The Sphinx's View

I watched Riddles of the Sphinx the other day while eating lunch. It’s an hour-long Nova program about the 4,500-year-old Egyptian monument of the crouching lion with a pharaoh’s noseless head. It’s seventy feet high and the length of a football field, carved out of a mound of solid limestone over the span of a couple of years, which is crazy because the ancient Egyptians had only stone and copper tools to work with, each of which only lasted a few minutes at a time.

One of the things that struck me the hardest, I think, you’ll see at the beginning of the program. The Sphinx does not lie out in the vast wasteland of the desert, with bleak panoramas of rolling dunes in every direction as far as the eye can see. Civilization has crept up to its paws. In fact, the Sphinx looks straight ahead at ... a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant a couple hundred yards away.

Now, I’m not a big hand-wringer over modern progress, so long as we’re progressing in the right direction. But that little tidbit about the Sphinx’s view in a throwaway comment and the accompanying scene on the screen – which only lasts a few seconds – felt so wrong and so sad that I have not been able to get it out of my mind.

Just something to ponder, I guess.