"A Sphinx is an iconic image of a recumbent lion with a human head, invented by the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom, but a cultural import in archaic Greek mythology, where it received its name (Greek Sf???, "strangler"). The best known is the Great Sphinx of Giza."
Webster's Dictionary adds that it might also have a ram or hawk head.
The sphinx statue has spread around the world, and transformed as it moved. Find them and visit them.
The Egyptian Sphinx
"The Egyptian sphinx is an ancient iconic mythical creature usually comprised of a recumbent lion – an animal with sacred solar associations – with a human head, usually that of a pharaoh."
"What names ancient Egyptians called the statues is unknown. The Arabic name of the Great Sphinx, Abu al-Hôl, translates as "Father of Terror". The Greek name "Sphinx" was applied to it in Antiquity though it has the head of a man, not a woman."
Giza Sphinx
Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas, USA
The Greek Sphnx
There was a single Sphinx in Greek mythology, a unique demon of destruction and bad luck, according to Hesiod a daughter of the Chimaera and Orthrus, or, according to others, of Typhon and Echidna— all of these chthonic figures. She was represented in vase-painting and bas-reliefs most often seated upright rather than recumbent, as a winged lion with a woman's head; or she was a woman with the paws, claws and breasts of a lion, a serpent's tail and birdlike wings. Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Ethiopian homeland (for the Greeks remembered the Sphinx's foreign origins) to sit outside Thebes and ask all passersby history's most famous riddle: "Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" She strangled anyone unable to answer. The word "sphinx" comes from the Greek Sf???, Sphinx, apparently from the verb sf????, sphingo, meaning "to strangle". Oedipus solved the riddle: man – he crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age. Bested at last, the Sphinx then threw herself from her high rock and died. In fact, the exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not specified by early tellers of the story and was not standardized as the one given above until much later in Greek history.
Corinthian Sphinx 7th century BC
Sphinx at Belvedere park, Vienna, Austria
Remember:
"Not all human-headed animals of antiquity are sphinxes. In ancient Assyria, for example, bas-reliefs of bulls with the crowned bearded heads of kings guarded the entrances to temples. In the classical Olympian mythology of Greece, all the deities had human form, though they could assume their animal natures as well. All the creatures of Greek myth that combine human and animal form are survivals of the pre-Olympian religion: centaurs, Typhon, Medusa, Lamia."
all information taken from Wikipedia
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