The Great Sphinx
— — the face the desert kept watching.
Not only on a wall.
“The lion-bodied figure that has watched the eastern horizon for forty-five centuries. Carved from a single limestone outcrop on the Giza Plateau, the Sphinx faces directly into the sunrise, the pyramids of Khafre and Khufu rising behind it. The colour shifts hour by hour, from cool grey before dawn to the warm ochre of late afternoon. The desert keeps the silence the city across the river has long since lost. from the studio
The Great Sphinx, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Great Sphinx sits on the Giza Plateau, about ten kilometres southwest of central Cairo on the west bank of the Nile. It is the largest monolithic statue in the world, measuring roughly 73 metres long and 20 metres high, carved directly from the bedrock limestone of the plateau. Most Egyptologists date it to the reign of the pharaoh Khafre, around 2500 BCE, the same era as the second pyramid that rises behind it. The Sphinx, the three pyramids, and the surrounding necropolis were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979.
The body is cut from softer Mokattam limestone that erodes in horizontal layers, giving the flanks their famous ridged texture. The head, carved from a harder upper stratum, has weathered far better than the body, which is why the proportions read oddly today. The nose has been missing since at least the 15th century. Restoration campaigns by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities have replaced lost paws and stabilised the chest with limestone blocks quarried nearby, a slow process running since the 1980s.
The Giza pyramid complex is open daily, typically 8:00 to 17:00, with extended evening hours for the sound and light show. A general ticket admits visitors to the plateau and the Sphinx enclosure; separate tickets are required to enter the pyramids themselves. The new Grand Egyptian Museum, just two kilometres away, opened in stages from 2024 and now houses the full Tutankhamun collection. Mornings are cooler and the light on the Sphinx's east-facing head is at its softest within the first hour after opening.