There are many characters in our society we are familiar with whether from books and comic books or television and movies. One of the characters we know from a variety of media is Conan the Barbarian but little is known about how he came into being. Conan is a character from the sword and sorcery genre created by a writer from Texas named Robert E. Howard in 1932. Howard’s Conan stories began as a series of articles submitted to the fantasy magazine Weird Tales. Howard’s influences ranged from the Greek writer Plutarch to the mythology works of Thomas Bulfinch. Howard wrote many more Conan stories over the next 4 year completing 21 stories. 
Conan books have been written and published by various different authors over the last 50 years, many of them trying to imitate the style of Robert E. Howard. The original Conan stories written by Howard were allowed to go out of print and were unavailable in their original form. In 2003 the original Howard stories were collected and printed by British Publisher Wandering Star and were republished in the U.S. by Ballantine. These volumes included Howard’s original stories but expanded on them by offering his notes and letters on the setting and for the world of Conan which provided a more complete look at the history of Howard’s ideas and the genesis of the character. Regardless of the history of the character the books, comic books, and the movies of the 80s have kept the Conan character alive and well in the imagination of society since he was first put into print in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard. 
Today standing guard on the Giza pyramid complex’s eastern face, the Great Sphinx in fact predates Ancient Egypt’s most famed architectural achievements by at least 500 years. Modern archaeology tells us that the Sphinx was built during Old Kingdom Egypt’s fourth dynasty, sometime between 2723 and 2563 BC - making it the world’s oldest known monumental edifice.
Though the lion with the head of a man was a common trope of both the Egyptian and Greek mythologies of the era, time and the elements have significantly worn Giza’s and ancient depictions of the Great Sphinx are few. Written accounts of its physical appearance are plentiful, but the West got its very first visual depiction of the two hundred foot long monument in 1556, via Andre Thevet’s Cosmographie de Levant. Thevet, who had visited Giza some seven years prior, presented a curly-headed, European-featured face of indiscriminate sex, perched atop a grassy mound. He described it as “the head of a colossus, caused to be made by Isis, daughter of Inachus, then so beloved of Jupiter.”
German traveler Johannes Helferich’s take was altogether different when he published a drawing in an account of his Oriental travels in 1579; here the Sphinx was definitively female, with its distinctive headdress portrayed as shoulder-length, harshly cropped hair. (Helferich’s travelogue also recounts, interestingly enough, that Egyptian priests showed him a secret tunnel within the statue in which they could hide and make it appear that the Sphinx was talking.)
For two centuries, equally embellished pen and ink drawings, etchings and sketches continued to circulate throughout Europe - with most providing conflicting depictions of the face’s broken/unbroken nose. The artists’ objectivity wasn’t helped along by the Sphinx’s mysterious nature; its body remained concealed beneath tons of sand, leaving only the head visible and obscuring its true scale.
The first true approximation the monument’s actual appearance comes from Richard Pococke’s Travels, published in 1743 – though he did take the liberty of penciling in the face’s nonexistent proboscis (believed to have, in fact, been destroyed at least a century before the publication of Thevet’s account). By the time Napoleon paid a visit to Giza in 1798, most of educated Europe knew the Sphinx’s true face – though its body would remain buried in the desert’s dunes, until one of many excavation attempts finally succeeded in 1936.
As for the famous face its self, it is commonly believed to be a likeness of the pharaoh Khefre, the fourth dynasty ruler most often associated with its construction. That assertion, however, is hotly contested in some circles with some scholars claiming that the Great Sphinx’s features bear little resemblance to those found upon other sculptural representations of Khefre.
| Nonetheless, the fact remains the monument’s true identity was unknown to even the Egyptians themselves. By the time of the New Kingdom, it was commonly spoken of as an image of the sun god Ra, following its incorporation into the myth of the pharaoh Thutmose IV. As a once prince ineligible for the throne, Thutmose had a dream during an afternoon nap beneath the great monument. He told of being visited by the deity, who offered him the kingdom of Egypt in exchange for his veneration of Ra above all over gods and repairs to his earthly |
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| embodiment. The would-be pharaoh soon began an expansion and restoration of the Great Sphinx. The rest, as they say, is history. | ||||||||||||
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