countries, the half-man, half-lion took on a more sinister meaning, often representing not just the underworld, but also senseless violence and destruction. The throne of the Greek god Zeus at Olympia the holy mountain on which the gods resided, was supposedly engraved with a ring of sphinxes, shown carrying off small children. Other Greek and Roman sphinxes were depicted as tearing apart their victims or slavering over their mangled remains. The basic anatomy of the sphinx also changed as it moved northeast: In Mesopotamia the mythical beast was often shown with the head of a ram or an eagle; in Greece it was given wings, and the face and breasts of a woman.
      Although she lacks wings, the sphinx that Harry Potter encounters during the Triwizard Tournament is probably Greek in character. Not only does she have a woman's face, she uses her wits to defend a dark secret, much like the sphinx in the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus. In that story, a menacing sphinx stalks the countryside around the city of Thebes, posing impossible questions to travellers and eating them if they fail her test. She finally meets her match in the young wanderer Oedipus, who solves the riddle "What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?" (the answer, of course, is man, who crawls as an infant, walks as an adult, and leans on a cane in his final years). Having successfully defeated the sphinx, Oedipus, like Harry, is allowed to proceed to his final destination, where a fate even darker than Lord Voldemort's wrath awaits him.
      Over time, the Greek image of the sphinx as a dark and enigmatic creature has become the most prominent. The word itself comes from the Greek sphingein, meaning to "squeeze," "strangle," or "bind." Despite the claims of some medieval writers, there is no evidence to suggest that the ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, or Greeks believed the sphinx was a real animal. Their legends, artwork, and literature consistently present it as a mythical creature, symbolising power and forbidden knowledge. This did not stop later writers, such as the seventeenth-century zoologist Edward Topsell, from claiming that the sphinx was descended from a bizarre Ethiopian ape. In honour of such misguided scientific observations, there is now a species of ape called the Sphinx, or Sphinga, baboon.