The photograph speaks more clearly than any length of description.[598] It has been supposed by early writers,[599] and repeated by many, that these sphinxes are of Egyptian suggestion. But the sphinx in general is not necessarily Egyptian: no one has traced any indigenous development of it as an artistic motive or as a religious symbol. It is much commoner in the Euphrates valley, where also it is found in greater variety of form. Its meaning in those more life-like representations becomes clearer. There the strength and dominion of the monarch are symbolised by the movement and force of the noble beast upon which his features are portrayed. But in Egypt the Sphinx is, for the most part, conventional and lifeless, an adaptation to the religious after-death symbolism which is the dominant motive of surviving Egyptian art. The familiar posture in early examples is sitting, and even the face is represented with so much conventionality and death-like mystery that it has given rise to an adjective in our language in the word ‘sphinx-like,’ implying an unvarying aspect of potential and mysterious serenity. Finally, no example of this class of sphinx, where the body is that of a bull, seems to have been found in Egypt, which could then hardly have provided the model for these standing ponderous bull-sphinxes of Eyuk. The face carved upon the sphinxes may be that of the royal and priestly law-giver who dwelt within the palace which they guarded, or it may be a conventional type; upon that point there is no evidence. We have disclaimed any Egyptian motive in these sphinxes on general grounds, but there are found two curious and unexplained resemblances when we come to consider the facial type portrayed and the manner in which it is adorned. The one is in the portrait-statue[600] of Nefret, a queen of Egypt in the middle of the twelfth dynasty (before or about 2000 B.C.) a sculpture which represents a type exceptional, indeed almost unique, in Egyptian art. There is something to be borne in mind, however, in making a comparison, namely, that this statue may have been carved in the Delta, and that ancient monuments of Lower Egypt are so rare that their standard character is little known. Hence it is not certain whether this peculiar monument merely reproduces a type of which no other examples have survived, or whether it was itself worked from a model strange even to the Delta. In the latter case the interesting explanation offers itself, that perhaps as early as the twelfth dynasty the Egyptian kings intermarried with Mesopotamian or Hittite princesses, as was done during the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. The other resemblance is found in an Etruscan monument,[601] which presents a general similarity in subject and treatment at once striking and noteworthy.